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Abstract
This is an ethnographic study of a clash of two paradigms of knowledge in an organization that provides alternatives‐to‐incarceration programs for the criminal justice system in a large city. As a new program evaluator for the organization I used participatory action research to evaluate the programs he was assigned to study. Through an account of how that participatory research was dismissed as valueless, we can see the administrative demand in a dominant strain of criminology for data to appear objective and parsimonious, to rely on experts, and to take the form of aggregate numbers (statistics) used for risk management. Research is used instrumentally to secure continued funding, to enhance surveillance, and to enhance output. Overall, the dominant paradigm objectifies the human subject at the heart of its research, withdrawing credibility from him or her. The participatory research, housed in another paradigm, resists this process of objectification. Its end is social change through a process of consciousness‐raising within a project of community organizing. Not all paradigms are created equal, however. Some are institutionally backed and others are marginal – or marginalized – in criminal justice. The case study is a narrative means of exploring the contours of each kind of knowledge and how participatory research is viewed, and rendered, insignificant from the standpoint of the mainstream standards of knowledge production.
Acknowledgements
This essay arose from and is grounded in numerous conversations with David Medina, Michelle Rodriguez, Terry Harilal, and Eddie Maldonado, as well as Debbie Mukamal, María Lugones, and Geoff Bryce. For their comments on this text I would like to thank Sarah Hoagland, Monroe Price, Ann Kibbey, Kevin Haggerty, Neil Feigenson, and the Working Group on Methodologies of Resistant Negotiation at the State University of New York Binghamton. My thanks are also due to outside readers from Contemporary Justice Review for their helpful and perceptive comments and suggestions. I dedicate this piece in loving memory to Geoff Bryce.
Notes
1. This paper was inspired by three essays in feminist epistemology: Lorraine Code’s essay ‘Rhetoric and Responsibility,’ her review of the scholarly reception of her previous writing (featured as a chapter in her Rhetorical Spaces [Citation1995]); María Lugones’ ‘Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker/Estratégias‐tácticas de la callejera’ (in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes [Citation2003]); and Sarah Lucia Hoagland’s ‘Resisting Rationality’ (2001).’
2. I intend ‘criminal justice’ in a general sense to include corrections, social services linked to criminal justice, the courts, parole, probation, and so on.
3. For clarity’s sake, I will use ‘subjects of research’ to refer to the subject (individual, group, population) being studied – that is, the researched subject. In this way, the subject of study is differentiated from the subject who is conducting the investigation – the researcher, the knowing subject.
4. For the purposes of this essay, I use ‘participatory research’ and ‘participatory action research’ interchangeably. On participatory research, see Fine (Citation1994) and marino (Citation2003).
5. The following description of participatory research is drawn from conversations with María Lugones.
6. An anonymous reviewer of this paper points out something I concede: ‘Some of the methodological assumptions struck me as rigid and dismissive: “the experts are not competent.”’
7. For the sake of doing participatory research, I had to assume a ‘community’. Another assumption made me unjustifiably separate managers and other care workers from the community. Although the staff was racially mixed, as one went to the higher echelons of the organization the staff was increasingly dominated by white people of middle‐class background. While this suggests other problems, it may have also led me to draw inappropriately a line at who belonged to the ‘community’. I may have had the unjustified tendency to consider the ‘community’ to be composed of people of color and working‐class people. However, I am white and from a middle‐class background. I was excluding members of my own racial and class background as if they did not feature as community members. In trying to help me understand why I was doing this, a friend remarked to me: ‘I have a suspicion that your drawing the “community” the way you did may have had elements of racist classism and classist racism.’ I include this as an open issue.
8. One staff member thought sexual abuse in the lives of the participants needed to be understood better. And a participant commented that we ought to study police harassment:
Researcher: What questions should we be asking as we evaluate the family court project?
Participant: ‘Why do the cops harass teenagers for no reason?’ Do they have a right to do that? That’s the biggest concern around here. I don’t see anyone concerned; they’re just letting it happen. It’s not on the news or in the papers or nothing. I don’t go outside at all now. I just stay in, stay at my girl’s, stay with my grandmother, but I don’t hardly go out. They stop you for anything, frisk you, pat you down, tell you to shut up, hit you on the head, call you a dummy, whatever, and when you try to talk, they don’t want to hear shit. And then, when they done, they just take off, they don’t want to hear your shit.
Now, it’s not just me, it’s thousands and thousands of youths. It’s everyone who I talk to. Whenever we talk seriously about anything, inevitably it comes up.
So, as we heeded the concerns voiced by staff and participants we incorporated new questions into our interviews.
9. In one interview, for example, I thought a new team member was being overly aggressive with a program participant we were interviewing, openly expressing skepticism about what I took to be candid answers, asking the same question again several times while leaning forward and dismissing the answer each time. I recommended afterward that he be a little more self‐contained. However, later that day the interviewee came up to me and volunteered how good the new interviewer was, and added admiringly that this new member of the team had caught him in several lies. The experience was salutary. It provided some texture to my suspicion that the interview situation in the social sciences generally contains a great deal of undertheorized subtlety, although from a direction I had not anticipated! It also shows the usefulness of a participatory approach to research; it cost me my trust in my own impressions (of what a respectful interview might look like, for example, or whether someone is being sincere or lying).
In another case, we interviewed a former participant who was back in ‘placement’ or what is generally called ‘juvenile detention’. The young man talked at length about how he prepared himself once it became clear he was going to be ‘terminated’ from the program and he would have to serve time in prison (where he was headed from detention). The peer researcher and I realized afterwards that we had each heard something different. I understood him to say that he went out and bought special clothes as a way to mark this transition – a sort of symbolic moment of reckoning. The peer researcher who conducted the interview with me, on the other hand, heard him to be speaking practically – that he went to buy clothes that were not too giggy so he would not draw too much attention to himself in prison. As Eddie and I reflected on the experience, we thought it provided an interesting example on a methodological level of how the same answer is heard differently by different people. On a substantive level, when we decided to include this in our report, we felt we were providing something much more, and much more interesting, than simply answering the question of how many former participants went to prison and how many went on to live crime‐free lives (recidivism rates are generally one of the most important and valued measures in alternatives‐to‐incarceration programs). We provided some analysis of how someone comes to realize he or she is going to prison and how they make the difficult subjective transition to face prison.
10. The implications of this should not be understated. Not only is it nerve‐racking to make numerous appearances, often without knowing whether it will end with being taken into custody, but it also places a burden on family members who wish to come to court in order to demonstrate familial support and investment in the life of the defendant. Many program participants spoke of family members who jeopardized their jobs in order to make numerous court dates.
11. In retrospect this was unrealistic and speaks to the gap between our perception of what we were contributing and the view of the senior staff.
12. I am tempted to say that from the standpoint of the organization, the logic is exchange: program evaluation for continued funding. One surrenders a certain proprietary, insider relation to the knowledge in exchange for financial support. The funding sources provide oversight over the programs they fund. The organization loses significant control, even to the extent that the terms in which it thinks of itself and its clients threaten to be defined in terms appropriate to this exchange.
13. On the relative and hierarchical status of different knowledges, see Lorraine Code (1988). On the history of the relative, and relatively unstable, relationship of knowledge to opinion in Western philosophy, see Ian Hacking (Citation1991).
14. In this connection, the Director thought the study lacked information that could make systems management more efficient and internally consistent:
Another critical element absent from this evaluation is an internal analysis of [the program]. An overview of its staff configuration, curriculum structure and the ways these are calibrated to fulfill the objectives of the Project might have unearthed valuable information. The author could have interviewed the Project Coordinator, Assistant Coordinator, and other relevant Program Services staff to find out how they formulated goals for the project and how they structured the [program’s] curriculum to meet their objectives.
He further specified that we could have done research to determine:
how [the program] interfaces, complements, or conflicts with work done in Case Management, Education, and Drug Units (e.g. is the referral process from Case Management effective?)
15. From an administrative standpoint, it is tempting to rationalize this approach because it seems more expedient. Internal systems are easier to measure, or at least seem that way because they seem more governable and clearer. Systems analysis is easier to report to stakeholders (e.g., the city and state government, foundations, the legal community, corrections, board of directors, and so on).
16. Simon further hypothesizes that actuarial practices have profound ideological consequences, because unlike other forms of grouping people (for example racial or sexual classificatory schema) that then come to be used as significant identities from which to organize against oppressive tactics, actuarial schema do not communicate themselves to the group members (e.g., non‐smoking unmarried males in their twenties with sports cars, people convicted of two felonies, and so on).
17. Sander Gilman (Citation1986) makes a similar point in showing the logic of the historical recalcitrance of Jews to participate in the disputations sponsored by the Inquisition.
18. I thank Michelle Rodriguez for this observation.
19. Thus, making an appeal to a specific person’s circumstances is, from the standpoint of this epistemological practice, largely beside the point. Trying to introduce, for example, how a particular person ‘turned her life around’ will not meet the evidence provided by statistics. It would be like arguing to my insurance adjuster that I will not conform to the profile of my demographic. In both cases, the actuary is concerned with aggregates that serve as predictors, independent of individual intention or willingness to change. My point here has to do with the logic of the paradigm. Since the criminal justice system contains different, conflicting logics, and its practice is by no means wholly coherent or consistent, drawing attention to the particular circumstances of an individual may affect a particular ruling, decision, and so on.
20. Technically, many were not convicted felons since this program included minors who were in family court. However, they were the youth equivalent of felons: the charges would have been felony counts had they been adults. They faced ‘placement’ or detention in juvenile facilities if the family court finding went against them.
21. On scientific practice as puzzle‐solving, see Kuhn (Citation1962).
22. One might presume that he was at least in theory interested in what would see people through; if so, perhaps he thought that social scientists ought to serve more as diagnosticians or engineers.
23. I worked for the agency for a relatively short period – about ten months – after which I moved to an academic job in an interdisciplinary program in applied social science. Consequently, it is premature to conclude too much about what room there might be to rethink method and its relationship to the organizational structure, mission, and praxis. For example, it is conceivable that the method could become more influential in the politics of alternatives to incarceration and the restorative justice movement.
24. I can provide an example. We learned a great deal about the nitty‐gritty of how the young people in the program faced and thought about the institutions in which they found themselves, including prisons, half‐way houses, schools, the courts, their parents’ home, and AIO itself. Although the young people in the program are viewed as threats to public safety and as sources of violence, we did get a better sense of how violence against them (by family members, in the schools, by the police, in prisons or lock‐up) was not seen as particularly important or significant from a policy standpoint. Along the same lines, we realized through this that staff members and certainly policy‐makers implicitly think of school as a sort of ‘holding pen’ where young people are monitored for many of the daylight hours. Its chief immediate virtue in many people’s eyes seems to be that young people will not be on the street during the time they are in school. That is why truancy is a problem: the person may be up to ‘no good’. Secondarily, a high school degree is taken only in instrumental terms, as useful for employment. Having earned one is also seen at times as testament to a person’s ‘maturity’. The education – the pedagogy, its goals, its quality, and so on – is not itself in question. Moreover, for many of the people in the program the space of the school was unsafe, scary. Thus our methodology brought us directly into this view of what schools in poor communities do, what their perceived value is, and how the actual experiences of these places for young people are not under examination; the knowledge young people have of the schools is treated as inconsequential and hence it is slighted. While learning this is not itself a practical gain, it is a likely precursor to one: a political strategy to improve education would have to countenance the investment some people have in the schools’ latent function as detention centers.
25. Some members of the research team refused to interview judges and prosecutors. Several remarked to me soberly, but with a great deal of bitterness, that they found the work of judges fundamentally unethical – that judges are involved in an ethically unsound project. They had in mind sentencing people to prison, but they may have included judges’ role in determining guilt, and prosecutors’ approaches to fixing charges, negotiating bail, arranging plea bargains, too. Although this position obviously goes radically against mainstream or dominant logic in society, it is worthy of more examination. For my part, I found this way of seeing things chilling, haunting.
26. Gwaltney’s work is also about community building in a way. This became clearer to me after I had taught his text. An older African‐American student remarked that she could hear the voices of the people in the text – people she knew growing up, neighbors, and people in her building and around where she lived. She said she planned to have her children read the text to establish a connection to a kind of community in which she no longer lived and in which her children did not live.
27. Lorraine Code provides a fascinating, gutsy account of the scholarly reception of her own previous work as a way of illuminating how epistemology is separated from ethics in traditional philosophy. The critical reception of her work and in particular the way it was opposed is used as the occasion for this exploration of the constitution of the discipline and its commitments. As I acknowledged at the outset, her essay was inspirational as a way to explore failure and misunderstanding as an avenue to understand where and under what conditions different forms of knowledge have credibility.
28. Code herself does not use this language of ‘paradigm’.
29. One paradigm insists on a bird’s‐eye view of the social world and another paradigm resolutely insists on locating itself within the social world. The two paradigms are mutually antagonistic. I am inclined to say that the paradigm that insists on studying from above partakes in the same logic that argues for a preservation of racial purity.
Nahum Chandler (Citation1996), in an essay on Dubois entitled ‘The Economy of Desedimentation’, argues that in order to understand fully white supremacy, one must explore the ‘conceptual infrastructure of that discursive formation and its organization according to certain presuppositions which are fundamental to an entire metaphysics, in which and according to which, the entire question of the Negro in the Americas has unfolded’ (p. 81). The submerged subject in these sociological adjudications is the hidden question of White or European identity (p. 82). Here Chandler has in mind the injunction against miscegenation understood as a violation of purity and of the law of non‐contradiction. This does not mean of course that the sociologist who performs the exercise must ‘be’ white, or even intend to do racist sociology. Rather, he or she would be observing the philosophical and paradigmatic architecture that keeps racial hierarchy in place through submerging the identity of the observer. See Gwaltney (Citation1993) for a brilliant elucidation and justification of what is otherwise perceived by anthropologists as level mixing.
30. This line of thinking was suggested by María Lugones.
31. These remarks draw on extremely helpful comments made by Elizabeth Morrison.
32. It is against this standard, I think, that the words of participants were characterized as ‘contextless ramblings’: What is it not to be a contextless rambling? What supplies the context? Are sociologists not contributing contextless ramblings? Or is it merely that their context is ready‐made? On whose authority does that context depend? This is the key question and the reason why Code’s ‘rhetorical space’ is essential.
33. See Mignolo (Citation1995) for a brilliant methodological description and application of differential social locations and forms of power within a hermeneutical methodology he terms ‘pluritopic hermeneutics’.
34. Foucault has cast the point in terms of seeing how the science of statistics is part of the modern art of government (see Foucault, Citation1991).
