Doing Ethnography in Criminology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction: Walking a Mile in Another Person’s Shoes

   • Stephen K. Rice, Michael D. Maltz

   Pages 1-8

3. Seeing Like a Cop, Writing Like a Critical Scholar

   • Amada Armenta

   Pages 9-19

4. Doing Court Ethnography: How I Learned to Study the Law in Action

   • Carla J. Barrett

   Pages 21-28

5. Problematizing School Discipline and Struggling for Verstehen

   • John J. Brent

   Pages 29-38

6. The Sense and Nonsense in Planning Ahead: The Unanticipated Turns in Ethnographies on Crime and Drug Dealing

   • Sandra M. Bucerius

   Pages 39-55

7. The Promise and Process of Ethnography: What We Have Learned Studying Gang Members and CPS Kids

   • Gabriel T Cesar, Scott H. Decker

   Pages 57-74

8. “Did I Just Get Caught Being Stupid?” Experiencing and Managing the Emotional Labor of Fieldwork

   • Heith Copes

   Pages 75-81

9. Process and Insight in Prison Ethnography

   • Ben Crewe

   Pages 83-89

10. Fieldwork with Homicide Detectives: 60 Minutes of Reflections from a British and American Criminologist

    • Dean Dabney, Fiona Brookman

    Pages 91-113

11. To the Bridge and Back: Risks, Rewards, and Rookie Mistakes in a Study of Postwar Bosnia

    • Stephanie M. DiPietro

    Pages 115-128

12. Keeping Classic Ethnographic Traditions Alive in the Modern-Day Academy

    • Jamie J. Fader

    Pages 129-146

13. Criminological Ethnography: Living and Knowing

    • Jeff Ferrell

    Pages 147-161

14. A Twitch or a Blink, an Ethnographer’s Path to Understanding Culture: A Lecture

    • Mark S. Fleisher

    Pages 163-177

15. The Ghost of Ethnography Future

    • Alistair Fraser

    Pages 179-185

16. Becoming a Police Ethnographer

    • William Garriott

    Pages 187-194

17. Using Prison Ethnography in Terrorism Research

    • Mark S. Hamm

    Pages 195-202

18. Searching for Glimmers of Ethnography in Jailhouse Criminology

    • Jacqueline B. Helfgott

    Pages 203-220

19. Just Who Needs Forgiveness? The Emotional Terrain of a Prison-Based Interview

    • Steve Herbert

    Pages 221-227

20. Respecting the Voices of Youth: Studying School Security and Punishment

    • Aaron Kupchik

    Pages 229-235

This innovative book examines the use of ethnography and fieldwork in Criminology and Criminal Justice Research. Using a combination of case studies, as well as “behind the scenes” contributions, it provides an comprehensive look at both the insights gained from ethnographic research, as well as the choices researchers make in conducting that work.

The research is divided into three main sections, covering ethnographies of subcultures, ethnographies of place, and ethnographies of policing. It includes a diverse group of international contributors to provide perspectives on researchers’ selection of questions to study, and their decisions about using ethnography to study those questions.

This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with a qualitative perspective, as well as related fields such as sociology, anthropology, and demography. It will also be of interest to students studying research methods and design.

• Criminal Justice Research
• Research Methods in Criminology
• Qualitative Methods
• Ethnography
• Fieldwork
• Police Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Substance Abuse
• Storytelling
• Narrative Research
• Critical Criminology

• Criminal Justice Department, Seattle University, Seattle, USA

  Stephen K. Rice

• Department of Criminology, Law and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA

  Michael D. Maltz

Stephen K. Rice is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Seattle University. He studies cooperation and defiance in individuals’ interactions with the justice system. Toward this end, his work has focused on emotions and crime, radicalization, procedural and restorative justice, racial / ethnic profiling (African Americans, Latinos, Muslim Americans), police / community relations (e.g., the police officer as “guardian”), final statements of the condemned, and social media and criminal justice.  His publications have appeared in outlets to include Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Deviant Behavior, Policing, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and the Harvard Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety.  He is also co-editor of Envisioning Criminology: Researchers on Research as a Process of Discovery (Springer) (with Michael D. Maltz) and Race, Ethnicity, and Policing (NYU Press) (with Michael D. White). His scholarship has been featured in public outlets to include The Final Report of The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida.

Michael D. Maltz is professor emeritus of criminal justice and of information and decision sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and senior research scientist and adjunct professor of sociology at the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University. A past editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, he was on the staff of the National Institute of Justice (1969-72) and was a visiting fellow at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (1995-2000). In 1996, he held a Fulbright Scholarship at El Colegio de Michoacán in Mexico. His primary research interests have been on the assessing the validity of, and developing measures to extract useful inferences from, crime data. His 1984 book, Recidivism (Academic Press), was awarded the Wilkins Award for the outstanding book in criminology and the Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society of America. He is coauthor of Mapping Crime in Its Community Setting (Springer), (with Andrew Gordon and Warren Friedman), author of Bridging Gaps in Police Crime Data (US Government Printing Office), and co-editor of Envisioning Criminology: Researchers on Research as a Process of Discovery (Springer) (with Stephen K. Rice). He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

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