Policing Carceral Boundaries: Access to Information and Research with Prisoners

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE THAT THE SAME WALLS THAT WORK TO CLOSE PRISONERS within an institution also work to keep people out. Indeed, one of the unstated purposes of carceral punishment is to curtail freedom of association such that prisoners are limited in terms not only of where they might go, but also of whom they have contact with. Although we typically think of the limits placed on who can actually interact with a person serving a penal sentence in terms of either interpersonal or public safety (as in not associate orders or directives against visits from criminal associates), (1) researchers are also routinely denied access to prisoners, probationers, and parolees. At least certain kinds of researchers are. Using legal geography, we explore the porosity of penal borders from the point of view of research, asking how it is that people gain access to actual human beings and, more to the point, how denial of such access works to place epistemological borders around the carceral. These questions are especially important in light of questions regarding not only who polices the boundaries of what constitutes useful research, but also, and much more importantly, regarding the transparency of penal institutions in general. Questions about transparency are particularly vital in the Canadian context, where a litany of egregious events and apparent human rights abuses in a variety of jurisdictions suggests there is a crisis of accountability in the penal system, exacerbated by a lack of transparency and a closed border mentality. (2) Such questions are also timely in light of an increasing trend to deny access to individuals working within federal government institutions, which is restricting qualitative research on many different aspects of governance (see Evidence for Democracy n.d.; Jiwani and Krawchenko 2014). The limits on access to individuals who can tell us about what is happening behind the walls often appear to be imposed arbitrarily and without recourse. This may leave ethnographic and qualitative researchers looking wistfully to the work being done by researchers collecting data through access to government information requests. (3) This type of research has been the subject of a great deal of intellectual and political interest of late as scholars have continued to push back against state authorities wishing to tighten the borders surrounding information about state institutions (Kazmierski 2011; Larsen and Piche 2009; Martel 2004; Monaghan and Walby 2012; Mopas and Turnbull 2011; Yeager 2008). Access to and freedom of information are key areas of intellectual and political interest (Kazmierski 2011; Mopas and Turnbull 2011) as scholars work within extant frameworks to move bureaucratic gears, opening doors to information authorities are compelled to disclose, however reluctantly. Without a doubt, there are a number of advantages (in theory at least) available to researchers seeking access to information rather than access to prisoners. Yet, notwithstanding these advantages, requests for Access to Information (ATI) often are met with the same obfuscation, delay, and ultimate refusal as requests for access to prisoners. At the same time, the information to be gleaned from government records is substantively different from that available from prisoners who live the day-to-day impact of carceral policies and administration. Nonetheless, ATI regimes offer an important resource, both as one source of information among many about carceral policy and administration, and as an inspiration for recalibrating the way in which the right of researchers to access people within the carceral system should be conceptualized. Our move to use the ATI framework as a model for penetrating Ihe borders of the carceral system stems from the experiences of many critical researchers who have been denied access to prisoners. Even though we focus upon access to carceral spaces, we do not intend to frame the lack of access to researchers as specific to this system. …

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