ABSTRACT
Social scientists face an array of challenges when conducting fieldwork inside carceral settings. Qualitative interviewing can be particularly fraught with ethical and practical challenges. This essay reviews existing research on qualitative data collection in prison and jail settings, highlighting principles and strategies across disciplinary boundaries. Then, drawing on original interview data – 73 open-ended, in-depth interviews with people incarcerated in an anonymized California county jail (May 2021 to January 2022) – I contribute new insights to the methodological literature. First, I provide concrete strategies for ensuring participants’ informed consent, considering the coercive context and pervasive mental illness among people in jails. Second, I show how virtual interviews via Zoom facilitated rapport and participant confidentiality in my study. Third, I explain how I conducted participant recruitment and snowball sampling in the jail to get a more diverse participant sample. Finally, I consider how my positionality and the research project disrupted the jail environment. These insights are also informed by my experiences volunteering teaching in prison and jail settings for seven years, and by my experiences working in public defender offices as an investigator and law clerk for two years. I conclude with implications and directions for future research design in carceral settings.
