Abstract
This chapter is drawn from the author’s Photovoice research project, Radically Rethinking Imprisonment, conducted with 12 former prisoners in South Australia. It demonstrates the breadth and depth of the images and narratives created by participants, showing how they took charge of the direction of the research, despite it being a researcher initiated project. Placed at its heart is the quality and significance of the ‘data’ through powerful imagery created by the participants. As active subjects, rather than passive objects of research, participants provided a considered account of their experiences as they produced new knowledge. Their data, in the form of photographs and accompanying narratives are profoundly personal while at the same time reflect common, shared experiences. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the transformative effect that participatory action research can have for researchers as well as participants.
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- 1.
The people that are given a custodial sentence tend to be from the precariat class. Guy Standing (2011) describes the precariat as being most likely to be: (1) poor; (2) unlikely to have quality legal representation; (3) have an addiction or poor mental health, and are unable to access holistic, publicly-funded treatment facilities; (4) have little formally recognised education; and (5) are unlikely to have held secure well-paid, meaningful work. As Standing argues, even when the precariat are not being held in a prison, they are already experiencing a broad loss of rights across civil, cultural, social, political and economic spheres, responsibility for which he places firmly with neoliberal ideologies.
- 2.
Convict Criminology is an area of criminology led by former prisoners who, fed up with the ‘positivist, functionalist and labelling approaches’ found in mainstream criminology, decided to create a formal network that would critically challenge this approach. Members of the New School of Convict Criminology are criminalised men and women who have earned academic qualifications and contribute to scholarly research, writing and teaching from a ‘convict perspective’. For more see http://www.convictcriminology.org/about.htm.
- 3.
An honorarium of AUD$40 in the form of a supermarket shopping voucher was paid at each of the three project steps; before the initial interview, upon completion of the photography phase and before our final interview.
- 4.
A copy of the handbook is available in the following chapter, including two of the images she created.
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Jarldorn, M. (2019). Using Photovoice with Ex-prisoners: An Exemplar. In: Photovoice Handbook for Social Workers. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94511-8_6
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