Barriers, Blinders, and Unbeknownst Experts

Date01 March 2015
DOI10.1177/0032885514563279
Published date01 March 2015
AuthorRandolph R. Myers
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-18TGDpEsGxarrL/input 563279TPJXXX10.1177/0032885514563279The Prison JournalMyers
research-article2014
Article
The Prison Journal
2015, Vol. 95(1) 66 –83
Barriers, Blinders, and
© 2014 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
Unbeknownst Experts:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0032885514563279
tpj.sagepub.com
Overcoming Access
Barriers to Conduct
Qualitative Studies of
Juvenile Justice
Randolph R. Myers1
Abstract
This article details the various access barriers negotiated by the author
in conducting qualitative interviews with young women in a county-level
juvenile justice system. After discussing how these obstacles shaped and
delayed this particular project, the importance of qualitative research for
understanding the more nuanced facets and consequences of juvenile justice
is demonstrated by analyzing one young woman’s reflections on how youth
justice shaped her life. Reflecting on the insights of this “unbeknownst
expert,” it is argued that one of the clearest windows into the larger social
forces that condition whether or not a program or set of policies “works”—
the words of young people—remains covered, in large part because of the
access barriers analyzed here. The importance of creating an alternative to
such a partial criminology of juvenile justice is discussed.
Keywords
barriers, qualitative research, juvenile justice system
1Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Randolph R. Myers, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion
University, Batten Arts and Letters 6018, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
Email: rrmyers@odu.edu

Myers
67
Introduction
Due to heightened scrutiny from criminal justice gatekeepers and institu-
tional review boards (IRBs), gaining access to conduct research in secure
juvenile facilities is proving more and more difficult. While other scholars
have discussed the lack of qualitative carceral research generally (Simon,
2000; Wacquant, 2002), approval for qualitative work inside secure juvenile
facilities encounters its own unique barriers. There is a paucity of scholarship
on this increasingly rare research process, and there has been little discussion
of the importance of qualitative work for informing juvenile justice studies.
In this article, I use my experience in successfully gaining access to interview
girls detained in the Valley County Juvenile Justice System to explore the
regulatory barriers to doing such work and to frame a discussion of the value
of interpretive work in juvenile justice studies.1
The goal of this article is not to elicit sympathy for the author. It is hoped
that this article is not read as a “victim narrative” about the plight of a belea-
guered qualitative social scientist (Stark, 2007). I acknowledge that the
scholarly community is split on the usefulness of accounts on the barriers to
gaining research access (Jenness, Maxson, Sumner, & Matsuda, 2010). Some
suggest that recounting the carceral research experience is an act for the self-
absorbed scholar (Sparks, 2002); others argue that “research notes, if instruc-
tive to others, can point to how (more) in-prison research can be successfully
conducted, perhaps contributing to a new ‘golden era of prison research’”
(Jenness et al., 2010, p. 6). This article is written in the spirit of the latter, and
it is hoped that other scholars can gain insights from the author’s experience
in securing access to conduct qualitative interviews inside a secure juvenile
facility. In addition to this practical aim, this article was written with the hope
that it sparks further discussion about the role and value of qualitative
research in criminology in general and the study of juvenile justice in
particular.
The focus of this article is fourfold. First, pertinent literature on the barri-
ers to conducting research inside custodial facilities is reviewed, with empha-
sis on the specific barriers facing researchers seeking access to secure juvenile
facilities. Second, the specific barriers I overcame in successfully gaining
access to a secure county-level girls’ juvenile facility are discussed, along
with how these barriers shaped the research design. Third, I next set out to
demonstrate the strength of qualitative data for untangling the “messy” world
of youth justice. This is done by showcasing one young woman’s reflections
on how the social process of residential treatment soured her on engaging
with mainstream institutions. Reflecting on the words of this “unbeknownst
expert,” it is argued, in the fourth and final section, that having the ability to

68
The Prison Journal 95(1)
access youths’ working knowledge of the justice system through subjectivist
methodologies is an absolute necessity for understanding the nature and con-
sequences of youth justice on theoretical or practical grounds.
The Decline of Carceral Research and the
Emergence Regulatory Barriers
Despite a rich history in sociology and criminology (e.g., Clemmer, 1940;
Sykes, 1958), the rise of mass incarceration in the United States has dove-
tailed with a decline in ground-level prison research (Simon, 2000; Wacquant,
2002). Although there is a long history of scholarship based on fieldwork
from inside juvenile facilities (e.g., Feld, 1977; Polsky, 1962), there has
recently been a paucity of such work (Chesney-Lind & Shelden, 2004;
Inderbitzin, 2007a). While relatively few in number, qualitative accounts
from inside juvenile detention centers and youth treatment facilities show
these institutions to be complicated amalgamations of care and control,
shame and support (Abrams, 2006; Abrams, Kim, & Anderson-Nathe, 2006;
Belknap, Holsinger, & Dunn, 1997; Gaarder & Belknap, 2002; Inderbitzin,
2006, 2007a, 2007b; Lane, Lanza-Kaduce, Frazier, & Bishop, 2002;
Schaffner, 2006).
The decline of qualitative work from inside juvenile facilities reflects the
quantitative leanings of modern U.S. criminology more generally. A glance
through the discipline’s flagship journals and an examination of the course
catalogs of doctoral-level criminology programs make it clear that qualitative
methods are not the bedrock of criminology research they once were
(Tewksbury, DeMichele, & Miller, 2005; Young, 2004, 2011). In a content
analysis of seven top criminological journals, Kleck, Tark, and Bellows
(2006) found that only 12% of the articles published included qualitative
methods, while 58% of the articles sampled relied on secondary data analy-
sis. And, when it was used, qualitative data most often played an ancillary
role. Work that relied solely on qualitative methods made up only 4.5% of the
articles published (Kleck et al., 2006). These figures are in line with Miller’s
(2005) observation that much of the qualitative data used in criminological
analysis is most often used to give “color” or “flash” to quantitative findings,
rather than treated as valuable data in its own right.
While there are numerous reasons for the quantitative leanings of crimi-
nology, the lack of qualitative work from within secure environments is due
in large part to the myriad administrative barriers surrounding carceral
research—two of the most prominent being IRBs and criminal justice gate-
keepers (Patenaude, 2004). Such human subject safeguards followed the 20th
century’s most egregious misuses of science, including the Tuskegee syphilis

Myers
69
experiment and the Holocaust (Dash, 2007). Prisoners, too, have been used as
subjects in dubious, sometimes outright harmful, research studies, including
tests of sunscreens in the Arizona desert (Lynch, 2009) and the injection of
cancerous cells (Roberts & Indermaur, 2007). Often citing such incidents,
IRB approval is now a prerequisite for nearly all research involving human
subjects (Borenstein, 2008). Gaining IRB approval for any form of correc-
tions facility research presents additional challenges due to the vulnerable
nature of this population (Arriola, 2006; Jenness et al., 2010; Patenaude,
2004). Moreover, review boards may be especially dubious of qualitative
corrections research (Schlosser, 2008) with its exploratory, open-ended
nature, deemed insufficiently scientific by some IRBs (Lincoln & Tierney,
2004). Researchers seeking ground-level access to juvenile facilities face
heightened IRB scrutiny as the population under study is at additional “high-
risk” due to being both incarcerated and juvenile.
In addition to navigating IRB regulations, carceral researchers must also
gain gatekeeper approval (Reeves, 2010). Since the times of Clemmer (1940)
and Sykes (1958), it has been necessary for prison researchers to establish a
constructive relationship with gatekeepers, as well as maintain it throughout
the study (Castellano, 2007; Trulson, Marquart, & Mullings, 2004). While
establishing trust and credibility with a gatekeeper is still a necessary prereq-
uisite to “getting in” (Patenaude, 2004), the modern access process is more
formalized than it was for early researchers (Trulson et al., 2004). Today,
establishing research access to secure environments can include background
checks, formal contracts between universities and criminal justice organiza-
tions, and approval from state- or county-level review boards (Jenness et al.,
2010).
Little research exists on the particular gatekeeper-created barriers facing
researchers of juvenile justice facilities. In one notable exception, Jeffords
(2007) surveyed the juvenile justice research department of each state and
asked them what qualities they...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT