Qualitative Research in Criminology: Advances in Criminological Theory 2014040951, 9781412856775, 9781315127880

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Qual itative Research in Criminology

Advances in Criminological Theory Series William S. Laufer and Freda Adler, editors

The Advances in Criminological Theory Series was created to overcome the neglect of theory construction and validation in existing publications, as well as to further the free exchange of ideas, to broaden the discourse on traditional theories and to explore new insights that challenge old ways of explaining crime. A rich collection that delves into the history of the discipline and organizes past and emerging knowledge, it also explores the current status of theoretical development and opens pathways for future exploration. Titles in this series include: Challenging Criminological Theory Labeling Theory Measuring Crime and Criminality The Origins ofAmerican Criminology Taking Stock Integrated Developmental and Life-Course Theories of Offending Beyond Empiricism Control Theories of Crime and Delinquency Social Learning Theory and the Explanation of Crime Crime and Social Organization The Process and Structure of Crime The Criminology of Criminal Law Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency The Legacy ofAnomie Theory Routine Activity and Rational Choice New Directions in Criminological Theory Facts, Frameworks, and Forecasts Advances in Criminological Theory (Volume 2) Advances in Criminological Theory (Volume 1)

Qual itative Research in Criminology lody Miller Wilson R. Palacios Advances in Criminological Theory

Volume 20

First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o/the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014040951 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Qualitative research in criminology / Jody Miller and Wilson R. Palacios, editors. pages cm.-- (Advances in criminological theory; volume 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-5677-5 (alk. paper) I. Criminology--Research. 2. Criminology--Research--Methodology. 3. Qualitative research. I. Miller, lody, 1966- II. Palacios, Wilson R. HV6024.5.Q3532015 364.072' 1--dc23 2014040951 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5677-5 (hbk)

Contents Introduction: The Value of Qualitative Research for Advancing Criminological Theory Jody Miller and Wilson R. Palacios

1.

Part I. Qualitative Criminology: History and Epistemology

1.

2. 3.

Criminal Practice: Fieldwork and Improvisation in Difficult Circumstances Dick Hobbs Kites from Drug Research Rehab Michael Agar Qualitative Research as Theorizing Peter K. Manning

15 35 51

Part II. Narratives, Biography, and Cultural Meanings of Crime

4. 5. 6.

Psychosocial Criminology: Making Sense of Senseless Violence David Gadd and Mary-Louise Corr Research Strategies for Narrative Criminology Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg The Culture of Violent Behavior: Language, Culture, and Worldview of Prison Rape Mark S. Fleisher

69 85

101

Part III. Positionality and the Study of Criminalized Social Worlds

7.

8.

9.

Being Trusted with "Inside Knowledge": Ethnographic Research with Male Muslim Drug Dealers Sandra M. Bucerius Recalling to Life: Understanding Stickup Kids through Insider Qualitative Research Randol Contreras Queer Anomalies?: Overcoming Assumptions in Criminological Research with Gay Men Vanessa R. Panfil

135

155

169

Part IV. Comparative Social Organization of Place and Crime

10. Qualitative Research in Comparative Context: Understanding Crime and Politics in Brazilian Shantytowns Enrique Desmond Arias 11. Swim against the Tide: Using Qualitative Data to Build a Theory on Chinese Human Smuggling Sheldon X Zhang and Ko-lin Chin

193

215

Part V. Understanding Punishment and Society

12. Observing Prisons, Conceptualizing Punishment: Ethnography and the Possibility of Theory Lynne Haney 13. Appreciative Inquiry, Generative Theory, and the "Failed State" Prison Alison Liebling 14. Penal Artifacts: Mining Documents to Advance Punishment and Society Theory Mona Lynch

237

25 I

271

Part VI. Long Views on Qualitative Criminology

15. Cultural Criminology as Method and Theory Jeff Ferrell 16. Qualitative Research, Theory Development, and Evidence-Based Corrections: Can Success Stories Be "Evidence"? Shadd Maruna 17. Where Are We? Why Are We Here? Where Are We Going? How Do We Get There? The Future of Qualitative Research in American Criminology Richard Wright, Scott Jacques, and Michael Stein

293

Contributors

351

Index

357

3II

339

Introduction: The Value of Qualitative Research for Advancing Criminological Theory! Jody Miller Wilson R. Palacios

This volume of Advances in Criminological Theory investigates the significant role of qualitative research in expanding and refining our understandings of crime and justice. We bring together seventeen original essays from prominent qualitative scholars, in which they draw from their research to discuss the relationship between methodology and theory, and trace the processes by which they theorize from their qualitative research. The result is a lively, theoretically engaged volume that explores the range of approaches qualitative scholars adopt in deciding what kinds of data to collect, how to treat this data, what it is seen to represent, and how it is utilized to advance criminological theorizing. Qualitative Research in Criminology has been a long time in the making. Understanding its origins provides some insight into our rationale and goals for the volume. In 2005, co-editor Jody Miller participated as the only criminologist on a National Science Foundation workshop on interdisciplinary standards for systematic qualitative research. I was asked to provide an assessment ofthe place of qualitative scholarship in our field and discuss standards of methodological rigor employed by qualitative criminologists. 2 My primary laments were twofold. First, the field of Criminology and Criminal Justice is one in which quantitative methods are predominant, as are the epistemologies that hold these methods in highest esteem. Second, there has been little in the way of writings by or dialogues among qualitative criminologists to discuss the question of methodological rigor, especially with regard to data analysis. 3 A significant consequence, I suggested, is that qualitative studies are often held to inappropriate quantitative standards of rigor, which are poorly suited to identify and appreciate the promise of rigorous qualitative criminological scholarship (Miller 2005; for a critical assessment of the NSF workshop on these points, see Becker 2009). 1

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These concerns stayed with me, and I made a more concerted effort to talk explicitly in my own research about analytic processes (see Carbone-Lopez and Miller 2012; Cobbina et al. 2008; Lindegaard et al. 2013; Miller 2008). Articulating these processes to editors and reviewers trained in quantitative traditions is an important mechanism for educating them about what we do and how we do it. Then in 2008, I (Miller) was asked to serve on the American Society of Criminology's (ASC) Methods Workshops Committee. This committee is tasked with organizing several methodological training workshops held the day prior to the commencement of the ASC's annual meetings. I proposed that we hold a qualitative methods workshop, as all of the previous workshops had focused on training attendees on statistical techniques. 4 My suggestion was met by the committee chair with skepticism about whether there would be sufficient interest among the ASC membership to justify such a workshop and concern about the value of supplanting one of the two planned statistical training workshops on Hierarchical Linear Modeling and Meta-Analysis. So we reached a compromise: with ASC Executive Board approval, we would add a third workshop on qualitative data analysis and allow it to move forward at the 2008 meetings if an adequate number of attendees enrolled. I asked Peter and Patricia Adler if they would consider facilitating this first ASC pre-meeting qualitative workshop. It would be hard to find more preeminent qualitative scholars of deviance than the Adlers (see Adler and Adler 1985, 1987). And I knew from personal experience of their commitment to the success of young qualitative scholars. As then editors of the Journal o/Contemporary Ethnography, they had painstakingly shepherded me through the publication of my first refereed article (Miller 1995), and the skills I learned in that process continue to serve me well. Not only did this inaugural qualitative methods workshop sell out, but each of the subsequent qualitative workshops has as well. 5 They have consistently had the largest participant enrollments among the pre-meeting methodology workshops since their inception, signaling that despite the marginalization of qualitative research in criminology-as illustrated by its underrepresentation in leading journals and limited pedagogical presence within PhD programs in criminology and criminal justice (see Buckler 2008; Copes et al. 2011; Tewksbury et al. 2005)-there is substantial interest in better understanding and utilizing qualitative criminology.6 Co-editor Wilson Palacios, who also has spent many years conducting qualitative criminological research (see Palacios 1996,2009; Palacios and Fenwick 2002; Root et al. 2013; Wholl et al. 2013), attended this first ASC workshop. I (Palacios) had witnessed firsthand the challenges Miller articulated in her NSF essay. So I approached her about collaborating on a project designed to address the marginalization of qualitative criminology by explicitly demonstrating the many contributions qualitative scholarship has made to the field over the last century. We shared two priorities in this effort. First was to demonstrate that-despite its routine characterization in criminology as "exploratory," "descriptive," or even

Introduction

3

"anecdotal"-qualitative research has and continues to offer significant theoretical insights on crime and justice. Second, we agreed that, in a field dominated by quantitative ways of thinking and knowing, demonstrating the theoretical insights of qualitative scholarship requires a commitment to transparency-to opening the "black box" of qualitative data analysis processes. We recognized that while sampling and data collection procedures are often widely discussed in qualitative studies, systematic descriptions ofthe process of data analysis and the epistemological underpinnings ofthese analysis techniques have been largely absent but are much needed. We spent some time thinking about how best to accomplish what ultimately became this volume. In its first iteration, we considered a journal special issue and even drafted a call for papers and spoke with several editors. But somehow this didn't feel sufficient to us. As we generated the names of scholars we would ideally wish to contribute, we realized that the list of qualitative criminologists whose work we admired far surpassed the insights we might hope to capture within the space constraints of a single journal issue. 7 So it occurred to us that we had to think bigger. The possibility of an edited book entered into our discussions as well. But given our goal of highlighting the significant role qualitative research plays in advancing theoretical understandings of crime and justice, what better signaling effect than for our imagined volume to appear in a series as prominent in criminology and criminal justice as Advances in Criminological Theory? With equal parts hope and trepidation, we approached Freda Adler with our proposal, and were delighted with her immediate and enthusiastic response. For some readers, our strategy may beg the question, why does a volume oriented around methodology belong in a theoretical series? A brief explanation is in order. The field research tradition of the Chicago School-and its use of the urban landscape as a social laboratory-was very much at the heart of early studies of crime (see Hobbs this volume; Adler and Adler 1987). Indeed, many foundational theoretical insights in criminology and criminal justice emerged from these early studies and from their "intellectual descendants" in the sociology of deviance (Becker 1996, p. 53). Several notable shifts occurred in the mid- to late-20 th century, however, each consequential for the evolution of criminological theory and the ways in which qualitative research has been positioned in the field. In the American context, criminology primarily developed as a subfield of sociology,8 but began to emerge as an independent discipline during this period. This discipline-building enterprise meant staking a claim on the unique scholarly contributions that criminology/criminal justice as a field has to offer, and occurred contemporaneously with dramatic progressive social changes, concomitant social upheavals and the beginnings of a rise in U.S. crime rates. The evolution of survey research methods and continued advancements in statistical techniques (see Hagan and McCarthy 1997, pp. 3--4), coupled with the growth in research funded by government justice agencies seeking direct policy relevance, resulted in a field whose claim to scientific rigor became largely defined

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in quantitative and positivistic terms. This trend is reflected in the dominance of theory testing models, often with the use of large, complex datasets that require advanced statistical techniques. Qualitative methodologies, whose strengths include inductive theory development, careful consideration oflatent meanings, and detailed attention to context, were an ill fit with this particular, quite narrow, definition of criminological theory.9 Yet sociologist Howard Becker (1996) makes a convincing argument that qualitative and quantitative scholarship are not, in fact, so epistemologically different (see also Wright et al. this volume). He explains that "both kinds of research try to see how society works, to describe social reality, to answer specific questions about specific instances of social reality" (p. 53). The distinction is in how we go about seeking answers. And this point brings us to the heart of our volume: to illuminate these processes for a variety of criminological readers. We envision at least three groups of readers who will appreciate the many insights offered in the chapters that follow. As we noted previously, the majority of criminology/criminaljustice Ph.D. programs in the u.s. do not offer rigorous training in qualitative research methods, and only a handful require a qualitative methods course (Buckler 2008). Thus, a primary audience for the volume is young scholars seeking to better understand how qualitative inquiry relates to their own careers. In addition, quantitative criminologists who desire a better understanding of the theoretical mechanisms of qualitative research, or who wish to employ mixed methods or collaborate with qualitative colleagues will find value in the volume. Our hope is to counter the counterproductive methodological schism in the field, as we firmly believe this impedes the advancement of criminological theorizing. Finally, we are sure that other qualitative scholars will, like we have, learn a great deal from their colleagues' discussions of the processes by which they theorize from their qualitative research. We have succeeded in bringing together a diverse group of contributors who span the social sciences. 1o They include leading American and international scholars, along with younger scholars who are representative of newer generations of qualitative researchers. Their works reflect a range of qualitative data collection and analytic approaches whose studies contribute to distinct substantive areas within crime and justice studies. The result is a vibrant, theoretically engaged collection of essays that provides important insights on the contributions and utility of qualitative research for theoretical developments in criminology and criminal justice. So what does this volume actually provide? This is best illustrated with an excerpt from our invitation letter to authors: The purpose of The Value of Qualitative Research for Advancing Criminological Theoryll is to investigate the significant role that qualitative research can play in advancing theoretical understandings of crime and justice. The terrain of qualitative research has expanded rapidly in the last twenty years, and has led to diversity in both methodological approaches and styles of thinking about what is of theoretical

Introduction

5

importance to our discipline. Yet our work is too often absent from prominent theoretical debates in the field. Thus, this volume of Advances in Criminological Theory will be a critical step in presenting a cogent appraisal of the state of qualitative criminology, to assess the possibilities that rigorous qualitative research offers for theoretical refinement and expansion in the field. We would like for you to draw explicitly from your research on ___ to address how you theorize from qualitative data, and in doing so attend to key issues such as the following: (I) How does qualitative research, such as that you have undertaken, contribute to our theoretical understandings of crime and/or justice? (2) What methodological and analysis strategies do you employ, why and how? How do you ensure the rigor of your research? And (3) What are the theoretical boundaries of your and others' qualitative contributions in this area? We also encourage you to feel free to address additional topics, including research ethics and/or other issues you believe are particularly important. By including scholars who adopt a range of approaches, our goal is to create a dialogue of sorts between chapters that demonstrates how a variety of data collection techniques, analytic approaches, and orientations toward data and what it represents, have been employed to advance theoretical understandings of crime and justice.

Organization of the Volume

Qualitative Research in Criminology is organized in six thematic parts: History and Epistemology; Narratives, Biography, and the Cultural Meanings of Crime; Positionality and the Study of CriminaIi zed Social Worlds; Comparative Social Organization of Place and Crime; Understanding Punishment and Society; and Long Views on Qualitative Criminology. We begin in part I, History and Epistemology, with Dick Hobbs' essay, "Criminal Practice: Fieldwork and Improvisation in Difficult Circumstances." Hobbs provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological history of qualitative scholarship in criminology, focusing on the evolution, implementation, and practice offield-based studies and their contributions to our understanding of crime and social control. From the perspectives of the sociology of deviance and crime, he illuminates the many theoretical and methodological iterations fieldwork has taken since the initial studies of the first Chicago School. Hobbs' thoughtful overview sets the stage for the chapters that follow, including through his critical assessment of what is lost in contemporary criminology with the undervaluation of field work's theoretical insights. Next we turn to two qualitative giants in criminology: Michael Agar and Peter K. Manning. We asked both to reflect on their decades of fieldwork, for Agar in the drug field; Manning, policing. In "Kites from Drug Research Rehab," Michael Agar offers both a personal and critical reflection on the hegemonic epistemological terrain of the last forty years and beyond, and what it means for understanding the experiences of and interventions on criminalized populations. His cogent appraisal assesses the deeply problematic outcomes associated with the application of outsider perspectives to account for people who use illicit drugs, and their consequence for the development of drug treatment modalities

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and interventions on drug epidemics. Agar's call for the epistemic privileging of human social worlds is a theme reflected in many of the essays that follow. Like Agar, in "Qualitative Research as Theorizing," Peter Manning provides a critical assessment of the state of criminological theorizing. He illustrates with the case of police work-quite an important consideration given the role of the police in producing many of the crime statistics that drive quantitative research in the field. Through a dramaturgical lens, Manning illustrates how "interaction, shared meanings, and practical actions" drive policing, and demonstrates the theoretical insights offieldwork grounded in a dramaturgical framework for understanding organizational policies and practices. Part II, Narratives, Biography, and the Cultural Meanings o/Crime, includes three chapters that illustrate the importance of speech for theorizing about crime and its individual, social, and cultural meanings. David Gadd and Mary-Louise Corr's "Psychosocial Criminology: Making Sense of Senseless Violence" begins the section with a compelling discussion ofthe use of case studies as an interpretive analytic tool for making sense of violence. The authors illustrate the use of pen portraits as a means of providing insight into how individuals who engage in violence construct themselves discursively, the emotional and psychological investment such participants make in the narratives they tell, and the insights these provide into the often disparate relationship between behavior and its explanation. For narrative criminologists like Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg, storytelling is a method we all use to come to terms with who we are. As a consequence, how and what we construct in narratives is consequential for explaining the causes of crime. In "Research Strategies for Narrative Criminology," the authors provide a thoughtful overview of narrative theory, and illuminate five distinct analytic strategies for discerning the theoretical elements of narratives. The section ends with Mark Fleisher's "The Culture of Violent Behavior: Language, Culture and Worldview of Prison Rape," which (re)acquaints the reader with two conspicuously omitted concepts in the criminological literature: culture and language. He provides a nuanced account of why these concepts are critical for understanding social worlds and carefully illustrates some of the procedures employed in ethnosemantic analysis, revealing how his research uncovered the function of prison rape stories as a mechanism for enculturation and socialization into prison life. Fleisher's is also a striking cautionary tale about the professional dangers that can result from misunderstandings of the goals of qualitative research. Part III, Positionality and the Study o/Criminalized Social Worlds, includes three essays that provide a meaningful dialogue with one another about researchers' insider/outsider positioning vis-a-vis research participants, and how these can be put to theoretical use. Sandra Bucerius, Randol Contreras, and Vanessa R. Panfil are each successful young ethnographers doing innovative community research, and each from distinct vantage points relative to those they study. In "Being Trusted with 'Inside Knowledge': Ethnographic Research with Male Muslim Drug Dealers," Bucerius demonstrates how her 'outsider' status as a

Introduction

7

white woman in Gennany provided her with unique opportunities for establishing rapport with the young Muslim men she investigated. She makes a compelling case for how her positioning allowed her to achieve a holistic understanding of the young men she studied, contributing to the development of a theoretically nuanced account of the relationship between young men's immigrant status, marginalization, and drug dealing. Randol Contreras, on the other hand, describes embracing his "insider" status as a failed drug dealer turned drug ethnographer in the South Bronx. In "Recalling to Life: Understanding Stickup Kids through Insider Qualitative Research," he describes how his positioning facilitated a Millsian analytic framework for understanding Dominican "stickup kids." Linking history, social structure, and biography, Contreras evocatively situates the criminal trajectories and lives of his research participants within a social milieu bounded by larger economic, communal, and drug market forces. Rounding out this section is Vanessa Panfi I's "Queer Anomolies? Overcoming Assumptions in Criminological Research with Gay Men." As a white queer woman studying the lives of gay gang- and crime-involved men of color, Panfil was both an insider and an outsider, and she describes how both contributed to her study design and theorizing. She highlights how her trust in the inductive process allowed her to overcome her own assumptions, providing her the opportunity to effectively dismantle many disciplinary misunderstandings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) populations in general, and crime-involved gay men in particular. There are two chapters in part IV, Comparative Social Organization of Place and Crime. Enrique Desmond Arias' "Qualitative Research in Comparative Context: Understanding Crime and Politics in Brazilian Shantytowns" is a timely exposition on the importance of comparative qualitative research in the global South. Arias draws from his extensive research in gang-controlled favelas in Brazil to highlight the significant contextual differences between crime and criminal justice in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as compared to the global North. He offers an illuminating account ofthe range of qualitative strategies he employed to understand socio-politicallife in Rio's shantytowns and outlines the advantages of comparative research for theory development and justice practices across global contexts. Next, Sheldon Zhang and Ko-lin Chin describe how their extensive comparative fieldwork in the United States and China allowed them to develop a theoretical account of transnational human smuggling at odds with commonly held assumptions about organized crime groups. In "Swim against the Tide: Using Qualitative Data to Build a Theory on Chinese Human Smuggling," they trace the methodological and analytic procedures they employed to build a Cartwheel Network Theory of human smuggling, resulting from their discovery of loosely connected smuggling networks characterized by dyadic transactions and sequential uncertainty. Like other authors in the volume, their trust in the analytic process resulted in significant theoretical innovation.

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Part V, Understanding Punishment and Society, brings together three of the most notable contemporary scholars of corrections, each offering unique methodological and theoretical insights. In "Observing Prisons, Conceptualizing Punishment: Ethnography and the Possibility of Theory," Lynne Haney highlights the advantages of the extended case method (ECM) for constructing a theoretically-driven ethnography of contemporary punishment. She argues for an ECM application that moves between ethnographic observation and conceptual insight, and debunks longstanding myths about qualitative research as an inherently inductive, descriptive, ahistorical, and atheoretical practice. Haney's essay is a challenge to contemporary ethnographers: Move beyond the Geertzian edict of "thick description" to theorize the larger social and structural forces shaping the 'concrete situations' we investigate. Next, Alison Liebling's "Appreciative Inquiry, Generative Theory, and the 'Failed State' Prison" calls for an affirmative social science premised on Appreciative Inquiry (AI). AI is a multi-method approach that generates ethnographically-based measurements through a "strengths-based approach" that allows for a grounded generative theory of correctional institutions and their inhabitants. Liebling demonstrates how this painstaking methodological process has resulted in "a 'failed state' theory of prison functioning and effects" that has shown significant empirical validation. Finally, extending methodological boundaries, Mona Lynch (re)acquaints the reader with the use of social artifacts as a significant source of qualitative data. In "Penal Artifacts: Mining Documents to Advance Punishment and Society Theory," she describes how social artifacts related to prison culture and punishmentincluding printed documents, pamphlets, maps, correspondence, and the likecan be treated analytically as communicative in both form and content. Lynch draws from several projects to illustrate how her analysis of the cognitive and emotional elements of carceral imagery and language result in ideographic theory generation. We close the volume with three final essays in part VI, Long Views on Qualitative Criminology. These address, in varying ways, the promise of and perils facing qualitative criminology. In "Cultural Criminology as Method and Theory," Jeff Ferrell carefully describes the symbiotic relationship between theory and method, which represents the epistemological anchor for many cultural criminologists. He describes a "methodology of attentiveness" through which meaning and understanding can be achieved among researchers and those researched. By eschewing traditional notions of objectivity for a theoretically informed subjectivity, Ferrell suggests that criminology can become a more progressive discipline by being attuned to how it comes to know and represent people's lives and to what consequence. For Shadd Maruna, a progressive criminology is concerned with the theoretical understanding of how people change. In "Qualitative Research, Theory Development, and Evidence-Based Corrections: Can Success Stories Be 'Evidence'?" he argues in favor of broadening the concept of "evidence-based"

Introduction

9

scholarship and critiques the popular premise that evaluation research represents the gold standard for assessing "what works" in justice policy. To understand how and why rehabilitation processes work for some and not others, for example, requires an inclusive approach involving multiple methods and analytic frameworks. Maruna's essay is one that highlights both the insights of qualitative research and the challenges it faces: the evidence-based movement risks re-entrenching counter-productive hierarchies of knowledge, while a 'realist synthesis' "could draw on the strengths and contributions of both" types of research to develop theoretically-based models of correctional practices and individual change. Finally, in "Where Are We? Why Are We Here? Where Are We Going? How Do We Get There? The Future of Qualitative Research in American Criminology," Richard Wright, Scott Jacques, and Michael Stein close the volume with an introspective essay about the status and future of qualitative criminology. Recognizing that qualitative criminological research is not on equal footing with its quantitative counterparts, these authors provide a thoughtful appraisal of disciplinary perceptions of qualitative scholarship. Wright and his co-authors advocate for the expansion of how social science is conceptualized, arguing that qualitative and quantitative methods are complementary and interdependent in the scientific study of crime and control. In addition to promoting data sharing and a broadening of the people and topics we investigate, Wright, Jacques, and Stein champion methodological transparency as a crucial step in enhancing both the status and state of qualitative criminology. We hope the reader will find that this volume of Advances in Criminological Theory is a critical step toward the transparency that we, like Wright and his colleagues, believe is necessary to ensure that qualitative research is recognized for its important theoretical contributions to the field. Notes I. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

Our sincerest gratitude to Elizabeth Webster (Rutgers School of Criminal Justice) and Amanda Petersen (Criminology, Law, and Society, University of California Irvine) for copyediting and indexing the volume. See the Final Report from this workshop at www.nsf.gov/sbe/ses/soc/ ISSQR_workshop_rpt. This is not to say there haven't been lively discussions of these issues in the past. Several of our contributors were participants in these (see for example Ferrell and Hamm 1998; Weppner 1977). By and large. however. such methodological discussions have been located in the sociology of deviance rather than explicitly influencing criminologists or criminology. In 2006 these included Data Mining from a Regression Perspective and Beyond OLS; in 2007, Introduction to Causal Inference Using Propensity Scores and Introduction to Spatial Analysis Using Geographic Information Systems. Following the success of the Adlers , workshop, additional qualitative workshops have been held almost annually, facilitated in 2009 by JetfFerrell. in 2010 by sociologist Kathy Charmaz, and in 2011 by Richard Wright. Scott Jacques. and Volkan Topalli. In 2013,1 (Miller) cofacilitated with Kristin Carbone-Lopez. Nearly every ASC President and Workshop Committee has continued the commitment to qualitative offerings. This is evidenced by other indicators as well. such as the representation of qualitative approaches in general criminology methods volumes (see Gadd et al. 2011).

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the publication simultaneous with this volume of The Routledge Handbook 0/ Qualitative Criminology (Copes and Miller 2015), and the recent introduction of the Journal o/Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology. We should note that just as some feminist scholars have critiqued the phrase "feminist criminology" (see Smart 1995) some might balk at our use ofthe phrase "qualitative criminology." We use it nonetheless as a shorthand method of referring to the enterprise of theorizing crime, law, and justice using qualitative methods. 7. Of course, the same remains true for this volume of just 17 chapters! But at least we were able to nearly quadruple the insights we would have gained from a single journal issue. 8. In Europe, criminology has been more closely linked with the disciplines of law, philosophy, and psychiatry. 9. This may be amplified further with the growing popularity of qualitative software programs. These have led to an increase in both the use of qualitative data without sufficient training in its epistemological and theoretical underpinnings, and the application of mismatched standards for assessing the validity and reliability of qualitative research. The growing expectation that analyses be completed using a software program fails to recognize that it functions as a tool, and has limitations when used without proper analytic training. 1O. As is surely always the case when producing a project of this sort, several contributors ultimately had conflicting commitments and had to withdraw from the volume. Our one regret is that among the fi ve scholars who withdrew, four were women and/ or persons of color, and all are qualitative scholars whose research advances theory at the intersections of race, gender, crime, and justice. 11. The original title of the volume.

References Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. 1985. Wheeling and Dealing. New York: Columbia University Press. Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. 1987. Membership Roles in Field Research. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Becker, Howard S. 1996. "The Epistemology of Qualitative Research." Pp. 53-71 in Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder (eds.), Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S. 2009. "How to Find Out How to Do Qualitative Research." International Journal o/Communication. 3: 545-553. Buckler, K. 2008. "The Quantitative/Qualitative Divide Revisited: A Study of Published Research, Doctoral Program Curricula, and Journal Editor Perceptions." Journal 0/ Criminal Justice Education. 19: 383-403. Carbone-Lopez, Kristin and Jody Miller. 2012. "Precocious Role Entry as a Mediating Factor in Women's Methamphetamine Use: Implications for Life-Course and Pathways Research." Criminology. 50: 187-220. Cobbina, Jennifer, Jody Miller and Rod K. Brunson. 2008. "Gender, Neighborhood Risk, and Risk Avoidance Strategies among Urban African American Youth." Criminology. 46: 501-537. Copes, Heith and J. Mitchell Miller, eds. 2015. The Routledge Handbook o/Qualitative Criminology. New York: Routledge. Copes, Heith, Anastasia Brown, and Richard Tewskbury. 2011. "A Content Analysis of Ethnographic Research Published in Top Criminology and Criminal Justice Journals from 2000 to 2009." Journal o/Criminal Justice Education. 22: 341-359.

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Ferrell, Jeff and Mark S. Hamm, eds. 1998. Ethnography at the Edge: Crime, Deviance, and Field Research. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gadd, David, Susanne Karstedt, and Steven F. Messner, eds. 2011. The Sage Handbook of Criminological Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Lindegaard, Marie Rosenkrantz, Jody Miller and Danielle M. Reynald. 2013. "Cultural Heterogeneity, Transitory Mobility and Victimization Risk among Young Men of Color: Insights from an Ethnographic Study in Cape Town, South Africa." Criminology. 51: 967-1008. Miller, Jody. 2005. "The Status of Qualitative Research in Criminology." Pp. 69-75 in Michele Lamont and Patricia White, Final Report: Workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation. Miller, Jody. 2008. Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence. New York: New York University Press. Palacios, Wilson R. 1996. "Side By Side: An Ethnographic Study of a Miami Gang." Journal of Gang Research. 4: 27-38. Palacios, Wilson R. 2009. "Fieldwork: Observations and Interviews." Pp. in J. M. Miller (ed.), 21st Century Criminology: A Reference Handbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Palacios, Wilson R. and Melissa E. Fenwick. 2002. "E is for Ecstasy: A ParticipantObservation of Ecstasy Use." Pp. 295-301 in Paul F. Cromwell (ed.), In Their Own Words: Criminal on Crime, 3rd Edition. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publishing. Root, Carl, Jeff Ferrell, and Wilson R. Palacios. 2013. "Brutal Serendipity: Criminological Verstehen and Victimization." Critical Criminology. 21: 141-155. Smart, Carol. 1995. Law, Crime and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism. London, Sage. Tewksbury, Richard, Matthew DeMichele, and J. Mitchel Miller. 2005. "Methodological Orientations of Articles Appearing in Criminal Justice's Top Journals: Who Publishes What and Where." Journal of Criminal Justice Education. 16: 265-279. Wholl, Douglas, J., Wilson R. Palacios, John K. Cochran, and Christine Sellers. 2013. "A Formative Approach in applying a Meta-Ethnography across the Qualitative Professional Criminal Literature." Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology. 1: 78-122.

Part I Qualitative Criminology: History and Epistemology

1 Criminal Practice: Fieldwork and Improvisation in Difficult Circumstances Dick Hobbs

It has been the dream ofphilosophers that theoretical and abstract science could and someday perhaps would succeed in putting into formulae and into general terms all that was significant in the concrete facts of life. It has been the tragic mistake of the so-called intellectuals, who have gained their knowledge from textbooks rather than from observation and research. to assume that science had already realized its dream. But there is no indication that science has begun to exhaust the sources or siguificance of concrete experience. The infinite variety of external nature and the inexhaustible wealth of personal experience have thus far defied, and no doubt will continue to defy, the industry of scientific classification, while. on the other hand, the discoveries of science are constantly making accessible to us new and larger areas of experience (Park and Burgess 1921: 15).

"Quant rules" in criminology, as Richard Wright and his colleagues explain in Chapter 17, especially amongst policy makers and their academic apparatchiks. However, fieldwork-based studies of drug users, gang members, thieves, robbers, and other deviants are among some ofthe most lauded within the criminological canon, imbuing to some of their authors an almost mythical veneer of authenticity that is derived from close proximity to "the street," or what Shover shrewdly calls our "bread and butter" (Shover 1996: xiii). While it is often presented, 15

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particularly to students, in tenns of a sequence of interdependent and linked procedures, in practice fieldwork is like life itself-an improvised gig (Becker 1964: 602-603; Denzin 1989: 245). This chapter will stress the contribution that field-based studies have made to our understandings of crime and control, while locating some of the theoretical boundaries offield-based contributions in criminology. Fieldwork Fieldwork refers to the research practice of engaging with the worlds of others in order to gain an understanding ofthe operations and mechanisms of a particular way of life and the meanings that members of that culture attribute to these everyday occurrences. This can only be achieved by making close observations from within an environment that is natural to those being observed, for to varying extents, the fieldworker is a stranger in the field. The extent of the strangeness experienced by the fieldworker will vary according to the specific culture under study and the background ofthe fieldworker. The shapes, patterns, and trajectories of action observed and experienced in the field are recorded as field notes, which are usually written up as soon as possible after the action (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011) and consist of observations and reflections that are representative of time spent in the field. As selective narratives, which when accumulated over a period of time will form the core of an academically framed account of a culture, field notes enable the construction of "thick description" (Geertz 1973), offering a window on disparate social worlds that would otherwise remain hidden or obscured. Strangeness and distance were distinct features of nineteenth-century anthropological fieldwork, where the colonial context assured that a distance between researchers and subjects was maintained, and any sharing of perspective with the studied population was at best extremely unlikely. Fieldworkers remained remote from the realities ofthe everyday lives ofthe natives and were preoccupied with the collection of artifacts and description, rather than with the generation of theory (Wax 1972). However, the evolution offieldwork from an archaeological enterprise linked closely to the rigors of colonial rule into an interpretive device where the fieldworker is an essential interactive component has been a richly productive development for the social sciences. Yet it was a journalist, Henry Mayhew, who, via the establishment of more intimate relationships with his subjects, marked an early attempt to document transgressive social phenomena via observation and interviews. l Mayhew located everyday deviance in the material conditions and lived experiences of working-class Londoners. Although vivid description remains an enduring characteristic of his work, theoretically Mayhew situated deviance within the local political economy as an inevitable response to irregular work (Mayhew 1980: Vol. 1). Mayhew wrote about costermongers (street traders of fruit and vegetables) who were distinguished by their language, their attitude

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to employment, their disruptive pastimes such as dog fighting and gambling, their dismissal of religion and formal marriage, and their violence and physical opposition to authority. The unearthing ofthe costermongers should be seen as a forerunner ofthe appreciative work on deviant subcultural life that emerged a century later (Mayhew 1980).

Chicago Inspiring some of the most influential fieldwork-based studies of deviant behavior, the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology combined ecology, formalism, and journalism. Soaked in the dangerous mystique of the city as a social laboratory, the aura that surrounds the Chicago School is urban and gritty, engaging via fieldwork with the social problems of a rapidly evolving urban setting. While this imagery often ignores other, more mundane, complimentary methodologies and concerns of Chicago's sociologists (Abbott 1999; Platt 1995, 1996), it cannot be denied that their fieldwork-based studies have enduring qualities that have inspired generations of researchers (see Deegan 2001). The sociological identity ofthe Chicago researchers and their work is important as a foundation for fieldwork-based studies of crime and control. They were not criminologists, nor was fieldwork regarded as a process separate from theory construction. Consequently, and against a backdrop of rising influence of statistical analysis within American sociology, the Chicagoans emphasized the importance of "the inquiring attitude" that refused to separate theoretical and empirical concerns, while promoting eclectic methods and methodological innovation (Fielding 2005). Yet for the most part, fieldwork was taught as part of an academic apprenticeship, rather than as a means of imparting technical knowledge. "Nobody taught any of us; I think you'd say we were self-taught, we proceeded from inspiration from people we liked, like ... Everett Hughes" (E. Gross, interview, quoted in Platt 1995).2 Prompted by Robert Park's exhortations to his students to "go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research" (Becker, cited in McKinney 1966: 71), the Chicago School's early studies located deviance as an essential part ofimmigrantbased communal identities in the process of assimilation. Consequently, "the life ofthe slum is lived almost entirely without the conventional world" (Zorbaugh 1929: 152), and the sense of difference, separateness, and normality within a milieu of rapid change set the scene for the classic studies that were to follow. For many Chicagoan studies, theoretically informed description of the sense of order that emerges from apparently fragmented communities, rather than the construction of theory, is the principle product of their fieldwork. For instance, with no methodological instruction other than Robert Park's suggestion to "(w)rite down only what you see, hear and know, like a newspaper reporter" (Anderson, 1961: xii), Anderson depicted the social world ofthe hobo as a complex cultural universe integral to both the reality and myth of the United States. In a similar but less personal vein, Cressey (1932), who was also concerned with a social

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world, that of a commercial dance hall where women were employed as dance partners, concentrated upon the meaning of the hall for the working women and the patrons, teasing out "the distinct vocabulary and ways of acting, the interpretations of activities, the code, the organization and structure, and the dominant schemes of life" (Cressey 1932: 53). One of the most influential theoretical products of the Chicago School is social disorganization, which is largely associated with Shaw and McKay (1942), who utilized spatial maps to locate delinquency. Although social disorganization theories are essentially about place, rather than people, fieldwork-based studies also featured in this highly influential and contested theory. Thrasher's study of Chicago youth gangs (1963) employed a mixture of "census and court records, personal observation, and personal documents collected from gang boys and from persons who had observed gangs in many contexts" (Short 1963: xviii). Virtually every possible working-class street group is featured in the study, and while the interview segments and life histories are strangely dry and formal, the notion of deviant groups being interstitial, filling the voids left by various forms of urban disorganization, has been enormously influential on subsequent theory (Thrasher 1963: 46). Disorganization as a prime factor in producing deviance was refuted by Whyte's fieldwork-based Streetcorner Society. As Whyte explains, "Comerville's problem is not lack of organization but failure of its own social organization to mesh with the structure of the society around it" (Whyte 1955: 273). Whyte highlighted "a documented hierarchy of personal relations based on a system of reciprocal obligations" (1955: 272), where much deviant activity was regarded as normal. He provides a rich description of everyday deviance, and the highly personal methodological appendix that first appeared in the 1955 edition is a fine introduction to fieldwork that stands as a rejection of the kind of methods course that attempts to mimic "quants" and convert fieldwork into a sequential, overly prescriptive, technical exercise. In a similar vein, Suttles wrote about informal organizations whose primary function was to protect the "defended neighborhood" from intruders. His time in the field discovered youths who are "hardly the unruly and unreachable youths that we are led to expect ... The street comer groups not only make their members known to the remainder of the neighborhood, but create a network of personal acquaintances that augment those already in existence" (1968: 172-173). The perception of deviance being crucial to the local social order is pivotal to the fieldwork-based ethnographic work of both Whyte and Suttles, emphasizing a local order where youth thrive more in harmony than in conflict with their locale. Although the Chicagoans tended to shy away from theoretical generalizations, when viewed as a collective enterprise, their emergent theoretical outputs clearly constitute a framework that addresses the timeless sociological conundrum regarding the link between structure and action. Further, by eschewing formal theory, the Chicagoans focused upon the empirical realities of social

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interaction and, in so doing, emphasized the meaningful worlds of social actors. Formalism had a particular influence upon Chicagoan theory and highlighted social patterns that are brought to life through social interaction. Coherence and continuity were made possible by the reproduction of social worlds that cannot be abstracted from the empirical conditions in which they were observed and from the point of view of fieldwork-defined theory. These worlds do not exist independently ofthe actions that created them. Thus Byzantine, complex social worlds can never be reduced to narratives of grand theory featuring monolithic social systems. The fluidity of social life that emerges from Chicago has been the most enduring feature of subsequent fieldwork-based studies, proffering an invitation to explore and, most importantly, to appreciate the imaginative worlds of deviants. Consequently, our understanding of deviance and control is defined by the actions of participants and the meanings that they attribute to action, rather than by empirical validation imposed by social facts or law-based edicts. As Blumer explained, "The road to ... empirical validation does not lie in the manipulation of the method of inquiry; it lies in the examination of the empirical social world" (Blumer 1969: 34). Symbolic interactionism [SI] was key to retaining and developing this emphasis on social meaning. After World War II, ethnographies of deviance featured prominently among the work of scholars of the "second Chicago School" (Fine 1995), who, like their predecessors, aligned themselves with sociology rather than the clearly defined administrative strictures of criminology. In these studies, interaction in complex and overlapping social worlds is described at a micro level. For instance, in Becker's covert study of dance musicians (195 I), the author worked as a musician and uncovered a partially deviant learned environment, while in his study of marijuana use (1953), deviance is presented in terms ofa three-stage learning process. Becker's collection (1963) became a flagship for an interactionist-based sociology of deviance that stood in stark contrast to conventional criminology. Goffinan's fieldwork in a large federal mental hospital in Washington (1968) focused upon the means by which the treatment of deviant behavior instills conformity among individuals via the professionalization of informal control mechanisms and the requirement for inmates to adjust to a new stage in their moral career. Goffman's study has been hugely influential on ethnographic studies of institutions-for instance, Carlen's finely grained study of everyday interactions in criminal courts (Carlen I 976}-and the fieldwork-based studies of both Becker and Goffman have acquired iconic status among successive generations of scholars. The interactionist/labeling school marked a total break from legalism and focused instead upon deviance not as a quality of a specific act, but rather as a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender" (Becker 1963: 9). The Chicago School laid the foundation for "a vibrant and increasingly methodologically sophisticated program of interpretive ethnography" (Thomas 1993: I I), and despite the dominance of positivism over much empirical territory

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and attempts to convert fieldwork into a technical exercise, the Chicagoans set a benchmark for the establishment of imaginative and sociologically rich fieldworkbased studies of urban crime, deviance, and control. The Radical Field The sociology of "nuts, sluts and perverts" (Liazos 1972) peaked in Polsky's celebration of lowlife (1971), which, despite its limited fieldwork (only one chapter is based upon fieldwork), focuses on poolroom hustling, a profession rooted in the subcultural world of urban deviance. However, Polsky is best known for a coruscating chapter (115-147) on the morality and pragmatics of fieldwork-a chapter that has been used as a rough guide by a great number of ethnographers (for instance, Adler 1985; Hobbs I 988)-where he claims that the fieldworker should learn "to suspend his personal distaste for the values and lifestyles of the untamed savages, until he goes out into the field to the cannibals and head-hunters and observes them without trying to civilize them or turn them over to colonial officials ... he will only be a jail house or court house sociologist" (Polsky 1971: 145). Indeed, during the 1960s there grew a dissatisfaction not only with conventional criminology, but also with the emerging limitations of interactionism and, in particular, its inability to frame deviance within historical and economic constraints (Gouldner 1975; Sumner 1994: 242; Turk 969). The National Deviancy Conference (NDC) was formed in 1968 (see Cohen 1971) as a looseknit confederacy of "Anarchists, CND, Young Communists and International Socialists" (Cohen 1974: 27), along with interactionists and phenomenologists (Sumner 1994: 262), a number of whom had conducted fieldwork-based studies that went on to define the sociology of deviance. The NDC spawned a number of symposia, several edited collections, and one ofthe most influential criminology texts ofthe postwar era (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973), in which the authors declared that "deviance is normal-in the sense that men are now ... asserting their human diversity" (Taylor et al. 1973: 282). The endearing utopianism of a "fully social" (Taylor et al. 1973: 268-282) theory of deviance became increasingly honed toward neo-Marxism (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1975), and the NDC was rejected by formal Marxists who parodied the notion ofa sociological theory of crime in favor of a strict Marxist, somewhat mid-nineteenth-century rendition of the relationship between the industrial working class and the lumpenproletariat (Hirst in Taylor et al. 1975: 203-244). Overall, the sense of irony that is central to the ethnographies of the interactionists (Atkinson 1990: 170-174; Matza 1969) was retained by those scholars who continued to embrace subcultural studies (Cohen 1971: 9-24; Downes and Rock 1979) and fieldwork-based research where "the meaning of actions and events to the people we seek to understand" (Spradley 1979: 5) was promoted as an alternative to the positivism typified by "mainstream criminology" (Cohen 1974: 1--40). However, while the NDC produced a spate of important studies whose theoretical conclusions highlighted

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the structural arrangements that construct the social parameters within which deviant worlds are created, at the first fourteen symposia consisting of seventy papers, less than ten of them featured fieldwork-based studies. In spite of this, some notable work did emerge. Probably the most celebrated fieldwork-based study ofthis era was conducted by Paul Willis (1977), who is more usually associated with the distinctly theoretical but highly influential Birmingham School (Hall and Jefferson 1976). Based on his ethnographic work with teenage boys, Willis explored how deviance functions as a way of formalizing, via the school, confiictual relations with middle-class culture, preparing working-class youth for their inherited position in the labor market. Links between the culture of the school and the culture of work indicate the futile nature of much deviant action and the irony of its consequences, highlighting the manner in which symbolic resistance reinforces class relations. Indeed, much fieldwork-based scholarship during this era was concerned with youth,3 and it merged with the subcultural tradition to form a significant body of work that provided a base for the growth of the sociology of deviance. While a number of these studies echo many of the key concerns of labeling theorists (Corrigan 1979: 149), following Downes (1966), this body of work locates deviant youth within industrial working-class culture (Parker 1974). Crucially, by stressing the manner in which youth and the parent culture share the material and cultural constraints imposed by class society, these studies stand in stark contrast to the non-fieldwork-based scholarship of those concerned with "sub-cultures of imagination and resistance" (Van Swaaningen 1997: 79) as drivers of youthful deviance (Hall and Jefferson 1976).

Deviant Fields 4 Although most fieldwork-based studies have been carried out outside of the "criminological gang" (Katz and Jackson-Jacobs 2004), the now fondly remembered sociology of deviance offered scholars the opportunity to step away from the strictures of criminal justice studies, and it opened up the world of everyday deviance as a particularly rich vein of fieldwork. For instance, Douglas et al. (1977) took a deviant activity-nudism-and examined via fieldwork how it becomes informally organized, developing rules and norms as well as providing its own perceptions of deviation such as voyeurism. In a similar vein, albeit presented in a more formal manner, Ditton's study of theft by staffin an English bread factory is concerned with the informal ordering of social life within the context of a normative political economy. Heavily influenced by Donald Roy and Erving Goffman, Ditton worked in the bakery, and his ethnography develops the concept of petty theft in terms of a "moral career" that does not require the adoption of a deviant identity (Ditton 1977). Donald Roy's work (1959) is seldom cited now due to its being designated as part of "work and employment" rather than "crime and deviance." However, its significance has not waned; exploring social interactions within a small

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working group in a factory, it demonstrates the strategies employed by the group to beat monotony. The paper describes a series of different "times" that triggered informal short breaks; for instance, "banana time" was a point each morning when a banana would be stolen from one worker's lunchbox, and a brief interplay would follow that served to temporarily relieve the monotony and tedium of factory life. While most self-conscious schools of sociology or criminology concentrate upon theoretical as opposed to methodological coherence, and with criminology in elite law faculties remaining largely unaffected by the various eras of radical theory that thrived unburdened by empirical evidence, it has been left to the efforts of individuals and a few isolated clusters of scholars to retain the fieldwork tradition. The sociology department at the London School of Economics (LSE) produced Morris's (1955) Chicago-influenced ecological study, Downes's (1966) seminal study of youth subculture, Young's (1971) study of drugs and bohemian life, Cohen's (1973) study of moral panic, and Rock's (1973) study of debt collection as a moral career. This merging of Chicagoan, interactionist, and subcultural work proved to be hugely influential. In a similar vein, the University of Missouri produced a series of fieldwork studies of crime based upon a melange of methodologies featuring ethnography, interviews, and an overt and semiformal emphasis on gatekeepers (Wright et al. 1992). These studies have focused upon armed robbery (Wright and Decker 1997), burglars (Wright and Decker 1994), drugs (Jacobs 1999), carjacking (Jacobs et al. 2003), drugs and violence (Jacobs 2000; Topali et al. 2002), and women and gangs (Miller 200 I). However, despite this substantial body of work, neither the LSE nor the Missouri scholars would ever regard themselves as formally constituted schools of criminology; such units have traditionally produced little empirical work, and fieldwork-based studies have seldom found a welcoming home from scholars gravitating toward grand theory. Nonetheless, freed of theoretical dogma but theoretically informed, scholars with a predilection for fieldwork are able to envelop themselves in the often chaotic and contradictory worlds that are often otherwise ignored. While most male fieldworkers have tended to situate their female subjects as bit-part players (Patrick 1973; Robins and Cohen 1978), female fieldworkers have made important contributions that stress female agency. Both contradicting and reinforcing normative images offemininity (Campbell 1984), fieldworkers attending to female deviance have theorized that the emergence of deviant female identities is structured by class and ethnicity (Campbell 1984) but complemented by stereotypical notions of femininity (Miller 1986; Sanders 2005; Taylor 1993), which in turn are shaped by "the same structural and cultural underpinnings that shape some of men's participation" (Miller 1998: 62). Fieldworkers have also acknowledged female involvement in illegal markets, indicating how women become established in male-dominated markets and, contrary to stereotypes, conduct their business according to middle-class values and strategies (Dunlap et al. 1994; Hart 1998). This work also stresses the way

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that the traditional domestic realm and its associated roles enable some of the most stigmatized deviant occupations (Miller 1986). In common with studies of women, gang studies have been particularly successful in utilizing fieldwork, and, as with studies of women, fieldworkers have tended not to emerge from specific theoretical schools of criminology. Within this genre offieldwork, contemporary gang members are usually located within an urban underclass where, unlike in Thrasher's study mentioned above, there is "no industrial ladder to step on" (Hagedorn 1988: 42), reducing the chance that youths will "mature out" of gang membership. Subjected to "multiple marginality" and with few opportunities for upward mobility, gangs emerged as a viable alternative for the young (Vigil 1988), who increasingly adopt entrepreneurial strategies in order to achieve material success. While communal deviant status (Wolf 1991) continues to offer traditional advantages (such as status, protection, friendships, and adventure), the new entrepreneurial imperialism of the drug trade (Taylor 1990) indicates the way in which associated activities can be understood as rational and organized around a form of "local patriotism" (Sanchez-Jankowski 1991: 99) that is often supported by prison gang culture and segregated by age (Moore 1978). Drug cultures have provided some of the most insightful and innovative fieldwork-based studies. Agar's (1973) ethnography and his role as a "professional stranger" focused upon the routines that are central to an addict's life, which revolves around drug procurement and finding a safe place to use the drug. Similarly, Bourgois (1995) stresses the normalization of the crack trade in the context of economic culture as opposed to individual pathology. Located in an arena where individualism and pecuniary advantage reign over communal priorities, the fieldwork is situated within a distinctly post-industrial entrepreneurial setting. Although much of the effort expended by fieldworkers has been concentrated upon youth, fieldwork on adult populations is important to our understanding of crime and transgression, and to the identification of the repression of pleasure-seeking through the bland routinization of everyday life, which provides the impetus for individuals to engage with upper-level dealing and smuggling (Adler 1985). Similarly, Klockar's (1975) study of a receiver of stolen goods highlights the extent to which deviant enterprise closely resembles legitimate business, while Humphrey's (1975) notorious ethnography also showed how fieldwork can bring to the fore the essential ambiguities inherent to so much deviant activity by describing in graphic detail the sexual comportment of men meeting in public restrooms and by exposing how the sexuality of their home lives contradicted their tearoom activities. Telling the Truth? As we can see above, contemporary gang and drug market studies have utilized fieldwork for locating and interrogating various aspects of post-industrial cultures. The post-industrial turn was the backdrop for one particularly

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illuminating debate concerning the tone offield-based writings and their subsequent theoretical implications. The AJS Review Symposium (2002) brought to the fore an eternal critique offieldwork-based theoretical explorations, sparked by Wacquant's fierce critique ofthe ethnographies ofDuneier (1999), Anderson (1999), and Newman (1999) for their "failure to construct a properly sociological problematic" (2002: 1469) and for presenting data "without any theory to organize it" (2002: 1520). In different ways, both sides in the subsequent argument accuse the other of honing preexisting (inappropriate) theoretical frameworks that have not been derived from fieldwork findings, and both sides stress the need to be receptive to the field. While the orthodox approach offieldworkers is to concentrate on explanation based upon description, rather than explicit theory construction, these explanations are underpinned by theoretical assumptions. As a consequence, theoretical claims emerging from fieldwork are often fiercely contested by those wielding alternative interpretations. The interpretive approach is firmly embedded in the Chicagoan and symbolic interactionist traditions, which stress the meanings that people attach to their social world, and is typified by Anderson, Duneier, and Newman, whereas Wacquant is more typical of a critical tradition associated with a social-conflict style. However, there is a somewhat false dichotomy between the two approaches. The critical approach, particularly in Wacquant's (2004) study of a Chicago boxing gym, features classic description gleaned from long periods in the field. His self-consciously partisan approach, while inspiring the occasional wrath of methodological zealots, is an understandable consequence of long-term commitment to the boxing gyms' sense of communality. More importantly, his theoretical assumptions were also the culmination of interpretive processes, albeit commencing with a more explicit theoretical foundation than those of his three protagonists. Wacquant's study, published just two years after the AJS Symposium, contained an astonishingly rich ethnographic narrative that featured a relatively light theoretical touch and, to this reader's eyes, was all the better for it. It is merely a matter of proportion. Van Maanen wisely notes, "Truth in fieldwork, as in life, lies in the eye of the beholder" (1991: 40). The AJS debate concentrates the mind upon issues surrounding the status of evidence, the credibility of participants' accounts, presentation and writing style, and crucially the romanticization of the lives of the poor via the imposition of the researcher's morality rather than from any fieldwork-derived sociological sensibility. From my own experience working since the early 1980s with several generations of thieves, drug dealers, armed robbers, and others (Hobbs 1988, 1995, 2013), it is clear that while as much ethical, moral, and theoretical luggage should be left in the care of the universities' baggage department as is possible, it is unwise and perhaps impractical to attempt to lodge these sensitivities in lost property. Our reliance upon appreciation and interpretation, along with the desire for validation, means that inevitably we will enter the field with theoretical as well as biographical backstories that both

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enhance and restrict our effectiveness. Patience and the willingness to listen (Back: 2007) are crucial qualities practiced in various proportions by all four of the contributors to the AJS symposium. However, ultimately the fieldworker's task is not to impose a moral, methodological, or theoretical template, but instead to comprehend and to "illuminate the subject's view and to interpret the world as it appears to him" (Matza 1969: 25) and perhaps, along the way, exhibit a little scholarly humility. All the rest is propaganda. Much of the tone of Wacquant's critique relates to the changing nature of urban culture, triggered by the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, a transformation that has provided the impetus for a batch of recent fieldwork-based studies. For instance, post-industrial urban cityscapes and the nighttime economy inspired fieldwork on crime, governance, and private security (Hobbs, Hadfield, Lister, and Winlow 2003; Monaghan 2002; Winlow 2001); on violence (Winlow and Hall 2006) and on gender and control (O'Brien, Hobbs, and Westmarland 2008).5 These studies retain the non-criminological sociological edge espoused by the sociologists of deviance, and they locate deviant activity in everyday life rather than in quasi-legal discourse, mixing conventional Chicagoan fieldwork techniques and associated descriptive theoretical assertions with the use of social theory associated with various scholars. 6 Attempts to generalize findings, and to connect empirically observable phenomena to social theory, is of course a feature of many fieldwork-based studies, and currently the most popular theorist for fieldworkers is Bourdieu. As an editor of an ethnography series, it is clear that young fieldworkers, few of whom appear to have sought out Bourdieu as a source, utilize the notion of habitus, not as a vehicle for interpretation (see Desmond 2007), but instead as an explanation for phenomena observed in the field. Typically the book proposal highlights the unique nature of the fieldwork, followed by a theoretical chapter where "Bourdieu's habitus will be applied." This usually means that habitus has been substituted for culture and will be used in the most simplistic manner, thus reducing this most sensitive yet practical oftheoretical frameworks to an explanation for fieldwork findings that have yet to be discovered.

Conclusion Sociologically trained fieldworkers have long labored to present deviance, transgression, and crime as a complex, messy, dull, exciting, pleasurable, and painful set of experiences (see, for instance, Briggs 2012; Bunsell 2013; Colosi 2010). However, the appreciative stance that is integral to competent fieldwork is often ignored by members of criminology's numerous citation clubs (see Bosworth and Hoyle 2011). Although criminology is a "rendezvous discipline," it has traditionally met under the sociological clock, and rather than consign valuable work to the edges of the academic domain, contributing further to the intellectual fragmentation ofthe study of crime and control, we should acknowledge its embeddedness in sociology: the discipline that provides criminology's methodological and empirical base, as well as many of its theoretical cues.

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The "chronocentrism" (Rock 2005) that is a feature of contemporary criminology has deprived those with a penchant for fieldwork of swathes offoundational scholarship along with related skills and theoretical dispositions. Much of the fieldwork-based tradition of the sociology of deviance has been bypassed by a simplistic, selectively nostalgic karaoke that ignores the sociological craft inherent to both fieldwork and theory construction. Consequently, Becker is cited in relation to learning to be a deviant and to underdog bias (1967). Apart from a crude word-association game where the term "stigma" triggers a reference to "Goffinan 1963," the writer's work on the intricacies offace work, dramaturgical analysis, the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, the social organization of experience, and total institutions-and so much more of Goffman's work-is either ignored in favor of alternative approaches or, more likely, just ignored. Similarly this call-and-response logic infantilizes the complexity of, for instance, the notion of moral panic (Cohen 1973; Young 1971), which is more often used, inappropriately, to describe overreaction linked to moral indignation (Hall 20 12).7 Matza once warned us against imposing order where none existed (Matza 1969: 1), but that was during an era when the skepticism of the sociology of deviance briefly held sway over the unimaginative rigidity of criminology. When the study of deviance was hosted by sociology departments, theory lay at the core of both undergraduate and postgraduate study, and it was impossible for students to complete their sociology degrees without encountering a wide gamut of theoretical frameworks. Further, theory was complemented by a largely nontechnical but theoretically informed education in sociological methods, and as a result, a sense of craft and disciplinary induction was inculcated (Hobbs 2012). Yet much of what evolved as a sociology of deviance orthodoxy was based upon non-fieldwork-based versions of labeling theory. As the complexities of labeling and its links with symbolic interactionism were eroded and "ethnomethodology and phenomenology of crime, deviance and control have apparently been expunged" (Rock 2005: 3), this buried history, along with related theoretical and fieldwork traditions, has been displaced by simplistic sociology-lite criminology programs, and a bland, nonempirical, liberal consensus has come to dominate the study of crime in so many sociology and emergent criminology departments. This rise in "chronocentrism" (Rock 2005) is connected closely to the political economy of the university sector that provides the context for research. The commodification of higher education, and the related expansion of the university sector, has led to the creation of a raft of new criminology degrees, lectureships, departments, journals, conferences, and publishers. 8 A cash cow for an expanded university sector, this previously critical area of intellectual activity became once again "a practical pursuit, devoted to helping society deal with those it found troublesome" (Becker 1964: 1). The critical disclaimers built into the study of crime and control when it was taught and researched from within an intellectually rigorous, self-consciously oppositional sociology of deviance (Kituse and

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Cicourel 1963) were skeptical, imaginative, and distinctly of the left, albeit with a pronounced liberal underbelly. Most importantly, it provided a coherent base for fieldwork-based studies and a flexible framework for theoretical innovation. Administratively oriented professionals concerned with policy formation marginalized critical writing and reduced theory from alive entity that ran like a thread through all aspects of scholarship to a niche or specialism (Maruna 2008), as criminologists come together under various radical or critical specialist outlets and citation clubs. While fieldwork-based studies are as rare in contemporary criminological circles as they were in the NDC era, there are two efficient and surefire ways of being identified as a criminological theorist: (1) exclude all forms of empirical data from your writing, and (2) make sure that theory is explicitly mentioned in the title of your books. You are then a theorist, removed from the grubby empirical realities of the field. When the study of crime and social order was dominated by sociology, students would have been well aware of debates surrounding positivism and its malcontents (Garfinkel 1967; Hindess 1973). In the 1970s, the critique of positivism enabled scholars to draw a clear line between administratively oriented, generally non-sociological criminology with strong links to government, and critical scholarship (Quinney 1975: 182-184). It is worth noting that with sociology being drained from much of the contemporary criminological enterprise, students of crime seldom study Comte or Durkheim, are spared conflicting debates regarding Popper, and no longer address the uncomfortable reality that Marx drew heavily on positivism. These debates, and many more, were apparent within the brief, vibrant era of the New Deviancy Conference (see Taylor et al. 1973). However, presented not in terms of the incremental development of theoretical frameworks or with the crafting of theory that enables new ideas to be shaped by past empirical work and its theoretical products, contemporary criminological schools and cliques seldom acknowledge their intellectual continuity with past scholarly frameworks. Too much criminology has been typified by a series of year zeros, where the cumulative product of the past is declared irrelevant and ideologically unsound, whereas highly selective, usually nonempirical outputs are presented as essentially New, Radical, or Critical in a stream of endless novelty. Although fieldwork-based studies are often espoused as constituting the core of these criminological innovations, few actual fieldwork-based studies are forthcoming, and as for those that are, ifthe findings do not fit with the preconceived notion of a correct outcome, they are dismissed or ignored. Indeed, across a wide range of criminological schools and eras, fieldwork-based studies have been adopted as the methodological mascot, yet when push comes to shove, the most important thing is not the method but the compatibility of findings with preconceived notions of reality masquerading as theory. Consequently, and with more than a touch of deja vu crossed with amnesia, actual engagement with the field remains a rarity. Much criminology shies away from the intensity, ambiguity, and ugliness of contemporary life in exchange for

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nonempirical blanket etiologies, featuring monocausal explanations covering the fabricated, amorphous concept of crime with a series oftheoretical conceits that are doomed to reside for eternity in a self-contained netherworld. The empirical reality of those it claims to champion is ignored as criminology continues to be typified by theoretically vacuous administrative studies and empirically illiterate theory. Without the influence of sociology, the complimentary crafts of fieldwork and theory will remain utterly separate. This is particularly apparent with the criminological writing style whereby field notes are written quite literally as "tales of the field" (Van Maanen 1988), followed by a self-consciously theoretical essay or series of essays. [n these outputs, and regardless of the quality of the field notes, the findings are not unpacked, developed, or interrogated, but instead they are left as a "postcard" (Geertz 1988: 130) from the field. Crucially, contradictions and negative cases are apparently never encountered, and so ongoing explanations are never modified (Katz 1988), as the theoretician goes to work with little more than a few rehearsed linking passages-for instance, "as we found" or "as we discovered"-in order to connect two only vaguely connected sections of the text. This is not empirical work but a diatribe dressed as Grand Theory and utilizing fieldwork as a narrative device to establish the "integrity" ofthe enterprise. [t stands in stark contrast to the classical "analytic ethnography" (Lofland 1995) that provided the informal orthodoxy for generations of sociologically trained fieldworkers. This orthodoxy involves not only interpreting the fieldwork findings but seeking out hidden cognitive rules and developing theory explicitly from the fieldwork as the social processes that unravel as a result of properly crafted fieldwork are invoked as theoretical propositions. Further, the low-key findings of fieldworkers who have shared the mundane realities of so many deviant lives can, if approached with some humility, unravel a richness, albeit a belligerent, unpleasant, counterintuitive richness that is manifested on a very different planet from that of the romantic constructs ofliberal theorists, Grand or otherwise. Beyond the criminological clubs and the ambitious conceits of Grand Theory, innovative fieldworkers continue to skirt the frontiers of both sociology and anthropology, exploring worlds that may be ordinary or exotic, mundane or dangerous. For deviants, "(like) any group of persons ... develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable, and normal once you get close to it and ... a good way to learn about any ofthese worlds is to submit oneself in the company ofthe members to the daily round of petty contingencies to which they are subject" (Goffman 1968: ix-x). Fieldwork offers an opportunity to investigate diverse social worlds from the members' perspective, and the inductive strategies offieldworkers enables a flexibility unavailable in more formal methodologies (Fielding 20 I 0). Further, the products of fieldwork have a human resonance that is impossible to re-create by the application of alternative methodologies,

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and therefore they are especially valuable when bringing to the fore voices that are routinely muffled by the cacophony of positivistic assumptions implicit to administrative agendas. Properly conducted fieldwork demands the kind oflong-term commitment that often leaves the fieldworker in and around the field for years, or in some cases for entire careers. Fitting such a commitment into the increasingly bureaucratic life-world of the contemporary university, with teaching duties, administration, and endless meetings about meetings is not easy; not too many academics with a long-term commitment to fieldwork rise to prominence in university management. Despite the commodification of academic life, the pretensions of many of its practitioners, and a relentless, numbing institutional pressure that at times resembles life in an Eastern European tractor factory ofthe Cold War era, fieldwork offers the prospect of genuine theoretical innovation that challenges the arrogance of abstracted empiricism, the sensibilities of liberal romantics, and the imaginations of policy makers. Notes I. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Between 1849 and 1850, Mayhew wrote eighty-two ten-thou sand-word articles for the Morning Chronicle. This groundbreaking work is available in many forms, but the edition referred to in this chapter is the six-volume edition republished in 1980. As Fielding notes, it was not until Glaser and Strauss (1967) that qualitative methods could be taught as a "systematic procedure that was as rigorous as quantitative methods. The fact remains that Glaser's approach better describes what many qualitative researchers actually do, carrying forward the Chicagoans' dilemma over whether qualitative method can be taught or only learned" (Fielding 2005). A couple of fine exceptions are the studies of Archard (1979) and Fielding (1981). Tn his ethnography of skid row alcoholics in London, Archard blended the political drive of the New Deviancy theorists with the theoretical rigor of symbolic interactionism, attending soup runs, magistrates' courts, common lodging houses, parks, and other venues frequented by alcoholics. He also describes the routine of drinking, begging, and buying drink that constituted the world of the skid row alcoholic. Fielding conducted both overt and covert fieldwork with a right-wing political group. Fielding's use of symbolic interactionism is another indicator of the way in which during this era, although the rhetoric of radical criminology presented ST in less than flattering tenns, sociological fieldworkers continued to regard it as a valuable and practical tool. This brief paper does not enable me to come even close to giving a comprehensive overview ofthe rich and engaging literature that emanates from so many fieldworkbased studies. For a more extensive but still limited review, see Hobbs 2001. Another example offieldwork addressing a distinctly post-industrial aspect of culture is "dumpster diving" (Ferrell 2006). In particular Bauman, whose floating metaphor has proved particularly popular for scholars of chaotic post-industrial settings (Bauman 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2011). As Laurie Taylor notes of his friend Stan Cohen, "Stan often used to joke in later years that ifhe had a penny for every time the concept of moral panic had been misused, he would have long previously been able to take early retirement" (Taylor 2004). Carrabine (2014, forthcoming ) has written two fine essays on the relationship between criminology and sociology.

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Bibliography Abbott, Andrew. 1999. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adler, Patricia A. 1985. Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography ofan Upper-Level Drug Dealing and Smuggling Community. New York: Columbia University Press. Agar, Michael. 1973. Ripping and Running. New York: Seminar. Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code ofthe Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life ofthe Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton. Anderson, Elijah. 2002. "The Ideologically Driven Critique." American Journal of Sociology 07(6): 1533-50. Anderson, Nels. 1961. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (Ist ed. 1923). Archard. Peter. 1979. Vagrancy, Alcoholism and Social Control. London: Macmillan. Atkinson, Paul. 1990. The Ethnographic Imagination. Routledge: London. Back, Les. 2007. The Art ofListening. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Liquid Love: On the Frailty ofHuman Bonds. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2006a. Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2006b. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2010. 44 Lettersfrom the Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2011. Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. Becker, Howard. 1951. 'The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience." American Journal of Sociology 57: 136-44. Becker, Howard. 1953. "Becoming a Marijuana User." American Journal of Sociology 59: 235-242. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Becker, Howard, ed. 1964. The Other Side. New York: Macmillan. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bosworth, Mary, and Carolyn Hoyle. 2011. "What is Criminology? An Introduction." Pp. 1-11 in M. Bosworth and C. Hoyle (ed.), What is Criminology? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In Search ofRespect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briggs, Daniel. 2012. Crack Cocaine Users: High Society and Low Life in South London. London: Routledge. Bunsell, Tanya. 2013. Strong and Hard Women: An Ethnography ofFemale Bodybuilding. London: Routledge. Campbell, Anne. 1984. The Girls in the Gang. New York: Basil Blackwell. Carlen, Pat. 1976. Magistrates' Justice. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Carrabine, Eamonn. 2014. "Criminology, Deviance and Sociology." Pp. 459-487 in John Holmwood and John Scott (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain. London: Palgrave. Carrabine, Eamonn. Forthcoming. "Contemporary Criminology and the Sociological Imagination." In Jon Frauley (ed.), C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination. Surrey: Ashgate. Cohen, Stanley. 1971. "Introduction." Pp. 9-24 In Stanley Cohen (ed.), Images of Deviance. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cohen, Stanley. 1973. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Paladin.

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Cohen, Stanley. 1974. "Criminology and the Sociology of Deviance in Britain." Pp. 1-40 in Paul Rock and Mary McIntosh (eds.), Deviance and Social Control. London: Tavistock. Colosi, Rachela. 2010. Dirty Dancing? An Ethnography of Lap-Dancing. Abingdon: Willan Publishing. Corrigan, Paul. 1979. Schooling the Smash Street Kids. London: Macmillan. Cressey, Paul Goalby. 1932. The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercial Recreation and City Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Deegan, Mary Jo. 2001. "The Chicago School of Ethnography." Pp. 11-25 in Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland (eds.), Handbook of Ethnography. London: Sage. Denzin, Norman K. 1989. Interpretive Biography. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Desmond, Matthew. 2007. On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ditton. Jason. 1977. Part-Time Crime. London: Macmillan. Douglas, Jack and Paul K. Rasmussen with Carol Ann Flanagan. 1977. The Nude Beach. Beverly Hills: Sage. Downes, David. 1966. The Delinquent Solution: A Study in Subcultural Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Downes, David, and Paul Rock, eds. 1979. Deviant Interpretations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Dunlap, Eloise, Bruce Johnson, and Ali Manwar. 1994. "A Successful Female Crack Dealer: Case Study of a Deviant Career." Deviant Behaviour 15: 1-25. Emerson, Robert, Rachel Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 20 II Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferrell, Jeff. 2006. Empire ofScrounge: Inside the Urban Underground. New York: New York University Press. Fielding, Nigel. 1981. The National Front. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fielding, Nigel. 2005. "The Resurgence, Legitimation and Institutionalization of Qualitative Methods." Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung (Qualitative Social Research Forum) 6(2): Art. 32, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:01l4-fqs0502324. (accessed January 19,2014). Geertz, Clifford. 1973. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture." Pp. 3-30 in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Goffman, Erving. 1968. Asylums. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gouldner, Alvin Ward. 1975. For Sociology. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Hagedorn, John. 1988. People and Folks: Gangs, Crime and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City. Chicago: Lake View. Hall, Stuart. 2012. Theorising Crime and Deviance. London: Sage. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson. Hart, Angie. 1998. Buying and Selling Power. Colorado: Westview Press. Hindess, Barry. 1973. The Use ofOfficial Statistics in Sociology: A Critique ofPositivism and Ethnomethodology. London: MacMillan. Hobbs, Dick. 1988. Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, Detectives and the Working Class in the East End ofLondon, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobbs, Dick. 1995. Bad Business: Professional Criminals in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hobbs, Dick. 2001. "Deviance and Ethnography." Pp. 204-219 in Paul A. Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland. (eds.), The Sage Handbook ofEthnography. London: Sage. Hobbs, Dick. 2012. "It Was Never About the Money: Market Society, Organised Crime and UK Criminology." In Steve Hall and Simon Winlow (eds.), New Directions in Criminological Theory. London, Routledge. Hobbs, Dick. 2013. Lush Life: Constructing Organised Crime in the UK. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbs, Dick, Philip Hadfield, Stuart Lister, and Simon Winlow. 2003. Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night-Time Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphreys, Laud. 1975. Tea-Room Trade: impersonal Sex in Public Places. Chicago: Aldine. Jacobs, Bruce A. 1999. Dealing Crack: The Social World ofStreetcorner Selling. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Jacobs, Bruce A. 2000. Robbing Drug Dealers: Violence Beyond the Law. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Jacobs, Bruce, Volkan Topalli, and Richard Wright. 2003. "Carjacking, Street Life, and Offender Motivation." The British Journal of Criminology 43: 673-688. Katz, Jack. 1988. "A Theory of Qualitative Methodology: The Social System of Analytic Fieldwork." Pp. 127-148 in Robert Emerson (ed.), Contemporary Field Research. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Katz, Jack, and C. Jackson-Jacobs. 2004. "The Criminologists' Gang." Pp. 91-124 in Colin Sumner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Criminology. Oxford: Blackwell. Kitsuse, John 1., and Aaron V. Cicourel. 1963. "ANote on the Uses of Official Statistics." Social Problems 11: 131-139. Klockars, Carl B. 1975. The Professional Fence. London: Tavistock. Liazos, Alexander. 1972. 'The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts and Perverts." Social Problems 20: 103-20. Lofland, John. 1995. "Analytic Ethnography." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24 (1): 30-67. Maruna, Shadd. 2008. "Review Symposium: Merton with Energy, Katz with Structure, Jock Young with Data." Theoretical Criminology 12: 534. Matza, David. 1969. Becoming Deviant. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Mayhew, Henry. 1980. The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor, vols. 1-6. London: Cali ban Books. McKinney, John C. 1966. Constructive Typology and Social Theory. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Miller, Eleanor M. 1986. Street Woman. Philadelphia: Temple. Miller, Jody. 1998. "Up It Up: Gender and the Accomplishment of Street Robbery." Criminology 36(1): 37-66. Miller, Jody. 2001. One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs and Gender. New York: Oxford. Monaghan, Lee. F. 2002. "Hard Men, Shop Boys and Others: Embodying Competence in a Masculinist Occupation." The Sociological Review 50 (3): 334-55. Moore, Joan W. 1978. Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios ofLos Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Morris. Terence. 1957. The Criminal Area. London: RKP. Newman, Katherine S. 1999. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the inner City. New York: Knopf Newman, Katherine S. 2002. "No Shame: The View from the Left Bank." American Journal of Sociology 107(6): 1577-99. O'Brien, Kate, Dick Hobbs, and Louise Westmarland. 2008. "Negotiating Violence and Gender: Security and the Night Time Economy in the UK." Pp. 161-176 in

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Sophie Gendrot and Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Violence in Europe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Springer. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parker, Howard J. 1974. Viewfrom the Boys: A Sociology of Down-Town Adolescents. Newton Abbott: David and Charles. Patrick, J. 1973. A Glasgow Gang Observed. London: Eyre Methuen. Platt, Jennifer. 1995. "Research Methods and the Second Chicago School." Pp. 82-107 in Gary Alan Fine (ed.), A Second Chicago School? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polsky, Ned. 1971. Hustlers, Beats and Others. Harmondsworth: Pelican (1 st ed. 1967). Quinney, Richard. 1975. Criminology. New York: Little, Brown. Robins, David, and Philip Cohen. 1978. Knuckle Sandwich: Growing Up in the WorkingClass City. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rock, Paul. 1973. Making People Pay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rock, Paul. 2005. "Chronocentrism and British Criminology." British Journal ofSociology 56(3): 473-791. Roy, Donald F. 1959. "Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction." Human Organization 18(04): 158-168. Sanchez-J ankowski, Martin. 1991. Islands in the Street: Gangs inAmerican Urban Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sanders, Teela. 2005. Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullhompton: Willan. Shaw, Clifford, and Henry McKay. 1942. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Short, James F., Jr. 1963 "Introduction to the Abridged Edition," pp. xv-l iii in Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shover, Neal. 1996. Great Pretenders, Colorado: Westview Press. Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Wadsworth Group/ Thomas Learning. Sumner, Colin. 1994. The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Suttles, Gerald D. 1968. The Social Order ofthe Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Avril. 1993. Women Drug Users: An Ethnography of a Female Injecting Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, Carl S. 1990. Dangerous Society. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, 1973. The New Criminology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Taylor, lan, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, eds. 1975. Critical Criminology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Taylor, Laurie. "The Other Side ofthe Street: Laurie Taylor interviews Stan Cohen." New Humanist 119.4 (July 2004) Thomas, Jim. 1993. Doing Critical Ethnography. Beverley Hills: Sage. Thrasher, Frederic Milton. 1963. The Gang: A Studyofl,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1 sl ed. 1927). Topalli, Volkan, Richard Wright, and Robert Fornango. 2002. "Drug Dealers, Robbery, and Retaliation: Vulnerability, Deterrence, and the Contagion of Violence." The British Journal of Criminology 42: 337-351. Turk, Austin T. 1969. Criminality and the Legal Order. Chicago: Rand McNally. Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, John. 1991. "Playing Back the Tape." Pp. 31-42 in William B. Shaffir and RobertA. Stebbins (eds.), Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

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2 Kites 1 from Drug Research Rehab Michael Agar

InAugust 1968 a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in anthropology from Berkeley packed his new VW Beetle with an ancient writing machine called a "typewriter" and drove to Lexington, Kentucky. He was one of the lucky few during the Vietnam era who had been offered a commission in the US Public Health Service. His orders anointed him the equivalent of a first lieutenant and assigned him to a new social science research unit at the National Institute of Mental Health Clinical Research Center, locally known as "Narco," a federal center founded in 1935 for the treatment of narcotics addicts. Though he had smoked marijuana, the student had no idea what heroin addiction was about. In fact, he had no idea what an anthropologist was supposed to do working in the United States, never mind in the strange mix of treatment center, prison, and fraternity/sorority house he found when he arrived in Lexington. His senior thesis was based on ethnography in a remote South Indian village, and at Berkeley he had worked with South Asian specialists in preparation for a return trip. That was real anthropology. He assumed that he would spend two years at Lexington as a research assistant and help crunch numbers for a sociologist or psychologist, something that he could handle as a recent graduate of the National Science Foundation's summer seminar in "mathematical anthropology," a phrase that-so went the seminar joke-meant that you numbered your pages. No such thing. To his surprise and delight, Jack O'Donnell, the boss, a sociologist the equivalent of a colonel in rank, told him to go off and do anthropology, whatever that was, and they would evaluate things after three months. He later told him that he'd always wondered what an anthropologist would do if you had one around and that the student offered a cheap experiment to find out. The experiment continued for decades, on and off. I was that student, and now, as of20 13, I still am, older and not much wiser. The editors ofthis special issue

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asked me to write a personal essay with the role of qualitative social research in the foreground. I did that to some extent in a book called Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs, my farewell to the field (Agar 2006), though that was more about research in the context of the disastrous policy called the "War on Drugs." In this essay, I'll stay focused on research, on the story of a marginal social research epistemology in a sea of positivism and the policy consequences of neglecting the kind of information that it could and did provide. As soon as I arrived, went through orientation, and received my commissioned officer's manual, I wandered around the institution and talked with addicts. Early rumors were that I was undercover with Students for a Democratic Society (younger readers will have to look on the Internet) or a "Fed" posing as a researcher. When driving to Lexington, I'd had no preconceptions about addicts or addict research. I didn't know enough to have any. But I was learning about being a heroin addict from heroin addicts, like an ethnographer would naturally do. I spent time shooting the breeze in "the unit" where they lived and in the dining hall and the gym. I even checked into the hospital for a couple of weeks to see what life in "the joint" was like. After a while I dived into the professional library at the hospital. There were a lot of books and journal articles about addiction, but not as many as there soon would be, what with President Nixon's declaration of a war on drugs looming on the horizon. As I read through the literature, though, I was surprised at my reaction. From South India days I was familiar with the concept of "culture shock." I'd experienced it myselfin the village. This new assignment should have been easy by comparison. After all, Lexington was in the same country as Berkeley, sort of. Most everyone spoke English. What was the problem? Instead of culture shock, I thought of what I was going through as "library shock." Once I started reading about addicts as behavioral/social scientists and clinicians described and explained them, it got confusing. The two versions of "addict"-the one I was hearing from them and the one I was reading about them-had very little to do with each other. That was the library shock.

Library Shock Was the Tip of a Two-Century-Old Iceberg I had led a sheltered life in anthropology departments as an undergraduate and then a first-year grad. The Lexington library dunked me into a two-hundred-yearold argument about what a human/social science should be, an argument I hadn't really heard much about in my anthro-cocoon. That argument is summarized in The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research, which I shamelessly recommend (Agar 2013). In the nineteenth century, as August Comte and John Stuart Mill laid the foundations for a human social science, not everyone agreed they were doing it right, especially in Austria and Germany. The heart of the Teutonic criticism was both simple and profound. The phenomenon of the new human/social sciences-humans

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in society-had characteristics that the phenomena of the natural sciences had never taken into account, logically enough, because their phenomena didn't have those characteristics. That was bad enough. But in addition to that major problem, the scientist himself or herself was also an example of the phenomenon of the science, setting up all the twists and turns of self-reference that were to come in the twentieth century. Human social science was indeed a science, argued the Germans and Austrians, but it had to be different in many important ways compared with the experimental laboratory tradition of physics and chemistry. Enlightenment science, which won the argument and guided most of what I read in the Lexington library, required experimental simplification and scientist control to meet the "gold standard" set by John Stuart Mill. But according to the critics, a "science" of humans in their social worlds is exactly what that kind of science was not, because it didn't engage the phenomena-real people leading real lives-and it didn't handle the fact that the science applied as much to the observer as it did to the observed. The model of human/social science that John Stuart Mill built on the natural science tradition did not deal with the contexts and meanings and practices of subjects, the world of their lived experience as it evolved over time. It didn't bother to learn their intentionality from their perspective-their beliefs, emotions, desires, and purposes-without which accurate description and explanation weren't possible. It didn't recognize that the scientists themselves were subjects, dominating the encounter by defining everything in terms of their own intentionality and lived experience. Human subjects, it turned out, were not gas molecules behaving according to laws, and scientists weren't passive recorders of data on the observable behavior of non-sentient objects. The human/social science of the German speakers was an encounter between subjects, "intersubjective," neither objective nor subjective in any simple way. No matter. At that critical nineteenth-century fork in the road, mainstream human/social science was declared to be just another example of Enlightenment science. The more it looked like a laboratory experiment, the better. "Science" meant Galileo and Newton. Who could argue with success? The "literature" about addicts (the way most of it was written, I couldn't figure out why they called it that) reported tests of what the scientists already thought they knew-in this case, that addicts were social-psychological failures. They tested a small number of variables-things they thought might be possible examples of that failure. Subjects were brought into a world simplified, designed, and controlled by a scientist. The problem was, they didn't know much about addicts before the research started, and they did the science on their own terms without knowing what, if any, sense it made to their subjects. The results, looking back from 2013? A lot of books and articles that, for the most part, didn't help much to understand or solve the "drug problem." What was required here, as one ofthe German critics, Wilhelm Dilthey, had written, was a different kind of science. But with the force of history behind it,

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the human/social science that came down to us was based on the experimental laboratory of natural science. Any science requires evidence organized according to some logic in an argument that can be challenged. No one disagreed with that, including the Austrian and German critics. But the version of human/social science that dominated denied the fact that the starting and ending point had to be the world of humans in society, not an event constructed and controlled by a scientist. It denied that the "objects" of the science were-like the scientists"subjects" with beliefs, values, feelings, and goals, not to mention the social influences they exerted on each other. The subjects brought to the moment a history and lived experiences. Not only was the scientist unaware of that (or at best only aware superficially), scientific control, under the epistemological flag of "objectivity," allowed him or her to impose a framework that probably distorted those worlds. And the scientists themselves were exempt from the influences that they claimed to study. They worked under the delusion that, being "objective," they had no influence over research process and research results. My acute library shock had a pedigree that I was unaware of. Much of what I heard from addicts in Lexington wasn't in the published research I was reading, because there was no way it could have appeared. There were a couple of exceptions, like a book about addiction by Alfred Lindesmith (Linde smith 1947), someone who had obviously listened to some addicts talking about their lives in their own terms and learned from what they said. [ found an odd piece by a former jazz musician named Howard Becker that described how you had to learn to get high from smoking marijuana (Becker [953). And there were a few autobiographies around that offered some compelling insights into real addict worlds (Brown 1965). The few examples to the contrary notwithstanding, most addiction research described a physiological problem with negative psychosocial causes, and those causes had to do with explaining what both science and popular discourse viewed as an "escape" from the more desirable "normal" world in which we ordinary, non-addicted mortals lived. The main question the behavioral/social scientists wanted to answer was, what makes those dope fiends 2 want to escape? [t had to be an escape, since "getting high" could never be a positive thing in the vocabulary ofthe researchers, the clinicians, and-most importantly of all-the politicians ofthe times. Unless, of course, they were drinking.

Dope Fiends Were More than the Dope Dope fiends "escaped from reality" with heroin-lexington's specialty-until they had used it often enough and long enough to become addicted. They did it either because they were psychologically disturbed or socially deprived. Those were the main kinds of variables that the researchers tested. [ remember [ kept thinking of the line in West Side Story when one of the gang members imitates a psychiatrist, saying, "Juvenile delinquency is a social disease." True enough, most Lexington "patients"-they were "sick," so that's

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what they were usually called by the clinicians-came from backgrounds of poverty. Addicts with money seldom showed up at Lexington. And most addicts whose stories I heard didn't grow up in what I would then have called "Leave It to Beaver families," either. But then again, it's a pretty good guess that most people who grew up poor in less-than-perfect families never became heroin addicts. Even by traditional Enlightenment standards, this was already bad science. If most people similar to addicts were not addicts, then how do you explain that? John Stuart Mill 101: You can't explain addicts only by studying those who are addicted. From day one, listening to dope fiends, I knew there was more to them than that. How to put what I was learning into words? Shortly after I arrived, I got some help. I discovered their folklore (Agar 197 I). As usual in the kind of humanI social science that the Germans and Austrians argued for, most of what counts in the research is only learned by the researcher after the research is well under way. Some ofthe folklore I discovered (an example in a moment) did reflect the social problems and physical dependency that the literature was obsessed with. There was some truth to it. But there was also another side to the story. Here's how the widely known "Honky Tonk Bud" started out: Honky Tonk Bud, the hip cat stud, stood diggin' a game of pool Though his bags were draggin' Bud wasn't braggin' He knew he was real cool. He was choked up tight with a white-on-white Had on a cocoa front that was down Sported a hand-painted tie that hung down to his fly And had on a gold dust crown. This is not the image of a social failure with psychological problems. It is an introduction to a long rhyming story, a "toast" they called it, that described what addicts then called a "righteous dope fiend," a phrase that I later learned had been used as the title of an article by Alan Sutter in 1966. It wasn't in the Lexington library. Then, not too long after I found out about "Honky Tonk Bud," an article appeared in a mainstream drug journal called "Taking Care of Business: The Heroin User's Life in the Street," the lead author an anthropologist named Ed Preble (Preble and Casey 1969). Ed would later become a hero and mentor. You can see from the title that this, like Honky Tonk Bud, is not the image of a dope fiend with a "social disease" nodding off and drooling and escaping from a middle/upper-middle-class world. There were also toasts describing a downside to heroin addiction. The image of social-psychological down-and-out in the literature wasn't all wrong; it was just, at best, partial, the part that the non-addicted world had decided must be the entire story. For example, another toast that Lexington addicts knew about was called "King Heroin," later recorded as a song in 1972 by James Brown.

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It described how a heroin habit forced a person out of socially desirable mainstream roles. Heroin made a "schoolboy neglect his books" and a "world famous beauty neglect her looks." And one day I asked a Lexington patient/musician named Rick to sing Lou Reed's song "Heroin," a song that expresses both sides of the story at the same time. It starts like this:

I don't know just where I'm going But I'm goin' to try for the kingdom if! can 'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man When I put a spike into my vein Then I tell you things aren't quite the same

The other addicts who were listening? They went into physical symptoms of early withdrawal, even though they'd been at Lexington for a while and therefore were "detoxed," as they called it. Their bodies remembered the feeling of heroin. Physical addiction really happened, and once a person crossed that boundary, it was a powerful force of nature, even after acute withdrawal was over and done with. Even though there was a downside, I'd learned about other parts of who they were that didn't fit the image that filled the books and articles of the professional drug field in 1968. There was more to addiction than King Heroin, and the "more" had a lot to do with explaining how they became addicts and how they might change. Here is one example of why it mattered. Lexington "patients" went home and said it was like they'd never been in the institution, so different were the two worlds of the joint and the street. The truth ofthis showed up because so many ofthem came back quickly under the federal civil commitment program of the time. Well, "civil" commitment. I learned that it usually meant that you got busted by city or state cops and then they said, walk over to the federal building and commit yourself, and we'll nol pros your case and avoid a lot ofpaperwork. Lexington dealt with the "dope" part of "dope fiend" by assuming that it was caused by King Heroin-type variables, though this doubled down on the failure theme. Failure caused the addiction, and then the addiction caused the failure, a feedback loop that the usual linear equations didn't handle. But then Honky Tonk Bud the righteous dope fiend went home to take care of business, clean and in good health, thinking that that first fix would feel really, really good. Lexington couldn't deal with Honky Tonk Bud, because, according to Lexington, Honky Tonk Bud didn't exist. Here's an example of how this difference came to life in therapy. Dope-fiend life in the streets was not conducted in a stable upper-middle-class environment with polite people who said "excuse me" a lot. Professional staff, who had grown up in and lived in just that kind of environment, heard talk of caution, mistrust, betrayal, and suspicious motives. The clinically oriented thought in terms of

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"paranoid tendencies." Dope fiends regarded the same "pathology" as something else. They called it "street smart." "Addict professional discourse," to take Foucault to places he would know all too well, assumed heroin addiction was only about social-psychological failure, both cause and consequence. The researchers put addict subjects in simplified situations ofthe scientists' design. Only King Heroin questions were asked, and only King Heroin answers were possible. And it should be said again, there is truth to that image of addiction from a dope fiend's point of view as well. But then there was also truth to Honky Tonk Bud. Questions about that image were beyond what the research imagination would permit, and the required top-down control of Enlightenment science guaranteed that they would never come up. The research results suited the chemical scapegoating role that "drugs" played in American ideology of the time. Nixon's war on drugs was motivated politically by the use of "drugs" to explain college protests, failure in Vietnam, and rising crime rates in the cities. Things are screwed up? It's the dope. Animals, said Levi-Strauss writing of totemism, are good to think with (Levi-Strauss 1968). Drugs, I used to tell colleagues in the drug field, are good to blame with. At Lexington in the late 1960s, the epistemology I had learned in anthropology, the one featured in this special issue, was viewed as somewhere between pseudoscience and "mere journalism" by colleagues at the hospital. It was neither of those. Like any science, it made a case based on evidence, logic, and falsification. The research I read in the Lexington library, in contrast, built walls of laboratory control around the possible ways a dope fiend could be described and explained by "science" even before a project started. Listening and learning about a Lexington "patient's" own intentionality and lived experience showed how the results of most behavioral/social science of the time-results that had been shaped before the research started-were far from a full description and explanation of heroin addicts. Instead, the results aimed directly at the part of being an addict that served the politically useful portrait of dope fiends that US drug policy needed to justify the "war" to come. My library shock was born of the different results produced by two nineteenthcentury human/social science epistemologies applied to the same people, heroin addicts in the urban United States. Addicts were more complicated than we wanted to believe they were. Their sense of who they were and their relationship to heroin shifted and changed, with context and over time. In Lexington, with treatment staff, they were usually King Heroin, either because they felt that way in that context or because they were gaming the system to get an early release date. In the unit where they lived with each other, Honky Tonk Bud made frequent appearances. On the streets, as I heard then and would later see in living color, they cycled between the images, depending on circumstances. But one thing was clear. Library shock was real. Honky Tonk Bud wasn't in the literature, hardly at all, not then. But he was alive and well in the conversations in the unit, in the gym, and in the dining hall, and most importantly for

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the issue of "relapse," in the streets when he or she went back home. Nothing in policy or treatment was dealing with that. During the two years at Lexington, it felt pretty lonely, talking about how dope fiends were about more than just the dope. My friend Dick Stephens kept me sane, and much later, in 1991, he put a more comprehensive image of addicts into a much bigger picture with his book The Street Addict Role (Stephens 1991). Cracks in the monolithic social-psychological failure image appeared before then, though, after I had left Lexington to return to grad school in 1970. David Musto, another two-year Commissioned Corps wonder, published a history, The American Disease, in 1973 (Musto 1987). The book described how dope fiends had changed, from middle-class women around the tum of the twentieth century, to white immigrant men living in cities in the 1920s, to blacks and Hispanics in the 1960s. Same drug, different historical conditions, different kinds of people got addicted. Then a psychiatrist, Lee Robbins, published an article with her colleagues in 1975 (Robins, Helzer, and Davis 1975). She interviewed Vietnam vets who'd become addicted in that country. It turned out that the ones who weren't addicted before they left by and large quit when they got home. Narcotics addiction looks different now than it did in the late 1960s, just like it looked different in the 1960s compared to when it took shape in the 1920s. And thanks to the kinds of human/social scientists writing in this special issue, the alternative science is now more present than it was then. Nevertheless, I still encounter, most ofthe time in work I've done over the last decade, the old-time religion, that human/social science is the test of prior hypotheses rather than the learning of new ones, and that the more the test looks like a laboratory experiment, the more credible it is.

Methadone Is More than a Medication Here's one more example of the epistemology difference from the old days. After I spent a year back in graduate school and a couple of years as an assistant professor, the state ofNew York decided, as Lexington had earlier, that it needed a center for behavioral and social science as part of its "war on drugs," known in the Big Apple as the Rockefeller Laws. Since the total number of drug experts at the time could dance on the head of a pin with room left over to park a couple of cars, I was offered a job. Having learned that academic politics made drug policy look positively rational, I took a position as research scientist and moved to the Upper West Side in 1973. The drug war had escalated,just like Vietnam had. I stepped back into drugworld, a little surprised at my own return but comfortable in my discovery that I was a natural New Yorker: assuming the worst, not being surprised when that assumption turned out to be optimistic, and then turning the disparity into dark humor. Methadone was the news of the day when I arrived in 1973. I've written about this elsewhere and won't repeat it all here (Agar 1977). At the time, it was the new magic tool to weed out the "drug problem" and toss it into the Hudson.

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One of the founders of this approach to heroin treatment, Elizabeth Nyswander, became a personal hero. She'd worked in Lexington, concluded that whatever they were doing, it wasn't working worth a damn, and figured the best way to treat dope fiends was with dope. I heard stories in New York of how she actually answered addict telephone calls personally (Hentoff 1968). Methadone, ironically enough, was a Nazi invention, something that I'd heard referred to as "dolophine" by addicts in Lexington, street name "dollies." The "doloph" part was named after-guess who?-Adolph. Methadone was a synthetic narcotic, same family as heroin, but with a wave of the magical medical wand, it became a "medication." It fit into Nixon's war on drugs. The plan was, dry up the importation of heroin, but make treatment more available so that addicts would be forced into it when they couldn't find heroin in the streets. Nyswander, and her colleague Vince Dole, argued that addiction was a physiological imbalance and that narcotics were simply necessary for some people to even things out and make the "patient"-the two of them were still, in the end, doctors-normal. Like insulin for diabetics, that kind of thing. So one fine day, as I was working my way into the streets via neighborhoodbased methadone clinics, I was chatting with an "outpatient" who had just picked up his "medication." A friend of his, also an addict, came by, and the three of us engaged in drug-based pleasantries, like discussing what particular psychoactive item was hot that week in the Union Square market. The friend then excused himself, saying that he had to leave because he had to go to the clinic to "cop." In the kind of human/social research that the German critics of John Stuart Mill articulated, when something like this happens, it is not "error variance." It is a surprise that hits one on the head with a signal of a different point of view, a new angle on things that needs to be explored. I called such moments "rich points" in earlier writings about ethnography. "Cop," needless to say, is not the term that physicians use when they write a prescription. It is the word that dope fiends use when they go to their dealer to buy. To "cop" methadone meant to go to your dealer-that is, the clinic-and get your stuff. The language shift signaled a context shift, a point-of-view change, at least for that person. The "patient" had placed what the straight world thought of as "medication" into the street category of "dope." Thinking back on the previous section of this article, you could think of it, Hollywood screenplay style, as Honky Tonk Bud meets methadone. I started a program of research, more than I can fully describe here, to show how "meth" (it then meant "methadone," not "methamphetamine" like it does today) became a street narcotic, how "meth clinics" sprouted all over the metropolitan area, where the only requirement for admission was a believable story. There was also good news, even though it was not what the programs intended. The large number of small dealers who sold a part of their clinic dose, known in the medical literature as "noncompliant patients," kept the street price low. And, for the first time in decades, a narcotic was offered as part of addiction treatment.

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It meant that the street/treatment boundary was made easier to cross than it ever had been. Methadone did, and does, help a lot of people, in more ways than the clinics imagined at the time. [t helped many a dope fiend in a King Heroin state of mind to buy some time to leave "the life." The chiefs at the state office where I worked were not happy with this research. Showing how meth had turned into a hot street commodity was not on the political agenda. In a moment of biographical irony some twenty-five years later, I was asked to help evaluate a brand-new drug called Buprenorphine. It was meant to fulfill all the tarnished hopes and dreams of the methadone advocates, a new medication for narcotics addicts that the medical profession could control. The full story is too long to add to this already overburdened article. It is enough to say that three colleagues and [ wrote an article using a concept we called "field trials," a play on the notion of "clinical trials" (Agar, Bourgois, French, and Murdoch 2001). We looked at data from the lab and from other countries and concluded that Buprenorphine, too, is a narcotic, and it would probably have a future in the streets. Once again, as with the earlier methadone work, the funders suggested maybe this wasn't such a good thing to publish, only this time they were a little more insistent. I waited a year, out of respect for a dead policy, and then published it anyway. As it turned out, the scenario we imagined came to pass. Buprenorphine, under its various names such as Suboxone, found its way into the streets and flourished. You just can't create a narcotic substitute and expect it not to substitute for a narcotic in the street as well as in the clinic. And the fact that it does substitute in the street is by and large a good thing, even if it does look like a bunch of "noncompliant patients." If you're getting the feeling that annoying the ideological command post in the war on drugs was a sign you were doing something right, you're getting the feeling of what it was like to work in the early days of the war on drugs. And if you're getting the idea that one of the reasons the Enlightenment view of behavioral/social research was favored was because it allowed for preservation of those ideological premises before the research started, you have (re)discovered the foundational arguments of the Frankfurt School, another group of Germans with a critique of science as preserving ideology through the epistemology of top-down, scientist-controlled simplification (McCarthy 1978). Methadone and, later, Buprenorphine were more, much more, than just "medications." No one considered that possibility when they were first proposed by the drug policy wonks and medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies. No one wondered what they might look like from different points of view, like the point of view of someone who was addicted to narcotics. As a matter offact, in the early 2000s, dope fiends still sold the "medications" in the streets, in Baltimore where I was working at the time. Treatment slots weren't available, or an addict wanted to clean up without marching to the demands of a program bureaucracy.

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And of course no one ever entertained the notion that methadone was actually a convoluted way of legalizing and regulating narcotics. Except maybe the cops, who knew what was going on in the streets. Dope-fiend life requires dealing with an illegal market. Make it easier and cheaper to get the dope outside those traditional market controls, and the effects will be positive in the short term, possibly leading to an easier exit from dependency in the longer term. But that's not because a new "medicine" has arrived; it's because the new narcotic profoundly impacts the underground market in ways that would make Milton Friedman proud. He's not exactly my favorite economist, but he did in fact say that most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. I don't favor simple legalization-another topic beyond the scope of this article-but I think that, though Friedman's advice messed up Latin America, he was right about narcotics. An Epidemic Is More than a Disease

There are many more stories to tell. At this point, the editors, and probably the readers, are sorry they started in on this shaggy drug story. I want to add one more, though, the last study I did as a drug researcher. This study was different because it moved up in scale from ethnography of a kind of person/group to a higher level to understand historical dynamics that, like a riptide, pulled in large numbers of different kinds of people at different points in time in a similar way. In the early 1980s I was-with some pride-politely ejected from a committee of the National Research Council, a story told in Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs. In a Lucy-Desi comedy hour episode in 1957, Lucy told guest star Tallulah Bankhead, "I've been thrown out of better places than this!" Tallulah replied, "You have never been in better places than this." But I'm telling you, it was Foucault in living color, drug-war ideology gripping the committee in its tight fist and working very hard to strangle it if it started to say the wrong thing. I left the field for a decade or so in the 1980s. But then, one day in the early 1990s, I did some work for a Hopkins public health program in Baltimore run by Carl Latkin that made sense to me (Latkin, Sherman, and Knowlton 2003). I went back into the streets and felt angry and depressed that, after years of the war on drugs, and I don't know how many billions of dollars, things were even worse than they'd been in the 1970s. The crack cocaine scene looked more destructive than anything I'd seen before. I kept asking myself, "Why does this keep happening?" Why hadn't illegal drug epidemiology answered its core question-Why these people, in this place, at this time? This question wasn't only about learning the lived experience of heroin addicts. It was, why do narcotics epidemics happen at all? But the research used the same epistemology of the alternative human/social science as the earlier work. No hypothesis, just a researcher in learning mode, looking for a pattern rather than a variable, using whatever information he could find, changing the research at time T depending on what was learned at time

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T - 1, letting the world speak to him on its own tenns rather than hammering it into the closest imitation ofa laboratory he could make up. And, in the end, still aiming for an argument based on evidence and logic that could be challenged, just like any science would. What was an "epidemic" anyway? It was and is a public health word inherited from medicine, a term that came into the drug field along with its dominant medical language, the same language that explains earlier sections of this essay on the "dope" and the dope fiend "patient" and on methadone as "medication." Epidemiology has its roots in infectious disease, as in the classic SIR model that classified populations into changing ratios of "Susceptible," "Infected," and "Recovered." With drugs, this translated into looking at "peer groups" as representing the kind of contact that could "infect" other members, or looking at dealers as "vectors," or speaking in terms of "incidence" (rate of new users/ addicts per some time interval) and "point prevalence" (proportion of users/ addicts at some point in time). There are other variations on both these terms. One of my favorites was a concept from Dutch colleagues at a conference: "lastnight prevalence," as in, "Did you get stoned last night?" A drug epidemic obviously isn't a disease like whooping cough. "Epidemic" is just the name for a mathematical curve that you can find in lots of other places, like the takeoff of a consumer product, or a sudden increase of any kind. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell grabbed the ordinary English-language expression "tipping point" and got rich off the curve (Gladwell 2000). Gabriel Tarde used it in his nineteenth-century sociology, and later, Rogers made it a basis of his theory of diffusion of innovation (Rogers 1995). In drugworld, "epidemic" just meant that there was a little bit of drug use rumbling along overtime, and then it seemed like, out of nowhere, all ofa sudden, a lot of people were using it. "Epidemic" meant an illegal drug tipping point, a curve, for example, that resembled the takeoff of the iPad. Or, another example: when I went off to India to do my traditional anthropology in 1965, everyone in college was guzzling beer. When I came back in 1966, one academic year later, many students were smoking marijuana instead. It certainly made the conversations more interesting. Epidemic, tipping point, "logistic growth curve" if you want some mathematical sex appeal. For drug epidemics, no one had been able to predict them very well. Everyone was surprised when they happened. Everyone had their favorite variable to explain them, but a little inductive logic showed that their offerings on the altar of science were neither necessary nor sufficient. I worked on this project for years, until 2005, thanks to a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, together with colleagues like Heather Reisinger and James Peterson and Alejandra Colom. We wrote a lot, and there are too many stories to tell, though the book I keep plugging in this article, Dope Double Agent, will get you going if you'd like to see more. The bottom line was, illegal drug epidemics are really a story best told as economic history, a history that unfolds

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in ways better formalized by the then-new sciences of chaos and complexity than by any of the old linear models. An illegal drug epidemic was poorly served by a metaphor of one person catching a disease from another. Epidemics had to do with an organizational crisis that changed drug production, with an international migration stream that provided couriers, and with a segment of a population who were rapidly and unexpectedly slammed by a historical change of either rapid decline or undelivered promises. The different shapes narcotic epidemics had taken in American history had already been described in Musto's history, cited earlier in this article. In fact, we built an agent-based computer model of a heroin epidemic that was going on even as we did the historical research, based on the lived experience and intentionality of the people who drove the epidemic curve as it took off. That work showed that a business model better served to show how epidemics worked than did a disease-based metaphor. Why did this matter? One article we wrote described the crack epidemic using the model we developed (Agar 2003). The article was used, along with a lot of other material, to change the discriminatory crack laws that required longer sentences for crack arrests than they did for powder cocaine, there being a racial correlation there. That article, written about an epidemic that occurred when I wasn't paying much attention to the drug field, was the most useful thing I ever did. The model made the disparity visible. I guess it just took a few decades to learn how to get it right. The research showed other interesting things. Another example: the epidemic curve actually flattened out before public policy reacted to it. Why? Because feedback mechanisms that we learned about worked in the world of people who were experimenting with the "new" drug to brake the curve before anyone thought to start new policies and programs. This led us to suggest all kinds of possibilities for intervention. For example, we did some drug education about heroin during the project and talked about how groups could be led into discussions that amplified the negative feedback in their small group, something that occurred naturally in more diffuse ways in their social worlds. But then this strategy meant the users would need to talk about the positive effects of experimenting as well. For early use of heroin, many people report exceptionally positive experiences. No way could we do that in the US drug field. Then we came up with a model for early intervention, a "monitoring" system based on information from front-line people in drug treatment and counseling together with a simple computer model to track developments and make informed decisions about where to invest resources and gain further knowledge about what a potential epidemic curve was doing. We asked around, but the research people said it was too applied and the applied people said it was too research-like. The exceptions were those front-line people who helped us conceptualize the system. They loved the idea.

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At that point, in 2005, the grant ran out and so did the almost forty-year run of that anthropology grad student who landed at Lexington in 1968. Since then, he has moved on and continues to work on new hopeless issues, like water in the Southwest. But he hopes that this article serves the purpose of the editors who invited him to write it, namely to open up human/social science so that it can expand beyond the unrealistic nineteenth-century straitjacket that it created for itself and attend to its phenomenon: us, in our ordinary social world, doing whatever it is we do to make a life work. The epistemology for this alternative science is more intellectually interesting, the work is more exciting, and the results are more useful. Implementing its results in ideologically charged territory like the US drug field has always been a problem, because such fields then have to give up control over what they think they already knew and change as a result. But that's a topic for another day. Back to the Library

This article reproduces a very old argument in a recent and specific context. The fact that the old argument still requires a "special issue" rather than being a normal part of any human/social research journal is testimony to the hegemony of an epistemology with an important, but limited, range of application in our efforts to understand human social life. The conversation about different epistemologies is easier to have now than it was forty years ago-no question about that. But some ofthe core concepts still miss the heart of it all, in my view. "Qualitative" and "quantitative," the form that the conversation often takes, leads us astray because the only clear meaning of the terms is a kind of datanumerical and propositional-and both kinds of data are relevant to any human/ social science epistemology. The phrase "mixed methods," popular in recent times, seems vacuous to me. At one level, the message of using more than one source of information to explore a research question sounds too obvious to be anything more than a baby step forward. On the other hand, the phrase often translates-in academic and organizational projects I have worked on in the last decade-to "add in a focus group to support the real science." An advance will come when education incorporates a curriculum that shows how science in general, and human/social science in particular in this case, has a history of many varieties, that "science" means more than a laboratory experiment to test a prior hypothesis. Perhaps that education has already become part ofK-12, where it needs to begin. Still, though, in recent projects I have done in the so-called real world, people who invited me in because "the numbers" were neither identifying nor solving their organizational problem were fascinated with and skeptical of what I was doing. They had no idea that there was an alternative way of doing a human/social science that could produce a claim based on evidence and logic that could be challenged.

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In many ways, the situation is the fault of those of us who pursue the alternative epistemology. Sometimes it has been presented as "anti-science" rather than "different science." In my day in university, we only heard the nineteenth-century advocates of a human/social science as footnotes. We were sent off to take a statistics course in the psychology or sociology department with no context for what it was, when it might be useful, and why it didn't serve the epistemology as well as other forms of mathematics might. I hope this article is part of a final push to get past this two-century history of privileging only one epistemology as the way to do what we usually call behavioral/social science. I hope the day comes soon when any human/social science journal will contain articles of many types, based only on whether or not they contain well-crafted arguments that can be challenged, rather than based on the degree to which the research imitates an experiment in a natural science laboratory. It's just Science 101. When the phenomena of research are human social worlds, then the characteristics ofthe phenomena have to be part ofthe science. Human social worlds-the argument returns us to the nineteenth-century debatehave among their characteristics intentionality, lived experience, and biographies interacting with histories. And in this kind of science, the research itself is a human social world, because the researcher is also an example of the phenomenon. Absent those characteristics, human/social research will inadequately describe and, therefore, poorly explain who we are and why we do what we do. Sad to say, most mainstream behavioral/social science chose to leave out those critical characteristics in the rush to emulate the revolution in science brought about by Galileo, Newton, and what followed in the European Enlightenment. The science they created was and is fascinating and useful, but it lacks the epistemological horsepower to adequately handle human social phenomena. Let me close with a recent story to end on a positive note. Though I left the drug field in the mid-2000s, I was invited to attend a conference in EI Paso and Juarez in September 2009. Those two cities decided to team up and hold a conference "celebrating" forty years of failure of the war on drugs. They recruited all the old-timers they could find from research, law enforcement, policy, and treatment to come and say, over and over again, how the "war" didn't just miss the point; it caused more problems than it solved, and we needed new ways to think about drug issues. Media coverage was great, that being the main purpose. I received a compliment from the Economist blog Democracy in America, saying that my presentation had argued to "let the world be your laboratory." But reading it was the definition of mixed emotions. On the one hand, it was an honor to hear that summary after all these years. On the other, he still had to use "laboratory" as the only possible metaphor that science was in play. The conference, though, was a breath of fresh air. Age and experience saying we got it wrong, one voice after another, saying the world is telling us so. Let's listen and learn, and maybe a new generation of researchers can get it right next time.

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Notes 1. 2.

"Kite" back in the day meant a note sent from one inmate to another. Maybe it still does. I use "dope fiend" in this article in honor of all the addicts I've worked with who preferred street terms rather than jargon or euphemisms when talking with nonaddicted audiences.

References Agar, Michael. 1971. "Folklore of the Heroin Addict: Two Examples." The Journal of American Folklore 84 (332): 175-185. Agar, Michael. 1977. "Going Through the Changes: Methadone in New York City." Human Organization 36 (3): 291-295. Agar, Michael. 2003. "The Story of Crack." Addiction Research and Theory 11 (1): 2-30. Agar, Michael. 2006. Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs. Raleigh, NC: Lulu Books. Agar, Michael. 2013. The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research. St. Paul, MN: Mill St. Press. Agar, Michael, Philippe Bourgois, John French, and Owen Murdoch. 200 I. "Buprenorphine: Field Trials of a New Drug." Qualitative Health Research 11 (l): 69-84. Becker, Howard S. 1953. "Becoming a Marijuana User." American Journal ofSociology 59 (3): 235-242. Brown. Claude. 1965. Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: Macmillan. Democracy in America (an Economist blog). 2009. "The Folk Pathways of Prevention." Sept. 23. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/09/theJolk_ pathways_ot'-preventio. Accessed January 28,2013. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little, Brown. Hentoft~ Nat. 1968. A Doctor Among the Addicts. New York: Rand McNally. Latkin, Carl A., Susan Sherman, and Amy Knowlton. 2003 "HIV Prevention Among Drug Users: Outcome of a Network-Oriented Peer Outreach Intervention." Health Psychology 22 (4): 332. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindesmith, Alfred R. 1947. Opiate Addiction. University of Akron: Principia Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1978. The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Musto, David F. 1987. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Preble, Edward, and John J. Casey. 1969. 'Taking Care of Business: The Heroin User's Life on the Street." Substance Use & Misuse 4 (1): 1-24. Robins, Lee N., John E. Helzer, and Darlene H. Davis. 1975. "Narcotic Use in Southeast Asia and Afterward: An Interview Study of 898 Vietnam Returnees." Archives of General Psychiatry 32 (8): 955. Rogers, Everett M. 1995. Diffusion of Innovation. New York: Free Press. Stephens, Richard C. 1991. The Street Addict Role: A Theory ofHeroin Addiction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Sutter, Alan G. 1966. 'The World of the Righteous Dope Fiend." Issues in Criminology 2 (2): 177-222.

3 Qualitative Research as Theorizing Peter K. Manning

Introduction

Theory is not an easily described thing. It is contentious and various in its shifting shapes. The nature of theorizing and theory testing has been reshaped in the last thirty or forty years from an exploration of sensitizing questions drawn from a general framework, such as structural functionalism or symbolic interactionism, to some sort of analysis using statistical reasoning. This latter-day theorizing flows from the notion that one proceeds by utilizing previously defined putative concepts, operational definitions, and working rules for sampling and inference, and establishing significance. These statistically driven machinations use conventionalized understandings about how to address and measure important problems. That is, one begins with a quantitative data set, explores its limitations, and finds some patterns worthy of exploitation. This now established mode of statistical reasoning dominates the publications found in "top-level" journals in criminology and criminal justice. What passes now for theory in fact is not actually a set of testable propositions, or hypotheses, but an ensemble of concepts from which the operational definitions are inferred. But nevertheless, any translation of a set of concepts into a quantitative study requires making plausible connections between selected variables. Think of Sampson's tour de force, The Great American City (2013). Given a framework, how does any investigator begin to measure "disorganization"? How can an investigator measure social organization or collective efficacy? How are they related or interconnected? Questions about why and how those variables are chosen, measured, compared, and analyzed are answered in publications partially in ad hoc terms, and partially by inference, and partially by the reader's 51

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trust in the author's ability to construct the meaning of the associations that are established. The basis for this reasoning is statistical inference, not deep, on-the-ground experience ofliving and researching in such areas, of understanding their dynamics and dangers. Let us turn this critique around and ask how fieldwork can illustrate and refine a quantitative study, or reveal its flaws. It may develop new questions and relevant understandings. Let us imagine that a researcher wants to compare the homicide rates oftwo or more cities over time. In order to do this, this hypothetical researcher has to assume that the concept "homicide" is a stable, fixed, and consistent category that exists as a real, objective thing in the world independent of (1) the organizational classification system and its particular subcategories (e.g., a type of violent death); and (2) the processes by which a reported death is classified as a homicide, not a missing person, a suicide, an accident, or a sudden natural death. This is a false assumption. Understanding the "how" of classification comes as a result of fieldwork, and this in turn informs theory-in this case, organizational practices in context. Exploring these matters in some detail requires that one observe practices of classification and talk with those who do it routinely, checking these explanations or accounts and comparing and contrasting the revealed practices of classification in the two cities. Let us explore this further. Classifying a death as a homicide rests on the facts initially established by the attending officers. Was it drug-related? Were they domestic partners? Drug addicts? Was one death possibly a suicide? Was it a murder-suicide (one person kills the other and then kills himself or herselt)? Is the putative victim's body present or missing? Ifit is missing, the case may be called a missing person. It may take years to establish the cause of death, let alone the motive and cause. The death may not be established until the medical examiner declares death. The medical examiner's decisions are based on the context of death, and may be made by an elected coroner or an MD. The rules governing the determination of the cause of death vary by city and state (Douglas 1968). In Detroit, shoot-outs involving two drug dealers will be classified as a "drug robbery gone wrong." A murder-suicide is not considered two homicides. A death without a witness, a confession, or physical evidence may be merely the result of an assault or fight that "went wrong." The organization's agents, homicide detectives, and medical examiners determine how a given instance is classified: they create the social object "homicide." Note also that there is sufficient variation from year to year and that there is no auditing of the case fi les for adherence to standardization procedures in any large police department. These categorization processes are powerful in homicide, the most standardized of police definitions, and more powerful as one moves from reactive crimes (reported and investigated) to those that are proactive or created by police shaping the conditions for crime by their actions. In other words, ifthe processes, shared recognizable meanings, gestures and postures, and accounts or explanations by which the social object "homicide" is created are not investigated for validity, the resultant comparisons, qualitative

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or quantitative, are misleading. Studies of comparisons over time, across organizations, and within organizational units that overlook these processes are in a weak position when arguing for any established pattern of homicide and its correlates. Generalizing from this example, it is possible to argue that social objects, such as a homicide, are created through interaction, shared meanings, and practical actions that can be studied in detail by fieldwork. Dramaturgy, a framework that requires studying close at hand the process of creation of social objects that are shared and made meaningful, is useful for theorizing. I argue that there are two matters of interest with regard to how qualitative work can contribute to criminological theory and theorizing. The first is how to create a study that explicates the ways in which one does fieldwork with a theoretical edge or question. The second is the matter of refining theory as a result offieldwork. This chapter discusses fieldwork based on these ideas, applies it analytically to police work with examples, and discusses the contributions of such a framework to theorizing.

Policing and Dramaturgy as a Framework Consider a framework within which fieldwork in policing can be cast. Dramaturgy is a framework within which action is seen, an abstraction, that captures sufficiently what organizations and other actors do and that explains or tells a story about what people do together. [t is not an actor-oriented perspective and does not rely on actors' accounts for validity. [t is an abstract framework for interpreting shared, emergent collective action. [n the course of interactions, mutual recognition and teamwork are essential. One must present a performance in symbols, language, gestures, and postures and have it validated. This means in turn selective presentation, omitting some matters and highlighting others. Think of the police as an actor, a performer, or an "acting unit" (Blumer 1967). As a going concern, or institution, no different from any other social organization, it will put on its best face; conceal its failures; emphasize its successes; carry out ceremonies and rituals such as parades, funerals, and honoring of its own; and amplify and sustain positive memories, traditions, successes, and heroes. Action will be selectively presented to audiences to foster an impression and will be recast and recalled as such in oral traditions, memories, and observations. When talking about policing, one is including the infrastructure of collective action: how it comports itself and how these performances are validated, trusted, and remembered or not. The broad outlines of what [ mean by "policing" will anticipate the features of it that fieldwork can reveal. Let us begin with another generalization about organizational performances and then support the idea with further evidence. The generalization rests on the dramaturgical metaphor that the police act in ways that selectively emphasize some powers and functions and omit others. They thus show "crime" as their concern and focus and downplay the dirty work they do with drunks, the disorderly, the homeless, and the lost. They will supply the media with stories and pictures to enhance their role in crime control. Their stories will reflect this emphasis on

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crime even iftheir actions do not. This means "crime work" is overvalued in the work as a rewarded activity. The ways in which police are perceived, imagined, and talked about are important for their mandate. The police are a collective representation, something believed in and trusted variously at a distance, not frequently experienced. However, they are a real and recognized force in the media and stories and a dangerous and violent force in potential. Their power and violence are downplayed in their websites and social media presentations (Twitter, Facebook, et al.). They are now being surveilled and recorded by their own cameras and microphones and those of the citizenry and less able to conceal their faults and miscues. The police emphasize that they are a service to middle-class audiences and a protective and violent force to the underclass or those they consider the sources of crime. Policing has two faces, and the most public face is seen in parades, media scenes, and funerals, where their merits are on display and their flaws irrelevant. We can also see them as an ensemble of collocated symbols standing for the government, among other things. The police organization occupies physical places and has several technologies, personnel, a bureaucratic apparatus, and a material reality. The police dramatize their role as boundary makers, markers, and patrollers. They create and sustain boundaries, keeping some out and members in. The police are considered unusual, and they are, indeed. They can be considered a social actor with an image, a role, and attributed powers and functions. They are a sacred entity insofar as they are awesome, dangerous, mysterious, and connected to societal authority. Police are an acting unit toward which action is directed and to which responses can be registered. As a dramatic acting unit, they are a collective enterprise punctuated by risk, danger, honor, and anachronistic, personalistic management practices. The technology of policing is interpersonal communication-words and gestures and practices-and the product of policing is trust. Any instance of the workings of an acting unit offers a window into theory or to generalization based on concepts. They are naturally dramatic by uniform, weaponry, and powers. They have the aura of the sacred: the distant, powerful, and mysterious. The police role, mystified, made real, and idealized both by performance and the media, is performed primarily alone in the field, and it relies on compliance and the trust ofthe public. The value ofthis metaphor is that it forces us to see how the fundamentals we assume are relevant to everyday life-crime, disorder, violence, racial profiling, stop and frisk-are actually produced, named, and added up, and how they provide an account or a socially validated warrant for what has been done. The police cannot accomplish police work unless we validate them as social actors with power and authority. Now, the question is: How is the ethnographic study of policing a source of insights into theory that could not have been gathered by other means? This requires both gathering the material and synthesizing it. Although I have written about policing as an occupation (Manning 1968), there was not a large, vibrant literature in the early seventies on policing. [ spent several months in fieldwork

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in London and Manchester in 1973. When Police Work was published in 1977, it was one of the earliest scholarly analyses of policing; arguably, it was one of the first done in the UK (Banton 1964; Clark 1965; Laurie 1970; Walsh 1977). I did not consider the book a systematic ethnography. It was loosely comparative; had a historical chapter on the origins of policing, which challenged the conventional wisdom of the origins of the "thin blue line"; and was theoretically grounded. The book also challenged, as had my earlier chapter on the police mandate, the "crime-focus" assumption that was beginning to be dramatized as the police job. I discussed the common and essential practice oflying with examples from the fieldwork, as well as the essentially mundane nature of police skills as officers saw them: humor, patience, cleverness in negotiating out of tight spots, tolerance, and open-mindedness. They were aware oftheirperformative requirements. Much ofthe book was a reflection on the role of information theory as an insight into the problems of crime detection and clearance, and the lack of rational management in policing. These were analytic chapters based on inference rather than the fieldwork I had done. I did think that much of what passed for command and control was public front work, a convincing show, given the autonomy of the patrol officers and the craft work of detectives. The book was a qualitative study of the process by which police made sense of the job. Police Work was also an argument for how the organization made sense of its own actions and dealt with the contradictions that arise in any bureaucracy. It was not well understood, and Donald Black noted that he liked the book (1978) but was not sure that what was argued there was true! The question of how fieldwork contributed to the book and its theorizing was understood later, in part, as a result of work with John Van Maanen (1978, 1983). The dialogue between gathering sensible materials and developing a perspective continued. Thus, the question of the role offieldwork in general with police emerged. l

Fieldwork How does fieldwork with police fit into this dialogue between data gathering and theorizing? Fieldwork is an effort to observe, up close, the ways in which the observed actors make sense of the problematic. It can be done briefly, episodically, over long periods oftime, or over a lifetime. It generally involves periods of deep immersion and periods of withdrawal, usually to compose field notes, recover, and reflect before returning. This work means listening to what is said, watching what is done, and selectively exploring some aspects ofthe scenes you have viewed. It involves typically long periods of time in a setting with people in a specific role as a "participant observer," although some work is done after having been a participant. It draws on what is taken for granted or tacitly recognized cultural knowledge, beliefs, and values. These are usually practices people do together to accomplish things. It typically requires a deep understanding of what is done and why, and ofthe symbols and language people use to order their doings. The practice of fieldwork is not uniform; there are different styles of

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interacting, engagement with the people, and ethical standards employed. The fieldworker must be responsive to the unexpected, and these responses cannot be fully anticipated. [n the field, one is trying to sort out the information that is relevant to some picture of the complexity one observes, and there may be many images and narratives that are appealing. The underlying theme of the work emerges in time, and it may remain "out of sight," seen but not recognized. It is important to note that fieldwork has a tool-carrying aspect. One needs a tool kit with equipment and backups for all the critical tools (e.g., batteries, varieties of recording devices, and computers). The fieldwork I have done was based on written notes, memos about these notes, and outlines of issues to be investigated over the course of the work. [ always have a list of things [ don't know, inconsistent facts [ have gathered, and things [ want to ask about "next time." These notes might be transcribed in detail or kept in a notebook and reordered physically and analytically-sometimes by grouping together the pages with similar content and sometimes by associations of ideas, incidents, and concepts that emerge from the observations. I am also at the same time reading literature on organizations, occupations, and perhaps the history of policing. I try to identify ideas in the notes that carry a sub-point about the overall analysis. The sub-points are then to be illustrated with vignettes or incidents that illustrate the point, including any diverse incidents that are in contrast to them, or "negative points." [n the incidents, [ seek out patterned uniformity of actions in the incident and exceptions to such generalizations. What other evidence to the contrary do [ know of or need to get? The extent to which the ethnographer's field notes are written, retrievable, and detailed varies widely and cannot be assumed while reading a text. They are instances of craft work, a product of craft work. [ have tried in my fieldwork to show how qualitative work illuminates theoretical questions and, over time, can serve to refine a theoretical framework. Arguably, one might say that there are at least five general working rules about gathering ethnographic evidence and using it to make an argument. First, it is of course impossible to know all that is present in the setting studied. This is true for several reasons. Officers may not in fact know much about events at the top, or command decisions. So when the commissioner of the Garda, the police of [reland that [ am currently studying, was forced to resign, a sergeant told me, "Well, not to worry, we just have to get on with the job on the streets." Officers may merely be speculating about why and how any change in policy may affect them. How the actions and policies of the newly named acting commissioner, Noira O'Sullivan (as of March 2014), will affect practices is not known at this time to my informants. They can only speculate, which means that a normative, ideological, or presentational "line" (Van Maanen 1979) of explanation will be offered me. In addition to ignorance, or lack of knowledge, officers may systematically lie to mislead the ethnographer. Hunt and I (1992) found that lies were quite common in the field, especially around problematic issues that might end up in court. This means that one has to sort out a situational remark that might

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be a prank or joke on the ethnographer from the generalizable indication of a pattern. How to do this? It may mean checking this statement or assertion with other informants, observation of variation in the expressed pattern, or drawing an inference based on one's knowledge of the organization and its routines and practices. I was told by a high-ranking member ofthe Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) that there was close cooperation now with the special branch (the unit that deals with security, terrorism, and the like, a very active group during the "troubles" from 1968 to 1998 in Northern Ireland). When I interviewed a senior member of the CID in an outlying district, he laughed when I mentioned this, saying that special branch officers have a separate floor in the building, go in and out by separate entrances, and never talk with the CID investigating normal crime. Over five hundred members of the MIS, the national organization that deals with threats to national security internally, are stationed in Hollywood, outside Belfast, and have no contact with the local police service. The suggestion is that the power and secrecy of these units has little abated with the peace agreements of 1998 and the Patten Commission. Second, what one takes for granted about the police organization may obscure following up on remarks or observed practices (Van Maanen 1983). When I was studying the PSNI, I assumed I knew all there was to know (or almost) about the technology employed in the patrol car. I was wrong: the license plate reader that spewed beeps for every car we were following and those coming toward us in Belfast and showed them on a screen was all new. Now, the question arises, how and when do they use this? The same is true of the social media used in the Short Strand in Belfast. The Facebook pages of the Garda and the PSNI displayed the "presentational strategies" I had been studying since 1973, and they revealed how these strategies related to the transformation and reform of policing in Ireland. Third, there are context-specific "game-changing" moments in the course of establishing an argument from ethnographic evidence. I had assumed that community policing in Belfast had proceeded apace, given the website, the statements of the chief constable, and the work of two young PhD students on the ground in Belfast. I visited a station in one of the Catholic areas of Belfast abutting a stronghold of Protestant paramilitary groups and found that patrol was done, if at all, in cars; that the officers' cars were parked inside an ironclad castle with an electric steel door, and that there was little time or effort devoted to community policing of any kind. In another district outside Belfast, I joined a community policing patrol in an armored Land Rover with officers wearing body armor and carrying weapons. This is evidence of the nature of community policing in the contested areas of Belfast. Fourth, one relies more on some informants than others, and a lonely ethnographer will be attracted to and enjoy the company of some rather than other informants. This appears to be patterned by the gender of both the ethnographer and the informants. It also suggests the value ofteam research, as different members

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will be attracted to and talk with different people. Behind this reservation is an assumption that there is variation in the social distribution of knowledge-among insiders and outsiders-and that this range is valuable. Cognitive anthropology and anthropology more generally are inclined to focus on unity of information rather than its variation. These inferences arise, given a general strategy of carrying out fieldwork. The fifth general working rule concerns this need for an overall strategy for carrying out ethnographic fieldwork. In the police context, I have found it useful to have a strategy of acquiring certain information in every organization I study. Assuming entry and the renegotiation of entry at several levels, I want to acquire consistent, comparable information about (I) settings in the course of the study (where people engage in the behaviors that count or are rewarded in the organization, such as arrests, traffic stops, seizures of evidence, serving warrants, or clearing cases by solving a crime); (2) routines that are performed by the unit segment within the organization that you are studying (how to make an arrest, traffic stop, collect evidence, work under cover, or interview an informant); (3) mistakes that are made (errors in the field, errors in paperwork, errors in investigations) and how they are accounted for or explained; (4 )fiows of information in and out of the organization (what are the channels of communication used, how much, by whom); (5) turning points and crises in the organization (scandals, corruption, violence, resignation, or termination ofa person in top command); and (6) descriptions of the organizational structure (levels and number of personnel, roles and units within the organization). One needs a focal point for charting movements of interest in, through, and out of the organization. I emphasize the flow of information in my work. In formal service organizations, the modes of processing are based on "cases": some package of information about a person or persons. These are a powerful means for tracking the flow of information into, through, and out of the organization. Each ofthese six matters is socially constituted. Ifthey are not understood as produced, described, attended to, refined, talked about, or put in context as social objects, then they cannot be measured, compared, contrasted, or aggregated. These are all abstractions that exist on the ground as the product of negotiations. Theorizing about organizations arises from these kinds of data as gathered by fieldwork, and thus data builds a context for explanation. After following some strategy, one needs to write field notes. So, in the course of doing fieldwork it is best to (1) be very descriptive in writing field notes and observations in whatever way they are recorded; (2) be orderly in keeping your notes, so that they can be retrieved and shared, if need be; (3) be sure to make clear the boundaries of your observations (what you saw and heard, what was reported to you, and what you inferred); (4) be aware of working from data to inference and seek plausible generalizations; (5) be systematic in comparisons in ways that are visible and can be checked by others; (6) use interviews, observations, and records to support your analytic claims; and to (7) continue to ask,

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what new have I learned lately? What difference does this difference make to my argument? (See also Becker 1998.) Doing fieldwork, one is moving from thefirsthand concepts of the actor, statements of facts, or ways they express themselves and add symbols to events, to secondhand analytic concepts that are a pattern of interpretation (Van Maanen 1979). For example, police may describe an area as a "drug dealing area," but they don't know the actual number or kind of drug dealing (retail, wholesale, or both), and they may offer different interpretations of why this is so. Second-order concepts put facts into a context. Be able to work from facts (people who use heroin need somewhere to shoot up) to an interpretation (there are drug houses and places where junkies shoot up), such that one can police the actions (good places to make arrests, or buy undercover, or send in an informant); and from interpretations (cocaine is hard to police) to facts (you can buy it anywhere, it is easy to use and still drive or walk away). These remarks are about fieldwork, how to do it, and how I did it, and they are a part of building a case or a framework for generalization. However, I want to move closer to my own work and how I refined my dramaturgical framework with a study of drug policing. This was the work I undertook while I was writing Police Work. Here, I was trying to pin down the argument that the organization was an actor and the performers part of the show, in some sense. I found the concept of a case a useful one to explore as a social object.

Theory from Qualitative Work: The Concept of a Case The horizon of a field study-what one is studying and why-is generally blurred, because the concrete and the analytic are merged initially. What is being studied, why it is important, and how the data gathered fit to these initial hunches are all unclear, even during the enthusiasms of the study. It is difficult to see how a study went forward, because what is analyzed in the end emerged from a long period of time in the field, attending to details. I want to work forward and then backward, in the sense that the fieldwork illuminated the flaws in the normative organizational account for how the work is done. In the beginning of my study, I thought the idea of the case, as in detective work, was the core concept in drugs policing. I wrote a grant for a fellowship with the Department of Justice that was funded. I argued that I would track cases to see their outcomes in two organizations. I later called them "Metro" and "Suburban." The research was in fact quite open-ended. I began in ignorance of how the job was done, on the streets or in the office; I had read a few trade or popular books on drug policing and seen some TV shows on drug policing. There was no study of this kind of policing at the level of "working cases." I did not know in fact how cases were created, worked, and closed. I assumed that the question police were concerned with was how to most efficiently reduce the demand for drugs. I had clues from reading the work of Bill MacDonald at Georgetown University that police drug law enforcement was case-oriented, flexible, and hard to describe.

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I began the study that was later published as Narcs 'Game (1980) (NG), Once I had access to the first of the two drug units I studied, "Metro," a unit in a large Southern city, I asked officers, "What are you working on?" They would mention they were waiting for an informant to call, or they were going out to meet an informant, or to make a "hot bust," or "street cruising" (observing dealing), or "out to harass a few junkies" (going to a dealing area to watch, or "sit on it" and make themselves known). I gathered information on the practices that the examples involved. I began to make a list of how these practices became the basis for creating a case. These could also be seen as tactics with a distribution within the unit-how frequently they were used, by whom, how widely they were used (what percentage ofthe activities were of this type), and whether they were sanctioned or just done to avoid sergeants' scrutiny. I knew that calls to the police were of little use and that most drug arrests were made by patrol officers. I asked, "How do you get your cases?" They would then give me an example. They typically described them in general terms and did not use the word "case." I would interview another officer, and he would give me an example, or I would ask for an example: "How do you get (relevant/useful) information?" They would respond, "I wait for an informant to call; nobody knows what he's going to do until an informant calls," or "I got a dynamite informant," or "Me and my partner hit the streets." Another officer told me he was going to try to make an arrest in a number of ways so he could refine his skill. Through observation I began to see that the occupational routine carried out by the officers in the unit (about 117 at the time, spread over days of the week on afternoons and evening shifts) was to come in, wander around the large offices, and check in with their sergeant, and then, unless they were writing up an affidavit (the result of arrests, which were rarely made during the day) or planning a raid, they would disappear. The game was to arrange to get the keys to a car from the previous driver and head out. The squads were organized around tactics, and the pattern of arrests flowed from these arrangements. In this organization, the idea of a case was loose and multifaceted, and as Wittgenstein wrote (1969: 117), terms are often names for a family of concepts that share some resemblances. They are also a label for a family of practices. Thus, both temporally and at any given time (cross-sectionally), how many cases one had or hoped to have could only be roughly determined and could not be predicted as to outcome. The future is a function of the horizon of interest, or how far in the future one can imagine working the case. In this way, I created a framework for studying police casework.

Creating Second-Level Concepts from the Fieldwork I began to think more abstractly as I drafted the monograph. The concept of a case in policing is context-dependent, or based on the unit and the organization. In police work, there are four modes of case-making: (1) the reactive investigative mode used by detectives after a crime has been reported or observed by an officer; (2) the crime analytic mode driven by prior knowledge of crime patterning, such as policing of hot spots; (3) the anticipatory mode of invigilation of a

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pattern of crime leading to prevention, tracking, or monitoring, as in organized crime investigations or anti-terrorist work; and (4) the proactive or case-creating mode used in vice and narcotics (drugs, not only "narcotics"). Based on my fieldwork, I was trying to figure out how the organizational context shaped what counted and what was a case. I studied organizations: a suburban county drug unit, "Suburban," and a big-city drug unit in a metropolitan area, "Metro." I knew now that drug work was case-oriented and was proactive. In this mode, cases are created by officers based on informants' information (primarily those previously arrested for drugs or other crimes), citizens' calls, witnesses, targets of previous investigations, or police observations of dealing (e.g., at openair markets for crack cocaine). Information needed to enforce drug laws and vice crimes is not forthcoming from "victims," since these crimes involve compliant participants; such information must be gathered or observed, or the conditions for the crime created. As one detective told me, "We [drug officers] perpetrate the crime." Citizen calls are of little use to drug police, although they may be dealt with by patrol officers. A primary tactic is using informants who make buys, identify dealers or users, and sometimes testify. They often work in exchange for reduction, modification, or dropping of criminal charges pending against them. They are not screened for their promise unless considerable amounts of time, money, or further investigation are needed. When the conditions of the crime are created by observation, buys by informants or officers, or by tracking evidence (such as watching the transfer of smuggled or mailed drugs), further evidence of the commission must be gathered, either to obtain affidavits for search warrants or to make an arrest. Typically, gathering this evidence requires either buys by officers working undercover, usually for short periods of time (and almost never in long periods of "deep cover," such as working in bars and identifying transactions to later proceed by grand jury), or supervising informants who are making "controlled buys." Investigation, arrest, and charge are separated in time and disconnected in practice. There is no essential connection between the three stages of the act, in large part because arrests may be made and charges held in abeyance until the charge is "worked off' by making buys. Otherwise, the enterprise may be dropped as too problematic, the informant may be arrested, or the charge may never be made and sent to the district attorney. Thus, unlike the linear aspects of the case-working model, the proactive model is uneven and often erratic in development. The local conventions about case working, whether constrained (by what I called the organization-centered mode I)-by supervision and control of evidence, money, affidavits, or opening and closing of a case-or not (called the investigator-centered model), determine what is a legitimate case or not within that organization. I saw this study as an example of organizational variations in the proactive case-working mode. In the book, I traced out the patterns and flow of information that became the basis for cases in each organization. They were quite different. The case flow diagrams, like all figures and charts, beg the question of the actual

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practices and content that link the points on the diagram. Arrows and flow charts gloss over detailed problematic and necessary practices. In NG, I argued that Suburban was able to control the matters that most shaped the targeting of users and dealers and working cases-evidence, money, affidavits, establishing informants, and carrying out raids-while Metro was not able to do so. I called the first an "organization-centered model" of drug law enforcement and the second "investigator-centered." The investigator-centered model is the most common in use in the United States, and its features reveal the value of fieldwork. The comparative design helped me to tie fieldwork evidence to organizational analysis. I focus here on the case-producing process found in Metro to illustrate the prevalent model of casework in drug law enforcement.

Casework in Metro In Metro, since there is no known base number of cases that have been accepted, or founded as crimes, no clearance/closure figures for narcotics investigations can be kept. No cases are "opened" or "closed" (except in the mind of the investigator or occasionally by administrative closure), because narcotics cases are infinitely expandable: each seller has a source, that source has another, etc., up the dealing pyramid. An arrest can be viewed as closure or as a mere overture, because, as one Metro sergeant put it, "You always try to 'spin' a guy when you arrest him [pressure him to become an informant] and try to go higher." Thus the number, type, promise, and current developments in a given investigation may be known only by the investigator. The further one goes from the street buy (bust situation or observation) arrest to investigations involving a network of employees, secondary-level dealers, and sources of dope, the more time is involved in surveillance and background work, and the greater manpower is required. Given the opportunity, costs involved in longer-term investigations, and the absence of rewards and administrative actions to induce compliance with a strategy of longer-term investigations (hopefully aimed at a point nearer the top of the dealing pyramid), most drug policemen will seek to reduce the time spent in investigations by quickly closing them out with arrests. Since Metro pays overtime for court appearances, this motivates officers to make arrests sooner and more frequently. They are told to "put meat on the table" and "keep the numbers up." The development of a case is not a linear natural history that unfolds in predictable stages, because stages are skipped, cases fold, cases that were "dead" re-arise because an informant calls with new facts, and the case expands or contracts as new dealers or users are named as targets. It is not a single matter based on discrete facts; these have to be connected to infer a link between buying, selling, and use (since technically use is not a crime). This connection may be made by past record, arrests, associates, the area of the city in which the sales are going on, or known sources (from whom one either buys from or sells to). Because ofthe contingent nature of any given case, agents are seldom working more than one or two, even

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"in their heads." They see the work as ad hoc, responsive, and immediate, and the legal status of the events is somewhat fragile. It is not a solid, coherent "thing," but instead a floating social object, defined and redefined over time by the practices used. Thus, officers do not ask about other officers' cases, and they do not know much about them unless their help has been solicited somewhat in advance (a day or so or earlier in a shift). There is a tacit understanding that most officers are up to something, but what that is or might be is to be explored. The surround or umbrella of tacit understandings that develops allows the marginal and disinterested or untalented to remain so, just as it links the active officers to each other. Their lack of activity is a contrast conception that elevates that which is done: cases. The case is thus defined by context, or what the officers bring to the phenomena over time. In summary of the fieldwork, I did interviews asking how people got their cases and worked them. I discovered rather tentative, individualistic answers and saw that there were variations in how cases were formed and differences in definitions of the job of drug law enforcement (working the street, working big cases, and other tactics). I realized that the flow of the work was to get out of the office in a hurry and that paperwork of all kinds was eschewed. I found that officers typically were not "working up" the dealing ladder or working several informants at a time and were fortunate to have one. I saw that sergeants set the style and expectations for their officers. So in the course offieldwork, I found, through interviews and observation, that some bits and pieces offact, combined with some potential tactic (street work, cruising, hot busts, informant work), were imagined, based on skills and cooperation, to have potential. The case thus created was worked and acted upon while expecting trouble, requiring flair or imagination to cope with that which could be reasonably expected to happen. Subsequent research by Beckett and associates (2005, 2006) shows no relationship between arrests and actual level of dealing. DeFleur (1975) brilliantly showed that variations in the locations of arrests were the product of trends and beliefs of police, not actual police data on the distribution of drug use. In our seven cities research (Williams, Edlinger, and Manning 1979), following my study, we showed that arrests were largely a function of (I) the drug of emphasis in the department; (2) money for making drug buys, paying informants, and "fronting money" for big "buy busts" (where money is shown and drugs are shown in an agreed location and an arrest is made once a deal is agreed to); (3) control of evidence; and (4) whether longer-term investigations were permitted. Most drug arrests were made by patrol officers and thus had a very elastic relationship to where the drugs were bought, the address ofthe dealer, and the address of anyone arrested. In other words, the social production of the arrest and seizures leads to a suspicion of studies and theories based on arrests (or calls about drug use) as indicative of epidemiological or dealing patterns, or of the structure of the "real world" out there. It also raises questions about the nature of rational models of organizational function.

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Theorizing Having made some assessment of the quality of my fieldwork, as noted above, and about its limitations, I have concluded four things about the relationship between these data and qualitative theorizing. First, the choices and actions of agents were based on their assumptions about what looked good, "put meat on the table," and showed they were working. They were putting on a show. These performances were linked to the dramaturgical aims of the organization. These actions were not based on reducing demand, use, or dealing; they were actions in aid of "looking good." In this way, a dramaturgical view of organizational action unfolds. Officers' aims were personal and irrational in the big picture but rational in their own terms and aims. They made sense of the job for themselves. The organization is a service agency without a product or a bottom line. To look good, the organization has to produce outcomes (e.g., big raids with large seizures of drugs or cash, or public announcements) and display them rhetorically. In turn, the actors, whose identity is in part linked to the organization's sense-making, create cases in a flexible fashion, keep secret what they know, do little paperwork to record decisions, and control the flow of work, producing outcomes that are valued largely on the basis of the arrests made. To see this as an attempt to reduce demand, or the result of reading of the environment, would be wrong, and the aggregated data is misleading if seen in this fashion. Secondly, the ineffective and ad hoc nature of the work meant that "big cases"-those in which a great deal of money or drugs was seized successfullywere few and highly "overvalued." Officers kept newspaper clippings of these rare successful cases at their desks as memorabilia. Most of the arrests for drug violations were made by patrol officers. Thus, in light oflow productivity, agents concealed information, maximized the appearance of success, told stories about their big cases if they had them, and were insulated from pressures to assume Weberian rationality-what are the ends pursued? In this sense, the cases are not of equal value, and notions of efficiency and effectiveness cannot be revealed by gross figures on arrests, seizures, or overdoses reported at emergency rooms. Thirdly, as a result, theorizing based on quantitative data on inputs and outputs of drug units would not be sensitive to the process by which enforcement is mounted and evaluated. Finally, any economistic analysis of cost benefits could not retrieve the costs in time, energy, or personnel for any set of cases, although the buy money (expended on drugs) could be estimated (Manning 1977). Fourthly, comparative work is essential to discern contrasts in organizational processes of cases. A study of drug law enforcement in a single city would not have permitted identification of two quite different modes of policing, and the connection of these modes to questions of performance evaluation and assessment of policies and practices. In addition, comparative work allows researchers to make connections between the performance obligations of individual officers and the presentational strategies of the organization.

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Conclusion Woven into this narrative are fieldwork tactics and how to derive some cautious generalizations from such field data, as well as turning points in the development of a qualitative theory, a collection of ideas, and the worth of an ensemble of concepts in a framework called "dramaturgy." This is a metaphor within which action can be cast to illuminate contingencies and contradictions and how they are addressed or not. [t is not an umbrella, but perhaps it is a parasol. What is outlined here includes aspects offieldwork and the emergence ofa framework for analysis as a result of my field studies, reflections, and experiences. Qualitative work can contribute to building a framework such as dramaturgy, as well as serving to refine and elaborate it.

Note I.

In writing this, I reread Police Work to discover what I had detailed in my chapter or section on methodology. There is none. This reveals my own uninformed approach to my work, my lack of training, and perhaps the emergent nature of the field of police studies (See Black 1978).

References Banton, Michael. 1964. The Policeman in the Community. London: Tavistock. Becker, Howard S. 1970. Sociological Work. Chicago: Aldine. - - - . 1998. Tricks of the Trade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - - - and Charles Ragin, eds. What Is a Case? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Katherine, Kris Nyrop, and Lori Pfingst. 2006. "Race, Drugs and Policing: Understanding Disparities in Drug Delivery Arrests." Criminology 44: 105-137. Beckett, Katherine, Kris Nyrop, Lori Pfingst, and Melissa Bowen. 2005. "Drug Use, Drug Possession Arrests, and the Question of Race: Lessons from Seattle." Social Problems 52: 419--441. Bittner, Egon. 1970. The Functions of the Police in Modern Society: A Review of Background Factors, Current Practices, and Possible Role Models. Washington DC: National Institute of Mental Health. Black, Donald. 1978. Review of Police Work. Contemporary Sociology 7: 568-570. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Jnteractionism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Bordua, David J., ed. 1967. The Police: Six Sociological Essays. New York: Wiley. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brodeur, Jean-Paul. 2010. The Policing Web. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buroway, Michael. 2003. "Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography." American Sociological Review 68: 645-679. Cain, Maureen E. 1973. Society and the Policeman s Role. London: Routledge. Clark, John P. 1965. "Isolation of the Police: A Comparison ofthe British and American Situations." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 56: 307-319. DeFleur, Lois B. 1975. "Biasing Influences on Drug Arrest Records: Implications for Deviance Research." American Sociological Review 40: 88-103. Douglas, Jack D. 1968. Suicide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1961. The Elementary Forms ofthe Religious Life. London: MacMillan. Emerson, Robert, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation ofSelfin Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Hughes, Everett. C. 1958. Men and Their Work. New York: Free Press. Klockars, Carl B. 1985. The Idea of Police. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Laurie, Peter. 1970. Scotland Yard. London: Penguin. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1945. "French Sociology." Pp. 503-537 in Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore, Twentieth Century Sociology. New York: Philosophical Library. Manning, Peter K. 1971. 'The Police: Mandate Strategies and Appearances." Pp. 149-193 in Jack D. Douglas (ed.), Crime and Justice in American Society. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. - - - . 1972. "Observing the Police." Pp. 213-268 in Jack D. Douglas (ed.), Research on Deviance. New York: Random House. ---.1977. Police Work: The Social Organization ofPolicing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ---.2004 [1980]. Narcs' Game. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. - - - and John Van Maanen, eds. 1978. Policing: A View from the Street. New York: Random House. Reiss, Albert J. 1971. The Police and the Public. New Haven: Yale University Press. Reiss, Albert J., and David J. Bordua. 1967. "Environment and Organization: A Perspective on the Police." Pp. 25-55 in David J. Bordua (ed.), The Police: Six Sociological Essays. New York: John Wiley. Rubinstein, Jonathan. 1973. City Police. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Sampson, Robert J. 2012. The Great American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Skolnick, Jerome H. 1966. Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society. New York: Wiley. VanMaanen, John. 1978. 'The Asshole." Pp. 221-238 in Peter K. Manning and John Van Maanen (eds.), Policing: A View from the Street. New York: Random House. - - - . 1979. "The Fact of Fiction in Organizational Ethnography." Administrative Science Quarterly. 24(4): 539-550. - - - . 2010 [1988]. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walsh, James Leo. 1977. "Career Styles and Police Behavior." In David Bayley (ed.), Police and Society. Beverly Hills: Sage. Wilcken, Patrick. 2011. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, Jay, Lawrence John Redlinger, and Peter K. Manning. 1979. Police Narcotics Control: Patterns and Strategies. Washington DC: USGPO. Wilson, James Q. 1968. Varieties ofPolice Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, Malcolm. 1991. An Inside Job. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Part II Narratives, Biography, and Cultural Meanings of Crime

4 Psychosocial Criminology: Making Sense of Senseless Violence David Gadd Mary-Louise Carr [IJt requires two minds to think one s most disturbing thoughts . .. When the thinking capacity of the parts of the personality in conversation with one another proves inadequate to the task ofthinking one's troubling experience, the minds of two separate people are required for thinking one's previously unthinkable thoughts (Ogden 2009: 100, emphasis in original.)

Introduction Although a relatively niche field within criminology, in the social sciences more generally there has been something of an explosion of interest in psychosocial studies as afield of inquiry that cuts across the disciplines of sociology, social work, psychology, education, counseling, and forensic psychotherapy in particular. Definitive of the approach is the premise that psychological phenomena (personalities, emotions, dispositions) and sociological phenomena (class, gender, ethnicity, inequality, strain, poverty) are not as discrete as we have become accustomed to considering them. Psychosocial scholars, as Stenner et al. (2008: 411) elaborate, have sought to transcend the "existing disciplinary configurations of the psychological and social sciences" through "the development of modes of thinking and acting capable of recognizing both that social issues and problems have psychological dimensions and that, symmetrically, psychological questions need always to be addressed."

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In other words, the psychosocial approach is not to be confused with simply adding one approach to the other; for example, adding social risk factors to psychological ones. Rather, at the heart of the new psychosocial studies is a commitment to coming to terms with the reality that people are irreducible to the group identities in which they are cast. Recognizing this enables the psychosocial researcher to perceive, in the researched, a capacity for human agency, however dire their circumstances. This, we would argue, is a critical insight for criminology, the subject matter of which is more often than not the multiple forms of human suffering inflicted on and by some of the most multiply disadvantaged. It is, nonetheless, an insight many criminologists are reluctant to exploit, probably because it involves speculating about elements of human subjectivity that cannot be verified through social scientific methods. This reluctance needs to be surmounted, because for our research subjects in criminology, far more than in most other social sciences, "suffering lies at the heart of ... subjective experience" (Frost and Hoggett, 2008: 440). It follows, therefore, that we need methods that are able to grapple with the complexities of the "lived experience ofthe social damage inflicted in late capitalist societies on the least powerful and the intra-psychic and relational wounds that result. In other words, both inner worlds of psychic suffering and outer worlds of social structural oppression are constitutive of such subjects, their capacity for agency, and the forms of agency that are possible" (ibid.). This attention to inner and outer worlds-often pulling in tension in ways we are not fully conscious of-among research subjects who suffer and cause suffering has been a feature of the small body of psychosocial criminology that has variously addressed the perpetration of domestic and sexual violence, the fear of crime, reactions to sex offenders, and racist crime, as well as the homophobic hate crimes of Stanley the Jackroller, a famous criminological case study derived from 1930s Chicago (Evans 2003; Gadd 2012; Gadd and Dixon 2011; Gadd and Jefferson 2007; Garfield, Reavey, and Kotecha 20 10; Gelsthorpe 2007; Hollway and Jefferson 2012; Jefferson 1997; Maruna and Matravers 2007). At the heart of all of this work is a commitment to redressing the central criminological challenge of explaining crime and reactions to it in ways that neither shirk responsibility for coming to terms with the most monstrous manifestations of human behavior nor neglect the mundane, commonplace, and essential normal nature of much crime and deviance. This, as Gadd and Jefferson (2007: 2) explained, is what makes a psychosocial approach necessary: Onto logically speaking, our interest in explaining exceptional crimes stems from a view that all crime, including the most apparently bizarre, is normal in the sense that it can be understood in relation to the same psychosocial processes that affect us all-much in the way that Freud saw mental illness. We are all more or less neurotic and life. given certain psychosocial exigencies. can make psychotics of anyone of us. This does not obviate the need for understanding. but it does require that we do so using understandings of psychic life and of the social world-and their interrelationship-that

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are applicable to all: pacifist church-goer as well as multiple murderer. This should humanize the criminal, however awful his or her deeds, and rescue him or her from the uncomprehending condescension of pathologizing discourses and the exclusionary practices these tend to promote. Which brings us to a further, political, reason why criminology's failure to produce recognizable subjects plausibly committing particular crimes matters: those we do not understand we can more readily demonize, thus enabling "folk devils and moral panics" to continue to figure prominently in the contemporary politics of law and order.

In seeking to overcome such demonizing discourses, psychosocial criminologists have concerned themselves with showing how apparently commonplace social and psychological reactions, buttressed within everyday social discourses and interactions, can in very specific circumstances lend themselves to extreme behaviors, or at the very least render extreme apparently senseless behaviors comprehensible. The collation and production of complex qualitative data about offenders and offending has been critical to this work, though this has been less well discussed outside of psychosocial studies. There, much ofthe methodological discussion has been between scholars with some level ofpsychoanalytic understanding, even ifnot practicing psychoanalysts themselves.

The Production of Case Studies Whether trying to make sense of high-profile cases or attempting to understand the behavior of little-known offenders, the analyses produced by psychosocial criminologists usually involve the assembling of a textual portrait of the people or community in question; a portrait that enables a complex view of the subject to be grasped and one that seeks to hold onto apparently contradictory data, whether that be two conflicting accounts of the same event or attitudes that do not square logically with each other. The reason why psychosocial criminologists refuse to let go of contradictions in the data-or aggregate them away in favor of discovering some kind of norm, trait, or propensity-has much to do with how they regard typicality. Typicality is regarded as problematic from the psychosocial perspective, as one should not assume that people from any particular demographic group are likely to think and feel the same. Rather it is only in understanding the particularity of any single case-whether typical or extraordinary-that one can extract conceptual lessons from it (Gadd and Jefferson 2007; Hollway and Jefferson 2012: 147). Sometimes, as with the cases of high-profile offenders or widely publicized crimes, it is possible to assemble such complexity from secondary sources, including academic ones (Gadd 2012; Jefferson 1997). But when it is not, psychosocial criminologists have turned to qualitative methods, especially in-depth interview data, to produce them. Although in no sense the only method used by psychosocial scholars, Hollway and Jefferson's attempts (2001; 2013) to do qualitative research differently through the development of an interview method geared to eliciting "free associations" from participants has had a profound impact on

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the wider field. In tenns of its core principles in the gathering of interview data, the method packaged together a set of techniques that were commonly used in oral history and biographical research, although not necessarily explained in pragmatic ways for English-speaking audiences. These included the following: • • • •

The importance of asking questions that invited story-telling; The avoidance of "why" questions that might encourage over-rationalization; Careful adherence to the utilization of the interviewee's words and meaning frame in the re-posing of questions; Minimalist facilitation.

What was more revelatory was the intellectual rationale Hollway and Jefferson conferred on these principles, most notably the idea that we are all more or less "defended subjects," unable ever to recount unsettling events exactly as they really were, because anxiety (whether evidenced as shame, doubt, or omnipotence) and desire (whether for love, recognition, or self-validation) shape, even if only in very subtle ways, how we remember, recount, and retell. The free association narrative interview method is based on the premise that the meanings underlying interviewees' elicited narratives are best accessed via links based on spontaneous association, rather than whatever consistency can be found in the narrative. This is a radically different conception of meaning because free associations follow an emotional rather than a cognitively derived logic ... It gives priority to the meanings inherent in the links, rather than the meanings contained within statements. In the interstices, we believe, is revealed a subject beyond the unitary, rational subject of most social science (Hollway and Jefferson 2013: 140).

It is in the theorization of emotionally charged links and interstices that the

approach has courted most controversy. One central question is whether researchers can ever access the worlds of others without recourse to wellrehearsed discourses, including psychoanalytic ones (Wetherell 2005). The psychosocial approach assumes that one can and that a psychoanalytic interpretive perspective provides a means of sensitizing oneself, in mind and body, to the lived and not always speakable experiences of another (Hollway 2011). The latter position has been elaborated by Hollway (2006), who attempts to capture the relational dynamics involved in the parenting of small children through a form of "scenic understanding" that, like a theater or film piece, requires a form of academic engagement that is "more holistic, closer to tacit, unconscious knowing and capable of accessing societal-cultural unconscious" than might otherwise be expected. For Hollway, scenic understanding, like engaging with any good drama, involves being able, at least sometimes, to tolerate the "absence of a consistent story" or a "muddle," by "using imagination" and "arousing curiosity" (Balint 1993: 11, cited in Hollway 2011: 95). Such an approach, of course, brings with it the danger of overinterpretation-of seeing connections that cannot be demonstrated empirically-and may have its origins as much in the mind of

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the researcher as in the minds of the researched, the former no less a defended subject than the latter (Wengraf 200 I). But this danger is inherent in all social scientific methods and not exclusive to the psychosocial approach, which is at least receptive to the possibilities of interrogating researcher defensiveness as a means of delivering more probing qualitative analyses (Garfield 2010). Interpreting Case Studies

In short, the methods psychosocial criminologists usually deploy involve being critically attuned both to what is said and produced in interaction and conversation-particularly in-depth interviews-and to what is not fully articulated, whether because of the defensiveness of the interviewee or the interviewer, or most likely both. Conceptually, the psychosocial approach blends post-structuralist and relational psychoanalytic insights in order to theorize the behavior of individuals who are not merely conditioned by social circumstances or upbringing, but instead able to choose, within delimiting circumstances, how to present themselves and who are, simultaneously, prone to acting out feelings that they are neither able to fully articulate nor fully conceal. The approach, as we will show in due course, has considerable potential for making sense of violence that, rationally speaking, often seems senseless to both those on the receiving end of it and those who perpetrate it. Such sense-making, however, requires a familiarity with at least three key ideas. 1. Discourse. The concept of discourse is central to the psychosocial approach, but not in the conventional sense that assumes people are disciplined absolutely by its configuration of power and knowledge. Someone who has committed a racist crime, for example, might depict him or herself as "able to get along with everyone as long as they don't interfere" as well as "tolerant of other faiths" but "worried about unrestricted immigration" (Gadd and Dixon 2010). Such depictions can involve individuals actively positioning themselves through a number of competing discourses-"the laid-back individual," "the multiculturally sensitive," or the "economically rational and reasonable" man-that sometimes fit well together but can also fall into tension, such as when someone perceived as an immigrant is perceived to be staking a claim that restricts the individual's choices. Identifying how offenders construct themselves discursively is thus a critical methodological task. In understanding violence, noticing what these discourses achieve in relation to the construction and attribution of vulnerability and invulnerability is often critical. 2. Defended, Non-Unitary Subjects. In part because of these different discursive positionings, psychosocial criminologists question the idea that people are only rational, conscious beings whose thoughts all hang together in a unitary and uncomplicated way. Instead, they note that most people espouse attitudes that are at least a little contradictory. People tend also to hold quite contradictory feelings in their minds and bodies. This

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is obvious when people feel both love and hate for a particular individual upon whom they are dependent, but it is common in all kinds of relationships, not just romantic ones. It happens in our work lives, schools, politics, and in local communities: all the places where hateful attacks are mounted. Psychosocial criminologists take the psychoanalytic view that such contradictions are commonly managed using unconscious defense mechanisms that protect the individual from feelings of vulnerability. This can mean burying certain feelings-like shame, disgust, and guilt-as best we can, while running the risk that they will sometimes resurface in ways that are not always strictly controllable, such as slips ofthe tongue, sudden outbursts, or dreams. They can also be managed through psychic splitting and projection, processes whereby unwanted feelings are attributed to others, where they can be attacked. This might be the case, for example, in a homophobic attack where someone who feels insecure about his heterosexuality will attack someone else for his perceived effeminacy, or when someone who is worried about her reputation for being "unemployable" attacks immigrants or disabled people for "stealing our benefits," as if they are the real problem. For this reason, psychosocial criminologists have to address the emotional work that discursive investments achieve. 3. Identification. Finally, there is the issue of identification: the participants' identifications with significant others as revealed in their story; but also the identification between the researcher and the researched, and particularly the extent to which the former feels moved, troubled, endeared, or repulsed by what is revealed by the latter. For researchers-turned-analysts, this is liable to shift during and after the research as they become more acutely aware ofthe discursive and emotional linkages represented explicitly and latently in interview transcripts. This can require researchers to confront some of their own defenses, a process that is all the more difficult when the safeguard of anonymity is foregone, as it has to be in academic publishing, but one that can be facilitated through sharing parts of the analyses with colleagues and coauthors willing and able to provide critical comment. In what follows, we wish to illuminate some of these dynamics in interviewbased material that we elicited from young men with experiences of domestic violence. The interviews formed one of three parts of a larger, multi-method project, the From Boys to Men Project. l The study explored why some boys become domestic abuse perpetrators when others do not and aimed to establish what can be done to reduce the number of young men who become perpetrators. In its first two phases, the project involved the measurement of 1,203 young people's attitudes toward and experiences of domestic violence, an evaluation of a schools-based domestic violence prevention program, and focus groups that explored the way in which young people construct some forms of domestic abuse as acceptable or unacceptable. The third stage of the project involved in-depth interviews with thirty men, aged sixteen to twenty-one, who had experienced domestic violence either as a victim, perpetrator, or witness. Given the recruitment challenges faced in this stage ofthe study, the sample recruited was

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one of convenience, skewed more toward young men in trouble and who were known to criminal justice practitioners to have had experiences of domestic violence of some kind. Young men were asked to participate in one in-depth interview "about people who have been involved in domestic abuse or violence either as victims, witnesses or because they have been accused of doing it." At the outset of the interview, they were invited to tell their life story using a set of biographical interviewing techniques that included active listening, reflection, and narrative-focused questions. After the opening "tell me your life story" question, the interviews focused on eliciting stories from participants using follow-up and probing questions, requesting them to elaborate on the experiences they had shared in their opening "story," aiming to follow the sequence of events as presented by participants, and reflecting their own use of language and terminology. The interviews focused on exploring how young men have come to understand violence through the examples they recalled and described. They also focused on young men's feelings toward their own parents and partners; the contingencies that make them feel sad, angry, defensive, and fearful; and their expectations about relationships with partners and children. All interviews were transcribed verbatim, and "pen portraits" were constructed of each participant. These attempted to capture the complexity of the stories told, bringing the participants alive in a more literary way to readers who had not studied the original transcripts. Jez, described below, was a participant in stage three ofthe From Boys to Men Project.

Pen Portrait Jez was an eighteen-year-old man of mixed-race origins-his father "Asian" and his mother white. Despite having been "kicked out of school" and a sports course at college for fighting, Jez claimed to have "six to eight" GCSEs (the standard qualification for sixteen-year-olds in Britain). He was nevertheless currently unemployed and living with his mother, an arrangement that had recently been reinstated after a fire caused the loss of the family home and the separation of Jez and his older sister from their mother. His sister-four years his senior-had now moved out "for good." Jez had little contact with his father, who was imprisoned for drug-related crime when Jez was five years old and was not released until six or seven years later. Although he knew that his father was "doing well for himself now"-"he's got properties"-Jez hardly ever saw his dad and the other members of what he referred to as his "Asian family," a loss that seemed troubling yet hard to articulate: Obviously everyone knew they split up anyway like cos me mum split up with me dad when he went to jail. But like my Asian family. But you see beforehand they were quite like, T was between yeah me both families like constantly but obviously T had to like, everyone split up basically. So him and her obviously, me dad's mum and dad, obviously helped him out with a lot. He's doing well for himself now like, you know what I mean like. He's got properties and that now [David Gadd: right]. So he's doing good and that but.

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Asked for memories of his life after his father went to prison, Jez explained only that his "mum was always out ... with different men ... like the whole way through ... six different men ... most of them were ... muppets."2 Jez liked none of them and explained that he had "a thing against all of them""couldn't relate to them or anything." One of his mother's relationships had, nevertheless, lasted six years, even though beset by "constant" arguments. Tused to stand on the stairs and listen like ... there was just too many arguments to talk about ... Everyone she has been with there's been massive arguments like ... literally screaming, slamming doors and smashing plates. Walking out the house, slamming the door again, going missing for about three hours, coming back.

Jez remembered being left alone, "wondering" if his mother would return: "I never used to ask her, 1 always knew what had happened, but 1 never said anything." More recently his mother had asserted that he "didn't know anything" about how "serious" it was, and that her ex had "grabbed her a few times" and "hit her against the wall ... stuff like that." From what Jez himself recalled, it would appear that he was still somewhat skeptical as to whether his mother was hit, having not seen it directly: "[ wouldn't say hitting, [ would say it was like good gripping." By the time he entered secondary school, Jez was getting into fights with other pupils, typically over trivial matters, but with the violence escalating to punching in the face, and the teachers "secluding" Jez in other parts of the building to minimize the disruption. Like the arguments at home, these school fights were too numerous to recount-"just craziness ... 1 used to have fights over nothing ... too many to think of." But Jez had distinct memories ofthe arrival of "Czech republican" students, one of whom had "barged" (or shoved) into him. He had picked a fight with a short but "stocky" one-"being crazy, just bam, whacked him, then it just kicked off'-amassing a crowd of" [50" pupils and culminating in the stocky Czech being hospitalized and Jez arrested but not charged. As Jez recalled it, he had never lost a fight, except on one occasion, two years prior to the time of the interview, when outnumbered by a group of boys from another part of town. Having challenged Jez to explain who he was, they knocked Jez to the ground when he was not looking and then kicked him in the face so much that he feared his "lip was hanging off ... 1 couldn't speak ... get any words out ... It was mad." That, he said, was "probably the only time that I've known what it feels like to be a victim." Despite this aversion to knowing what it feels like to be a victim, or more generally to lose, Jez also explained that he had recently "lost everything" when a fire destroyed his and his mother's house. "[ just had enough. [t was in my room. Everything, literally everything just bam gone." Asked specifically what happened in his room, Jez insisted he did not and could not know-ultimately speculating that it was probably "electrical problems"-as he was home alone at the time-"just me and my dog" -asserting that he was "obviously" downstairs

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when the fire started. Not only did he lose his things, but, at least from his perspective, the fire also broke up the family unit, his mother choosing to move in with the man she was seeing, leaving Jez and his sister to go to his nan's. Over this, apparently "everyone fell out": Jez's mum falling out with his nan (her own mother), first taking her boyfriend's "side"; and then Jez ultimately falling out with his mother's boyfriend, the boyfriend having tried "talking nice to him," having fallen out with Jez's mum and having told her to "pack her bags." T, just like, [got] pretty bad cos obviously like Tthrew a bottle at him and ... he tried to come chase me on the streets ... The only reason Twent mad at him then is because me mum were ... phoning my nan's house ... crying ... So obviously I went down there and he's come out ... and he tried like talking to me nice and then I was like "you F." Twas kicking off like so that's how it started.

Jez also lost his girlfriend around the same time, though it was unclear if this was before or after the fire, Jez initially insisting that he did not "want to talk about her" and revealing only how he had "whacked ... gripped [and] butted ... clear in the nose" someone who had "tried it on with her." Subsequent probing around any "impact of domestic violence" on Jez's life prompted him to disclose that he had "ended up slapping ... her as well like" and to return to the story of their relationship. This girlfriend, Jez had discovered, had been having a "secret romance" with one of his mates "behind" his "back." At the time of this discovery, Jez was already enrolled in anger management classes at school (which he regarded as "crap," in part because the other attendees were just "loads ofmuppets" for whom the course was "just a game": "I couldn't hack it") and attending counseling (which he found more helpful-"she was a good person to talk to") specifically because of how stressful Jez found the relationship with his girlfriend. In fact, they were actually "on a break" before Jez assaulted his "mate" for "trying it on" with her. The relationship, Jez said, had long been "crap," the two of them having apparently "argued from the get go" or outset. The girl, Jez said, was "stupid," but perhaps more to the point, he had always been "paranoid with her" because she left another boy for him when they first started dating: A girl who does that she'll never change, does she? She did that to a guy for me like then obviously it can come back round.

Inability to trust now seemed to be an enduring problem for Jez: "I don't trust anyone, I can never trust anyone." Jez said he was just "a paranoid person"though between him and his girlfriend, he was the more untrustworthy, "cheating on her all the time" from the "beginning," despite believing she was "proper in love" with him. Upon seeing "them" together after the school "awards night," Jez encouraged another mate, whose car they were in, to help him attack the boy who had been

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seeing his ex-girlfriend. The victim asked Jez to stop, before twice questioning his sanity: "You've drawn blood, just leave it ... Are you mad? Are you mad?" About this, however, Jez continued to believe he was in the right: "He's done something to me." Jez was, however, more hesitant to admit that he had "ended up slapping" his girlfriend "as well like." She was at his house "getting drunk and ... getting in my face and I slapped her and that's it." The girl rang the police, alleging that Jez had tried to "batter" her. An arrest culminated in a "final warning," sparing Jez a prosecution for a domestic violence offense, if not the assault on the other man, for which he was sentenced to the referral order he was currently serving under Youth Offending Team supervision. Jez was nevertheless so "stressed" by the knowledge that his (ex-) girlfriend had asked the police to "lock" him up, and that he hit an instructor at his college, whom he perceived to be laughing at him for being "angry." Jez was then kicked off the course, despite generally "doing good" there. Now, Jez said he had not gotten "a clue" how things were going to unfold. On the positive side, he had found the two-week course he had just completed on computing and going for job interviews "good," and things were now "all right" with his mum, with whom he was living again and at least beginning to talk more openly with. On the more negative side, Jez was unable to "think about" avoiding further violence with other men. "It just happens too fast .. . If it happens it's over and done with and you're there thinking 'what have I done?'" He was more confident about avoiding perpetrating violence against another female partner, though not necessarily for the best of reasons: "Girls are nothing to me like. They are just there for a link [i.e., sex] ... I'll never get into a relationship again." Moreover, it was plain that he still blamed his ex for the assault he perpetrated on her: No one else except that one girl can make me slap them. Trust me, T can never slap another girl, just her. T hate her with a passion ... a big, big passion ... She's just a rat. I hate her like [laughing].

Analysis Leaving the interview with Jez, my (OG) initial feelings were quite mixed. The interview had been relatively brief (forty-five minutes), and it appeared less cohesive toward the end. As Jez's responses became briefer, he kept checking his phone, implying that he had other things to be getting on with. His account of being left on the stairs, "wondering," nevertheless struck a chord with me. I felt for the abandoned child depicted, "left wondering" if his mother would return. I also felt a little disappointed that Jez could only articulate secondhand reasons as to why his mother left, the physical violence not recounted in a way that conveyed understanding of how frightening it could be. This lack of detail jarred in part with the somewhat graphic accounts Jez provided of the assaults

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he perpetrated against other young men, depicted as worthy adversaries: a masculinity-enhancing narrative that, as he appeared to know, was undercut by his own reluctantly offered revelation that he had felt compelled to slap (or perhaps "batter"?) his girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend?) when someone "tried it on with her" (or when they were "on a break" following his infidelity). No less confusing was Jez's account of the house fire in which he lost everything, the cause conveyed as uncertain and irrelevant, and the consequences recalled, perplexingly, not at all in terms of the fear of being trapped in a burning building, but almost exclusively in terms of the separation from his mother, as she left him to his nan, compounding a family breakup that began with his father going to prison, his parents separating, and his sister, actually now old enough to move in with her partner anyway, doing just that. In short, Jez's was a confusing account in terms of both its content and in terms of how it left the interviewer feeling. It was not one that could provide a simple, easy-to-read-off answer to the question of why some young men become domestic violence perpetrators when others do not; for example, in terms of a combination of attitudes and experiences. Rather it was an account that required interpretation: interpretation that would require us to think critically about how Jez told it and how we heard it, including why some parts of it had been easier to hear than others during the interview and in our first readings of the transcript. Ultimately, we needed somehow to reconcile the disjunctions between our perceptions of Jez as both an articulate, likeable, but abandoned boy overcoming adversity and an evasive young man who avoided blame for the violence he started. Keeping these different ways of seeing Jez together-as opposed to disaggregating selective quotes from the transcript-was fundamental to our analysis. We worked dialectically, discovering patterns in parts of the transcript that motivated us to look again at other parts that had at first seemed unproblematic. Spotting the identifications between interviewer and interviewee involved in the telling of the story provided us with a first step for returning to the transcript. This was a story that Jez could tell an older man, for discursively it was a culturally familiar one-a young boy heroically overcoming adversity against the odds-and it was one I (DG) felt some sympathy with, having a half-sibling of my own who never knew his mother (my mother). Discursively, the journey that Jez took the interviewer on was a relatively simple one. As Jez told his story, I could imagine him sitting alone on his stairs, unsure that his mother would return, unsure how long he had been waiting, and wondering if things would have been different had his father been around. As a teenager he felt he had left to make his own way in the world, amid a host of "muppets," including the men in Jez's mother's life and fellow pupils at school with "anger management" problems. As we returned to the transcript, we noticed that these "muppets"-childish puppets-were construed as somehow inauthentic, their problems as not

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real. They were men to whom Jez could not "relate." His father-now "doing all right for himself' despite a period in prison and his estrangement from his wife and children-was not talked about in these terms. But his mother appeared to be damned through her association with such men. She was constructed as naIve, failing, and fickle, constantly arguing and falling out with a string of "different" men with whom "she was always out," despite apparently settling down with one for six years. Jez was willing to take on boyfriends who crossed her, though he was, paradoxically, hesitant to accept her account of her own victimization. This hesitance, we speculated, was perhaps a clue as to why Jez's account became more guarded as the interview progressed. Conceding that his mother was also a victim-that he could not orwould not identify with her vulnerability to being abused by the "muppets" he hated-would have undermined his own investment in the discourse of the abandoned child now making his own way in the world. While Jez's tendency to "kick off' and "lose it" was perceived as completely "mad" by those on the receiving end of it, and laughable by his teacher, the safer construction for Jez was one of the male outlaw come good, a characterization that also resonated with his account of his father, whom he rarely saw and hardly knew. In this way, Jez found a means of presenting his violence, though too fast to think through, as heroic, entailing the righting of wrongs perpetrated, for example, by the outsiders like the stocky "Czech republican," his mother's boyfriend whom she had chosen over him, and indeed any man who tried it on with his (ex-) girlfriend. In such instances, Jez felt entirely justified in meting out punishing lessons in morality through violence, typically with an onlooking audience to verify his victory. Such discursive constructions, however, while fostering a sense of identification between interviewer and interviewee, also kept out of full consciousness some of the pain, rage, and discomfort a young man ill at ease with loss surely must have felt. This could explain why the latter part of his story was less coherent, more contradictory, and, in places, frustratingly evasive. That Jez could not really describe the abuse his mother suffered was not a shortcoming of the method, if one notices that he was perhaps only now starting to hear, if not to fully know, what she was struggling to cope with. Most of his reactions were not informed by identification with her suffering. Hence, he saw himself not as a victim, like her, but as a loner unable to trust anyone, making his own way in the world. This is how Jez continued to remember those younger years and in part how he experienced his present. The feelings had endured, for as Jez explained, he was also alone-maybe lonely-just him and his dog the day when his mother's house burned down. "Obviously" (or the converse), Jez was nowhere near his own bedroom, where the fire started. "Obviously" (or not) he was in no way culpable. As analysts, we noticed just how frequently this term"obviously"-was used, alongside a choral "basically," to describe something that was not at all obvious.

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Basically, just, to be honest I don't know. Basically electrical problems like but yeah, I was the only one in the house as well. So obviously I was downstairs, come up and see my room on fire like, black smoke. So obviously I got my dog, gone out, in jumper, trackie, socks, that's it. And like obviously went out and all the fire brigades come.

This led us to look again at what was "obvious" in Jez's opening words about the fire. To us, he was obviously feeling very aggrieved at the time, having 'just had enough." What he had had enough of was not clear in his account of the fire. But looking elsewhere in the transcript, one thing stood out: namely, the "constant arguments" between him and his mum and between him and his girlfriend. Noticing this led us to read the story again and to attempt to order it chronologically. When we did this, we discovered it was plausible that Jez was thinking that he had already lost everything before the fire started-the love of his girlfriend, the respect of his mother, the support his father's family could have supplied, and access to mainstream schooling. The painful truth of the breakup became apparent as we learned that the relationship was already suspended, that she was no longer Jez's girlfriend but his ex, as they were "on a break," she having discovered his infidelity. Seeing this construction of the "ex" as still in his mind "his girlfriend" proved revelatory, for it exposed the sense behind what would have seemed to her a relatively senseless attack on her new partner, Jez's fonner "mate." The mate was not really "trying it on," as Jez construed it. But now, realizing that the girl he had treated so badly had once "really loved" him, the loss was laid bare, salt rubbed in the wound, as she and her new partner were spotted leaving the school awards night-a celebration of pupil success-of which Jez was clearly not a part. Like his mother and the men that came after his father was imprisoned, Jez now remembers that he and his girlfriend argued "from the get go." Everything was bad. His ex-girlfriend-like his mother, whom he claimed, without much substance, dated so many men-was untrustworthy because she had left a former boyfriend for him. Now Jez hates her with "a passion." Given his self-assuredness in his skillful use of violence, his insistence that no one else could make him hit them except her represented something of a paradox. At this point in our analysis, we looked toward psychoanalysis for concepts that might help explain such a paradox. The interchanging ofhate with love reminded us ofthe psychoanalytic concept of "splitting," where good and bad parts of the self are kept apart and projected onto others, who can be overtly despised and unconsciously desired. In Jez's case, this splitting worked by unconsciously attributing his girlfriend, and her alone, with such mystical power that she was able literally to drive him crazy, provoking his violence, stifling his agency: "No one else except that one girl can make me slap them." And yet, looking again at the accounts of provocation in his story, we discovered that this was not the whole truth either. After the breakup, it seemed that people who reminded him of this loss placed themselves in potential danger. So a smirk from a teacher at the college where

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Jez was now trying to secure the basic skills needed to get a job proved enough to unhinge him, unleashing an explosion of anger and violence. Such violence, as Jez himself concluded, was becoming a way of life, not because it had ever really secured him anything tangible, but because it happened so quickly. They were "crazy," "mad" attacks on adversaries-"too many to think of'-providing the means through which a positive identity as victor could be asserted. This idea that painful thoughts get acted out through sudden, extreme actions is another psychoanalytic insight of use for grappling with violence that defies an obvious cultural logic. Without having to think, Jez could be spared the pain of having to contemplate having lost everything, of being a victim, and of causing his own downfall because of his inability to fully come to terms with the perspectives of his mother and his girlfriend. Conclusion

We opened this chapter with a quote from the relational psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden, who notes that it takes at least two people in dialogue-in the psychoanalytic context, therapist and client-to bring a dangerous thought to a point in consciousness where it can be articulated. In this chapter, we have shown that the same can also be true in criminological research. We have illustrated this point through the analysis of a single case study that can be read-if one is prepared to accept that it is a motivated account-both discursively and psychodynamically. In order to do this, however, the interviewer had first to consider his own identifications with the interviewee's vulnerability and heroically masculine constructions of violence. This was done in conversation with the chapter's coauthor and others to whom we have presented the case. What we hope to have illustrated in the process is that, far from being a weakness of data, the absence of a consistent story provided by an interviewee can, if considered more analytically, provide valuable clues to the nature and etiology of otherwise unthinkable acts, permitting the psychosocial researcher to access an intersubjective realm that is more or less imperceptible to those still caught in ruminations about the victims of their violence and/or others who have aggrieved them. Undertaking this kind of research runs the risk of overinterpretation. In our own analysis of Jez, we have hung much meaning on his disclosure to the effect that he had "lost everything," reading this not only as about the burning of material possessions, but also as the source of emotional pain that fueled the "mad," "crazy" behaviors to which he confessed, and potentially the firestarting that he, for quite "obvious" reasons, did not want to be associated with. Such an analysis would have been too dangerous to share with Jez directly. But we think it is one that academic criminologists should be willing and able to entertain for what it might reveal about the problem of senseless violence perpetrated by troubled young men. The substance of criminology is, of course, ridden with such dangerous matter. But if we are to truly understand it, we will need to ensure that our analyses go beyond the patterning of crime rates,

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whether in general or for different groups of offenses. What we need as well are opportunities for understanding offending behavior in terms of its logic within the lives of particular offenders, a logic that sometimes evades them too. The argument made in this chapter is that we need to embrace the methods of psychosocial studies more fully, including its capacity to utilize identifications in the research process, if we are to fully comprehend the dangerous thoughts and deeds of our research subjects. Embracing such methods may require criminologists to relinquish the pursuit of scientific certainties in favor of the pursuit of plausible interpretations that are conversant of the competing social and psychodynamic processes that culminate in crimes that are apparently senseless to many victims and offenders. It will also, as we have shown in this chapter, require us to adopt a much more inquisitive, more deductive approach to data analysis than is conventionally the case in qualitative research. In order to do so, we will have to prioritize working with the entirety of case studies and interview material before we dis aggregate them. This will mean keeping particular participants fully in mind for much longer periods than we are accustomed to doing and sharing our dangerous thoughts about them with those less accustomed to psychosocial analysis. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Margareta Hyden and Claire Fox for comments on the case material contained in this paper and work on the project from which it derives. They would also like to acknowledge thanks to "Jez" for sharing his story. Notes 1. 2.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number RES-062-23-2678). The Muppet Show is a classic children's television show that uses puppets similar in style to Sesame Street. We took Jez's use of the term to be derogatory, referencing those whom he regarded as like childish puppets, pale imitations of real men with real problems, like his own.

References Balint, Enid. 1993. Before 1 Was 1. London: Free Association Books. Evans, Jessica. 2003. "Victims and Vigilantes: Thinking Psychoanalytically about AntiPaedophile Action." Theoretical Criminology 7: 163-89. Gadd, David. 2012. "In-Depth Interviewing and Psychosocial Case Study Analysis." Pp. 36--48 in David Gadd, Susanne Karstedt, and Steven F. Messner (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods. London: Sage. Gadd, David, and Bill Dixon. 2011. Losing the Race. London: Karnac. Gadd, David, and Tony lefferson. 2007. Psychosocial Criminology. London: Sage. Garfield, Shoshana, Paula Reavey, and Mehul Kotecha. 2010 "Footprints in a Toxic Landscape: Reflexivity and Validation in the Free Association Narrative Analysis Method." Qualitative Research in Psychology 7: 156-169. Gelsthorpe, Loraine. 2007. "The lack-Roller: Telling a Story?" Theoretical Criminology 11: 515-542.

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Hollway, Wendy. 2006. The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity (Women and Psychology). London: Routledge. Hollway, Wendy. 2011. "Psycho- Social Writing from Data." Journal of Psycho-Social Studies 5: 92-101. Hollway, Wendy, and Tony Jefferson. 2000. Doing Qualitative Research Differently. London: Sage. Hollway, Wendy, and Tony Jefferson. 2013. Doing Qualitative Research Differently, 2 nd ed. London: Sage. Jefferson, Tony. 1997. "The Tyson Rape Trial." Social and Legal Studies 6: 281-301. Maruna, Shadd, and Amanda Matravers. 2007. "N = 1: Criminology and the Person." Theoretical Criminology 11(4): 1362-4806. Ogden, Thomas H. 2009. Rediscovering Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Stenner, Paul, Marian Barnes, and David Taylor. 2008. "Psychosocial Welfare: Contributions to an Emerging Field." Critical Social Policy 28: 411-414. Wengraf, Tom. 2001. Qualitative Research interviewing. London: Sage. Wetherell, Margaret. 2005. "Unconscious Conflict or Everyday Accountability?" British Journal of Social Psychology 44: 169-173.

5 Research Strategies for Narrative Criminology Lois Presser Sveinung Sandberg

Introduction

The meaning that we give to things inspires and constrains our every action. One of the principal ways we make meaning is through stories or narratives. l Enter narrative criminology, an emergent perspective that explains criminal and other harmful action in terms of the stories that we tell about ourselves (Presser 2009; Presser and Sandberg forthcoming; Sandberg 2010). Its premise is that stories motivate and legitimize harm. Narrative is a recounting of experience that evaluates that experience and, in so doing, evaluates those who are associated with the experience, most of all ourselves. Criminologists have tended to use narrative as a report on individual lives. In particular, narratives are seen to reveal criminogenic factors in the individual's past, such as parental neglect, financial hardship, or the influence of peers. These factors are "the main thing"; the narrative is a means to finding out about them. In contrast, for narrative criminologists, narratives themselves may be criminogenic-or, conversely, peace- or desistance-promoting-factors. On this view, it is because narratives set out who we are that they animate what we do in the world. When narrative is seen simply as a report, the researcher's priority is to faithfully solicit the narrative and perhaps also to make sure the story is "true" by comparing it with other data sources. However, when we consider the narrative itselfas influential, we are fairly unconcerned with its veracity. Whether true or false, the narrative itself is consequential (Sandberg 20 I 0). Our stories 85

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motivate our own actions; they also affect the actions of others. Nowhere is the power of narrative, regardless of its "truth" value, clearer than in the case of mass harm. Stories told by elites-generally called "propaganda" when observers judge them to be false-mobilize large numbers of people to support harmful action, either with direct participation, enthusiastic consent, or passive tolerance. As Frank (2010) observes, "Stories have the capacity to arouse people's imaginations; they make the unseen not only visible but compelling" (p. 41). The history of stories inspiring and legitimizing devastation is a long and alarming one. Hence the broad purview of narrative criminology: harm and not just crime, legal and not just illegal activity, mass harm and not just individual harm. When we consider narrative as influential, we wonder what about it makes it so. We ask how story characteristics, elements, and plots inspire action. Methodologically, then, studies in narrative criminology distinguish themselves by closer analysis of narrative than is undertaken in most other criminological research. This chapter examines what close analysis of narrative might consist of when the analysis is meant to theorize patterns of harm. Narrative criminologists are interested both in what is narrated and in how it is narrated (Riessman 2008). They believe that both substance and form are consequential. Hence, they seek to discern the thematic, linguistic, and interactional nuts and bolts of storytelling. Following suit, this chapter offers guidelines for discerning the particulars of narratives and narration. We begin our discussion after data have already been collected, because while methods for collecting narratives are important, they are more or less standard across theoretical frameworks. 2 However, a narrative criminological framework calls for relatively distinctive strategies of analysis. We examine five foci of analysis: (1) elements or parts of narrative, (2) subject and verb choices that represent agency, (3) genres or types of narrative, (4) narrative coherence and plurivocality, and (5) the storytelling context. These are not the only things that narrative criminologists concentrate on, but they capture a good deal of their attention. These five foci have theoretical significance inasmuch as they communicate something about the agent and her/his actions and targets. We use examples from published and unpublished empirical work to illuminate analysis along one or more of these lines. We pay particular attention to an interview with Ola, a young man recalling his experiment with amphetamines. Toward the end of the chapter, we consider the goal of achieving rigor in narrative criminological analysis. Elements of Narrative

One way to approach narrative is through its infrastructure. Researchers may examine constituent parts of narrative or less essential elements like characters, metaphors, or reported speech. When studying the different elements of narratives,just a few of which are discussed here, the emphasis is on how these enable and constrain meaning-making.

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Parts of Narrative

The best-known conception of narrative structure is surely that of sociolinguist William Labov (1972), for whom a complete narrative is composed of these parts: an abstract (summary), orientation (context), a complicating action (new event or problem), evaluation (significance), a result or resolution (solution to the problem), and a coda (cue that the story has ended). Consider these six elements in the story of a "bad trip" while on amphetamines told by Ola (a pseudonym), as part ofa larger study by author Sveinung Sandberg. We present this story in full, as it was told during an interview, in order to make various points about narrative criminological method throughout the chapter. The interview was designed to glean stories of illicit drug and alcohol use. In this case Ola's interviewer, Sandberg's research assistant, was an old acquaintance from childhood days. The interview was conducted at the interviewer's home, and the interview was sandwiched between more casual and collegial talk. Ola's story was prompted by a rather general question about what kind of illegal drugs he had tried. It was one in a series of stories that Ola shared of binge drinking and drug use that went mostly uninterrupted by the interviewer. Abstract Ola:

I can count on one hand how many know [that he has used amphetamines]. But now I can tell you, because I don't do it anymore, that's why T can tell. But I'm still not sure, had it [the interview] not been anonymous, then Twould not have told you, that's for sure.

Orientation Ola:

But yeah, then Peter comes home with five grams of amphetamine, and I almost hadn't heard about amphetamine. The only thing I'd heard was that it was the poor man's coke since it was a lot cheaper. But except for that T didn't know what amphetamine was, T really didn't. And like I said, I wasn't interested in drugs, so I hadn't done any research on them. The only thing I was a little interested in was cocaine, and I did try that, and T knew what it was. But then T thought, yeah, yeah, great fun. So we'll share it and go out partying. And Peter didn't take as much amphetamine as I did that night while I took a fair amount. And one gram of coke, right, for example, to compare, that was nothing to me at the time, that was just enough to get the party started. So T took the same amount of amphetamine as if it were coke because T didn't know any better, I thought it was the same stuff. So in the course of the night I'd had maybe one and a half to two grams of amphetamine, right.

Complicating Action Ola:

And so that went really well, and I was going to bed, it was maybe around five, six in the morning, and so when T lay down T couldn't get to sleep,

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Qualitative Research in Criminology there was just no way. That was a bit odd. So that morning Tjust lay there with my eyes open, and by noon T hadn't slept for even a second, and T thought that was a bit odd. And then I felt really hungry, so I got up, went to the kitchen, Peter was still sleeping, and I made myselfthis really great baguette. Cheese, ham, lettuce, mayo, the whole works, and Tsat down on the couch. At least Twas going to treat myselfto a first-class meal, and I'm really hungry, and I take a bite out of the baguette, and I can't swallow. There's just no way, Iike,I understand how an anorexic feels to put it that way. It was like a faucet in my throat that had been shut off, there was no possibility of even swallowing. So Thad to spit out the food, and then I started getting stressed, I was thinking like: okay, I haven't slept, now Tcan't fucking eat, what's going on? So Tgoogled amphetamine for the first time that morning. And so Tread that a line of amphetamine, which is maybe the equivalent of a hundred milligrams, that'll last for six hours, and to compare, a line of cocaine with a hundred to a hundred and fifty milligrams, that'll last for twenty minutes. And I'd taken one and a half to two grams of amphetamine. So Tkept on reading and it said that if it's your first time using amphetamine then anything more than one gram of amphetamine is lethal. To put it mildly, I started feeling anxious. Interviewer: Yes, you probably started sweating at that point.

Complicating Action/Orientation Ola:

Yes, and that was just the beginning of five days of hell. Tcouldn't sleep for five days, I couldn't eat for five days. Peter didn't feel sick at all because he'd taken maybe two lines of amphetamine. And I was lying there for five days on the couch in our living room, in a fetal position, and Peter had to feed me soup, that was the only stuffY could handle. T couldn't even prepare the soup myself, he had to make it and feed it to me like I was a baby.

Interviewer: Because you couldn't even move toOla:

I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything. And it really never stopped, five days-that's quite a few hours.

Resolution Ola:

And Tremember on day five, Twas so worn out, so broken down and so worn out, that Tthought: I'm going to die any minute now, that's what T kept thinking, I'm dying right now. And I was shitting myself with fear that anyone was going to find out about it, and definitely my parents. They would never ... they'd be crushed. But on the fifth day Twas so broken down that T said to Peter, 'Tm going to the hospital, I'm telling them everything." And I knew-or at least I thought-that the hospital was going to call my parents, but I was so worn out that I didn't give a fuck, and that just shows how ill T was. But then Peter said, "Give it another half a day, and if it hasn't gotten any better by then, I'll take you to the hospital." And in the course of those hours, the whole thing passed. So on day six I could sleep, I could eat as well.

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Evaluation Ola:

And on day six I remember ... I had one gram of the amphetamine lett, I remember I poured it out into the toilet, and I just told myselfthat I will never ever take any other drugs besides cocaine ever again, if someone put a gun to my head, I wouldn't do it again.

Coda Ola:

So really, the end of the story is that trying amphetamine was really the best thing that could have happened to me. Because it's made me a fanatic about drugs, I really couldn't take anything at all. Cocaine? Yeah, I'd be inclined to, but it gave me a real wake-up call even about that, and in hindsight it could have gone really badly, it started going badly.

Ola's story is a typical narrative representing "cause and effect relations" through a "sequencing of events" (Po II etta, Chen, Gardner, and Motes 20 II: 111). Drug use caused serious physical and mental distress. Ola himself, and not the researcher, draws this causal connection. Indeed, Ola demonstrates a narrative consciousness. Note, for example, his reference to "the end of the story" to mark the conclusion of the interrelated narrated events. The story has all of the parts of narrative Labov (1972) described, though the order is somewhat different and some parts are difficult to categorize. Also, Ola places a good deal of emphasis on what might have been, and not merely what actually happened. Indeed, the nearness of death and other trouble such as his parents learning about his drug use informs Ola's evaluation of the story-that drug use is not for him. Stories are often more disorganized than this one, but disorganization is often no problem for the audience, because they are familiar with similar stories and able to fill in the "missing pieces" themselves. The basic structure of the narrative is thus fundamental for understanding the meaning of a story, even when elements are absent. Narrative criminologists, like most students of narrative, pay particular attention to the story's evaluation-its point. Ola's point is that he is not much of a drug user ("I just told myself that 1 will never ever take any other drugs than cocaine ever again"). Narrators can cue their evaluation, as Ola does, through dramatic highlighting, possibly achieved through the use of reported speech and specifically by quoting a significant opinion "even ifthe person quoted is oneself' (Shuman 2012: 135-137). Reported speech also emphasizes the authenticity of the tale, as, for example, when Ola reports the dialogue he had with Peter about whether or not to go to the hospital ("But on the fifth day I was so broken down that I said to Peter 'I'm going to the hospital, I'm telling them everything'''). Replaying the situation makes it more trustworthy, giving the impression that we get to "hear" what was actually said.

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The fact that narrators make a point concerning an experience is itself a finding; some do not. Compare the highly moralized story of Ola with ones whose evaluation is scant or nonexistent. Presser (2013), for example, observes that when research participants who weighed in on a variety of harmful actions reported the harm they did to nonhumans, such as hunting or eating meat, they typically failed to offer an evaluation of it. Don provides a vivid example in the following exchange: Interviewer: Have you ever killed an animal yourself or taken part in theDon:

Yes.

Interviewer: -procedure? Don:

Yes.

Interviewer: Can you tell me about that? Don:

Vh, well. We used to slaughter our own pigs. We used to slaughter our own cows. We used to slaughter our own chickens. Turkeys. I-I used to raise turkeys myselJfor food.

Interviewer: And did you kill them? Don:

Yes.

Interviewer: Do you mind telling me about that? Don:

Uh. I don't know-what do you-what do you want-what do you want to know?

Interviewer: I mean an example of the time you killed an animal-or times. Don:

Well it just-during chicken season-we used to raise a hundred, a hundred and fifty chickens. So, yeah: we had to go around, catch the chickens. cut their heads off and then-de-feather 'em and clean 'em and get 'em ready to sell. The same with the pigs and same with the cows: it's all the same.

Don avoids offering an evaluation of his killing nonhuman animals, despite the interviewer's repeatedly prompting him to do so. White (1980) would say that instead of a story, Don's recounting is a chronicle, which reviews past events but makes no moral point. The researcher distinguishes between chronicles and stories by asking whether or not actions are framed in terms of values and principles. Harm is easier to commit when recounting is done as a chronicle and not a story; where the moral dilemma of harmful action is not acknowledged, speakers might well be expected to persist in doing the relevant harm in the future. Hence the importance ofthis sort of cultural-structural analysis for criminological theorizing. Note the difference between this sort of structural analysis and one that attends to content by asking what the speaker's values and principles are.

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Metaphors, Characters, and Symbolic Boundary Work

Metaphors, characters, and symbolic boundaries are not integral building blocks of narrative in the way that the Labovian elements are. That is, they are found in narrative, though elsewhere as well. However, metaphors amplity the impression that a narrative makes, whereas characters and boundary work are essential to understanding narrative plots. Use of metaphors has us "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). The analyst locates metaphors by "asking the data" whether the speaker literally means what he or she says. Looking back at Ola's story, does he really expect that someone might "put a gun to [his] head"? Was he actually, physically "shitting [himself] with fear"? If the answer to these questions is no, the analyst can proceed to ask what role these surreal representations play for the tale being told. The most striking metaphors in Ola's story associate his wretched condition while on amphetamines with early childhood. Ola was in a "fetal position" at one point and had to be fed "like a baby" at another, indicating a state of complete helplessness. Other widespread metaphors for "bad trip" stories, such as being a zombie or going crazy, have very different implications. A baby cannot do any harm, which means that although this was an acutely unpleasant experience, it did not involve risk to anyone but himself. Metaphorically or not, people get characterized in narratives. Otherwise stated, narratives construct characters or person/subject/object types. The researcher can locate characters by asking who or what is driving the story forward, who is acting, and who or what is (potentially or actually) acted upon. Characters are similar across genres and standard stories, from folklore and ancient fairytales to personal narratives and political narratives. Propp (1968) describes the prototypical characters that might populate a narrative: the hero, who embarks on a transcendent quest and wins a prize, such as the princess; the villain, who battles the hero; the donor, who prepares the hero or gives him some magical object; the helper, who helps the hero in his quest; the princess, whom the hero marries, often after searching for her over the course of the story; the false hero, who seems to be a good character early on but later emerges as evil; and the dispatcher, who sends the hero off. Notwithstanding the importance of stories for characterizing who people are, characters may also be objects. Just so, in Ola's story, the villain may be seen as amphetamines. The helper is Peter; the princess or sought-after object is normality or self-control, and the hero is Ola himself. Characters forge self-understanding. Sandberg (2009) observes that street criminals often conjure themselves either as victims-of poverty, discrimination, and marginalization-or as heroes in street culture. These two rather unfortunate positions were the most readily available characters to take up, and such a narrative environment hampered their ability to get out of crime. Characters limit

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the available positions subjects can take up in discourse, and thus they influence their perceived repertoire of action. Characters are also important for narrative criminology because intentional harm to others-the paradigmatic construction of crime-appears to require a story populated, at a minimum, by a hero and a villain. As Smith (1997) observes, one of the "narrative conditions" of legitimate violence in civil society is that it be "undertaken by a quasi-heroic 'pure' figure against an 'evil other'" (p. 110). Thus, for example, Hitler's National Socialists were "lords of the earth" in virtuous struggle against their enemies (Hitler 199911925: 652). Hitler contrasted their "heroic virtue" with "cunning craftiness; the one results in Aryan states based on work and culture, the other in Jewish colonies of parasites" (Hitler 199911925: 153). Lamont and Molnar call the construction of oneself or one's group in opposition to others or other groups "symbolic boundary drawing" (Lamont and Molnar 2002). Boundary work is important for dramatic storytelling. Ola's story establishes him as a cocaine user but not an amphetamine user. Moreover, he is a responsible, self-possessed user, one who ordinarily knows his limits. Copes and colleagues (2008) found that participants in the crack cocaine economy construct a "hustler" identity for themselves by contrasting it with a stigmatized "crackhead" identity. By emphasizing being clean, having things, being cool, being criminally able, and having heart, they socially distanced themselves from those degraded others. This symbolic boundary drawing justified violence against crackheads: they did not deserve the same respect and recognition as others. Representations of selves and others, drawn from a cultural menu of subjectivities, construct the justifiable harm and the harm-worthy victim, respectively. Symbolic boundary drawing is a useful way to reframe critical criminological perspectives including conflict, labeling, and constitutive theories-where positioning some as "other" is criminogenic. Narratives that draw boundaries are the vehicles for such positioning. Functional parts, metaphors, characters, and even boundary drawing are relatively discrete elements ofthe story. We turn now to linguistic characteristics of stories that are typically more systemic, which condition harmful conduct by representing one's capacity to act-that is, one's agency. Linguistic Choices for Representing Agency

Talk of one's agency constructs responsibility for and legitimization of harm. One can communicate agency or passivity semantically and manifestly, with such statements as "I couldn't help myself." Ola signals passivity by delegating action to Peter at the start of the story ("Peter comes home with five grams of amphetamine, and 1 almost hadn't heard about amphetamine"). But speakers also use more subtle devices for constructing agency and lack thereof, including dropping subjects out of sentences, using passive or first-person plural constructions, and nominalizing activity (i.e., treating processes as entities). That is to say, speakers communicate about agency through their specific linguistic choices.

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In analyzing narratives of crime told by male prisoners in Washington DC, O'Connor (2000) attends to shades of agency that speakers communicate through such things as pronoun choice and change, verbs, and frame breaks-or stops in the reported flow of action to evaluate the action. Deflecting or passivizing structures "shift the focus from the speaker's agentive act (robbing, shooting, etc.) to his position as acted upon by the criminal justice system" (O'Connor 2000: 40); for example, the quite common statement, "I caught a charge," as opposed to statements of having committed a crime (p. 53). A more agentive self-construction is reflected in the speaker's use of irony. A man O'Connor calls Kingston states that after having served a prison sentence, "I was IN my thirty-first day in the streets, and I was IN my first bank." O'Connor offers this evaluation: "The emphasis on in and the resonance of thirty-:first day with first bank is effectively showcasing the pathetic situation he now sees in his past acts" (p. 63; emphasis in original). The protagonist's storied agency may also be conceived in relative terms. One is capable or incapable of acting in relation to other people, objects, institutions, "forces," and so on. The analyst would inventory who and what matters to the event besides the agent. These others may be benchmarks of one's agency or agents affecting one's agency. As discussed above, Ola's friend Peter is the active procurer of drugs, while Ola himself is passive and therefore somewhat innocent. Construction of agency is obviously a key aspect of stories of illicit conduct. Stories of deviant conduct that attribute responsibility to agents other than oneself may permit the behavior in future, unless the storyteller has rediscovered agency (Maruna 200 1). In that case the journey from passivity to activity may mark reform.

Narrative Genres Some narrative criminologists ask how the stories before them compare with standard types or genres. A concept from literature is that a genre assigns broad parameters of meaning to narrative with an emphasis on dramatic arc and affect. Ola's previously described "bad trip" story takes the form of a romance, with a happy ending following grave troubles. Genre can characterize either content (what is said) or form (how it is said). We can identify a genre by asking how the story we are examining compares with other stories. Such a question reveals that not only is Ola's story a romance (form), it is also a recovery story often heard in drug treatment, where a turning point in drug use is linked to extensive or particularly bad experiences with a drug (content). These are, again, similar to religious stories of repentance and salvation. McAdams (2006) observes that while redemptive stories can promote rehabilitation, recovery, good deeds, and remarkable achievements, they can also justify violence. Drawing on literary theory and especially that of Northrop Frye, Smith derived (2005) four narrative genres to explain the decision of national leaders to go to war. He found that leaders used low mimesis, tragedy, romance, and apocalyptic

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narrative genres to frame these crises. The low mimetic narrative represents life as "drab and routinized and characters (as) reliable and stoic. Actions are held to be pragmatic and constrained" (Smith 2005: 24). As such, "[i]t is a genre that sits uncomfortably with military action because it does not provide a convincing and legitimate justification for blood sacrifice" (ibid.: 25). Very different is tragedy, where emotions run high and much is at stake. But tragedy does not stimulate war any more than low mimesis does, because it emphasizes suffering and the human error that too often produces it. Romance is characterized by triumph over adversity and optimism, including "a sense that crises can be resolved without recourse to large-scale and systematic violence" (p. 26). Only the apocalyptic narrative spurs and sustains war. "When radical evil is afoot in the world there can be no compromise, no negotiated solution, no prudent efforts to effect sanctions or to maintain a balance of power" (p. 27). Smith uses this typology of genres to explain the decision of national leaders to go to war in three international conflicts of the twentieth century-the Suez crisis, the Gulf War, and the war in Iraq. Genre analysis clearly has room to grow. The well-known genres can launch inquiry, but others may yet emerge. We might find that hybrid genres are possible: for example, a tragic apocalyptic narrative. As Fairclough (1992: 125) observes, "there is not, and could not be, a determinate list of genres, styles, or discourses." In the spirit of exploration and in recognition of both the cultural rootedness and the creativity of discourse, narrative criminologists remain open to the form and substance of the stories we hear.

Coherence and Plurivocality A principal function of narratives is the unifying work that they do-that is, their contribution to coherence. By constructing a life story, we know ourselves as one person over time. In addition, by telling stories, "we seek to tie together the more disparate strands of our lives, of our history" (Kerby 1991: 105). Respectively, McAdams (2008) distinguishes two different kinds of "tying together"-synchronic and diachronic integration. Ola works to achieve diachronic integration, as he assimilates a traumatic and reckless episode into a longer life story. In his life story, he is a straight person ("And like I said, I wasn't interested in drugs"). He reconciles his bad trip with that narrative identity using the kind of discursive forms discussed earlier, such as minimization of his agency. Another sort of coherence that stories contribute to is that of the group. A collective story helps a group of people to know itself as a group. The group's story brackets individual differences in favor of collective experience and values. Whereas our stories strain for coherence, they do not necessarily achieve it and never do achieve it once and for all, because they are ever in flux, constantly updated, told and understood differently in each social space. Nonetheless, stories generally inspire action when they make sense to people, and they make sense to people when they wrap things up in a satisfying way (cf. Polletta 2006).

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Stories are generally ambiguous and open to interpretation. Scholars point to their plurivocality (Riessman 2008): they often contain several voices in dialogue with one another (Frank 2010). In Ola's story, what at first seems to be a clear point in the coda concerning abstinence in fact is a rather open-ended internal dialogue. One voice states that the experience made him avoid all kinds of drugs ("I really couldn't take anything at all"), while another voice indicates that he might use cocaine ("Yeah, I'd be inclined to"), before returning to the first voice ("a real wake-up call even about that"). The story is thus open as to what the coda "says"-and thus open as to the implications for his future behavior. One might say that Ola is hedging his bets, but we see him as exploring an unpleasant experience and trying on different meanings for that experience. A single story can be different things for the storyteller. And, of course, stories are good at being different things for different people. In this regard, ambiguity and polyvocality are resources for storytellers. They can make for stories that are good at mobilizing or inviting the empathy of others, inasmuch as they involve audiences in the interpretation of the story (Polletta et al. 2011). But these qualities can also produce stories that are difficult to recognize and believe in. They may not "ring true." The extent to which a narrative is read as coherent or polyvocal partly depends on the perspective of its audience. If enough of the story's form and content are familiar, it may be construed as unified and straightforward. Similarly, researchers can assess incoherences and multiple voices, or they may choose not to, depending on the data at hand and their theoretical inspirations (Sandberg 2013). The Storytelling Context

Stories are coproduced-tailored to the storytelling occasion and thus influenced by setting, the purpose of storytelling, and those with (or to) whom we communicate. Ola's story of traumatic amphetamine use is clearly not his creation alone. Indeed, earlier we classified the interviewer's questions as part of the story (i.e., complicating action, orientation). The interviewer first raises the issue of illegal drug use and subsequently communicates that the story is appropriate and interesting (e.g., "Yes, you probably started sweating at that point"), thereby prompting Ola to continue. In more structured research interviews, interviewers may play an even more prominent role in the story that gets told. They contribute some of its most important parts, such as the orientation, and weigh in on the meaning or significance of the story as it gets told. Ola's story would most likely have been different had the context been more formal or had he not known the interviewer-almost certainly less colorful, and possibly missing some of his self-critical evaluation as well. Ola and the interviewer were, after all, former friends who had not seen each other in several years. They were nearly the same age and had grown up together, and the interview was conducted in the interviewer's apartment. They spent some time catching up before the interview started. Notwithstanding the research protocol, which

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involved prompts geared to soliciting accounts of drug use in the context of whole lives, the two men were sharing stories to entertain each other and have a laugh. Stories of wild drinking and illicit drug use are "privileged stories" (Gubrium and Holstein 2009: 23) in encounters between "old pals." The fact that stories are coproduced has one immediate implication for research practice, which is that researchers should include as much of that context within the frame for analysis as is possible and feasible. We recommend coding the social interactions that make the storytelling possible (e.g., capture by the criminal justice system) as well as those in the immediate setting of the research. Former violent offenders in Presser's (2008) research assimilated the interviews with her into life stories of reform and related identities as morally decent. For example, Dwight, whose criminal history included rape, aggravated assault, and robbery, scripted a life story that would lead him to give back to others. When Presser asked about his future plans, he referred to the research interview (Presser 2008: 128): Interviewer: What is [it that] you want to do? Dwight:

What we doin'.

Interviewer: You want to, uh, what? Dwight:

Share the, the, the experience, and reach out an' help, an' help others.

The interview itself was part of Dwight's vision of the good life. It is quite likely that the interview occasioned such a redemptive tale, and thus that Dwight's identity came into being as a result of the interview. Similarly, Ola treats the interview as evidence of his true nature: "I can tell you because I don't do it anymore, that's why I can tell." The interview itself represents the essentialnon-amphetamine-using-Ola. In addition to investigating speakers' references to the research, the analyst can discern ways in which what the researcher says and does, in interviews as well as encounters with archival data, influences "the" story. In short, researchers should at the very least acknowledge that stories, including criminogenic stories, always bear the mark of storytelling settings and interlocutors. Ideally, they should analyze the influence of the setting besides. Such analysis compels at least three questions: What characterizes the storytelling situation, who is the story being told to, and why is it being told? Storytelling context should at least be reported in publications so that readers can determine how they might understand the stories told.

Conclusions: Toward a Narrative Understanding of Crime Narrative criminologists recognize that "the past is a selective reconstruction" (Riessman 1993: 64). Rather than viewing such reconstruction as a source of

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error, however, it is seen as conditioning future action. The basic perspective is that language is crucial in shaping and forming action. Stories "emplot lives: they offer a plot that makes some particular future not only plausible but also compelling" (Frank 2012: 10). Because we act upon our stories, stories are crucial for understanding criminal behavior. Narrative criminologists seek to draw theoretical connections between storied discourses and patterns of harmful and/ or illegal conduct. The crime-related effects of stories can be read from both their structure and content. Close studies oflanguage have played only a minor role in mainstream crim inology. Narrative crimino logists de lineate detai Is of language use, i lluminating how they forge a blameless self, a blameworthy victim, a neutral, honorable or at least inevitable harm, and so on. Analysis can entail investigation of elements or parts of narrative, linguistic (e.g., subjective and verb) choices that communicate about agency, genres of narrative, and narrative coherence. This is no exhaustive list of focal areas but rather the most common in a relatively young field. We have emphasized qualitative analysis of narrative data, but narrative criminologists can avail themselves of just about any method of doing social research that exists. That is to say, whereas all narrative criminologists use qualitative (narrative) data, they may take qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches to the data (see Franzosi 2012). They may illuminate patterns in discursive fashion, highlighting variability, or they may weigh in on the representativeness of patterns, or they may do both in mixed-methods projects. We have also emphasized causal analysis-the search for relationships between storytelling and other behavior-yet that is surely not the only path narrative criminologists may pursue. At this early stage in the development of narrative criminology, descriptive work is just as valuable. We need case studies that deconstruct the narratives of the various agents, both individual and collective, who do (and tolerate) crime and other harm. Whereas narrative criminologists are in the business of mapping out the relationships between stories and action, they understand these relationships to be reciprocal and volatile. Discourse and "life" are mutually conditioning, meaning that discourses/stories influence how we understand our experiences and our experiences influence the story. To make matters even more complicated, we seek out experiences for their "narrative payoffs" (Jackson-Jacobs 2004). That is, the desire to tell a certain self-story influences the experiences we "go for." These complex relationships between narrative and experience do not prevent us from establishing narrative effects. We are not stopped in our tracks by the everchanging nature ofthe story. Narratives are no more dynamically entwined with experience than are other, more tried-and-true research objects such as attitudes; we dare say that narrative criminologists are only more reflexive about them. Caveats aside, narrative analysis, as interpretive analysis, may call for a different approach to rigor than is typical for most criminologists. As Riessman (1993) states, "There is no canonical approach in interpretive work, no recipes

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and fonnulas, and different validation procedures may be better suited to some research problems than to others" (p. 69). Maruna (200 I) had a team of research assistants code the same narratives to monitor and improve the reliability of analysis, but other scholars will view narrative research as inappropriate for such a scheme. In this vein, Linde (1993) says of narrative analysis, "The investigator cannot hope to come up with a single correct interpretation, but can attempt to produce one or more interpretations that will be adequate for the analytic purposes of the investigation" (p. 96). The latter perspective rejects the possibility, and even the desirability, of "the" findings waiting to be discovered in the data. We are sympathetic to both views. Researchers can choose to use structured interview guides, clearly identifiable categories, and/or multiple coders. Those concerned with multiple voices and possible interpretations might opt for more traditional ethnographic approaches to data collection and analysis. Whereas the fonnertake a positivist stance that the latter eschew, in both cases rigor involves systematic and intellectually honest engagement with all the data available to the researcher.

Notes 1. 2.

We use "narrative" and "story" synonymously. For a discussion of how to solicit narratives, see Presser (201 0) and Riessman (2008).

References Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Frank, Arthur. 2010. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. 2008. "Narrative Ethnography." Chapter 12 (pp. 241-264) in S. Hesse-Biber and P. Leavy (eds.), Handbook ofEmergent Methods. New York: Guilford. Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. 2009. Analyzing Narrative Reality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hitler, Adolf. 1999/1925. Mein Kampf Translated by Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jackson-J acobs, Curtis. 2004. "Taking a Beating: The Narrative Gratifications of Fighting as an Underdog." Chapter 19 (pp. 231-244) in J. Ferrell, K. Hayward, W. Morrison, and M. Presdee (eds.), Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: Glasshouse Press. Kerby, Anthony Paul. 1991. Narrative and the Self Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Labov, William. 1972. "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax." Chapter 9 (pp. 354-396) in Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lamont, Michele, and Virag Molnar. 2002. "The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences." Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167-195. Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University Press. Maruna, Shadd. 2001. Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

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McAdams, Dan P. 2006. The Redemptive Self Stories Americans Live By. New York: Oxford University Press. McAdams, Dan P. 2008. "Personal Narratives and the Life Story." Chapter 8 (pp. 242-262) in Oliver P. John, Richard W. Robins, and Lawrence A. Pervin (eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. New York: Guilford. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage. O'Connor, Patricia E. 2000. Speaking of Crime: Narratives of Prisoners. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Polletta, Francesca. 2006. It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polletta, Francesca, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity Gardner, and Alice Motes. 2011. 'The Sociology of Storytelling." Annual Review ofSociology 37 (1): 109-130. Presser, Lois. 2008. Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Presser, Lois. 2009. 'The Narratives of Offenders." Theoretical Criminology 13 (2): I 77-200.Presser, Lois. 2010. "Collecting and Analyzing the Stories of Offenders." Journal of Criminal Justice Education 21 (4): 431-446. Presser, Lois. 2010. "Collecting and Analyzing the Stories of Offenders." Journal of Criminal Justice Education 21 (4): 431-446. Presser, Lois. 2012. "Getting on Top Through Mass Murder: Narrative, Metaphor, and Violence." Crime, Media, Culture 8 (I): 3-21. Presser, Lois. 2013. Why We Harm. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press. Presser, Lois, and Sveinung Sandberg. Forthcoming. "Narrative Criminology: What's the Story?" Chapter I in Narrative Criminology. New York: New York University Press. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Riessman, Catherine K. 1993. Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Riessman, Catherine K. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Los Angeles: Sage. Sandberg, Sveinung. 2009. "Gangster, Victim, or Both? Street Drug Dealers' lnterdiscursive Construction of Sameness and Difference in Self-Presentations." British Journal of Sociology 60 (3): 523-542. Sandberg, Sveinung. 2010. "What Can 'Lies' Tell Us About Life? Notes Towards a Framework of Narrative Criminology." Journal of Criminal Justice Education 21 (4): 447--465. Sandberg, Sveinung. 2013. "Are Self-Narratives Unified or Fragmented, Strategic or Determined? Reading Breivik's Manifesto in Light of Narrative Criminology." Acta Sociologica 56 (I): 65-79. Shuman, Amy. 2012. "Exploring Narrative Interaction in Multiple Contexts." Chapter 6 (pp. 125-150) in J. A. Holstein and J. F. Gubrium (eds.), Varieties ofNarrative Analysis. Los Angeles: Sage. Smith, Philip. 1997. "Civil Society and Violence: Narrative Forms and the Regulation of Social Conflict." Chapter 4 (pp. 91-116) in J. Turpin and L. R. Kurtz (eds.), The Web of Violence: From Interpersonal to Global. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Philip. 2005. Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, Hayden. 1980. "The Value ofNarrativity in the Representation of Reality." Critical Inquiry 7 (I): 5-27.

6 The Culture of Violent Behavior: Language, Culture, and Worldview of Prison Rape Mark S. Fleisher

Introduction The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (Public Law 108-79) (PREA) was passed by Congress to address the problem of sexual assault in American prisons, jails, and juvenile correctional centers. Based on what remains a contested premise that sexual violence is rampant in detention facilities across the United States (Beck and Guerino 2011; Donaldson 1993; Guerino and Beck 2011; Lockwood 1994; Struckman-Johnson 2000, 2002; Zweig et al. 2006; see Gaes and Goldberg 2004 for an overview), the PREA also included earmarked research funds for national studies of prison rape. Among these, there was just a single large-scale qualitative study. Fleisher and Krienert's (2009; see also 2006) The Myth ofPrison Rape: Sexual Culture in American Prisons investigated the culture ofprison sexual violence through an ethnosemantic study designed to describe and interpret the cultural semantics of prison sexual violence. The analysis was derived from linguistic data elicited in interviews with male and female prisoners in high- and medium-security prisons across the United States. Our study was predicated on the theory that culture, language, and cognition are inextricably molded into a coherent worldview, a cultural system of perceptions and interpretations of causes and effects. We did not assume a priori that the cultural meanings of sexual violence inside and outside prison are semantically congruent. Our core research question was as follows: What is the meaning of sexual violence in the sociocultural context of American prisons? Inmates' speech has been a source of data on prisons and prison rape over the decades 101

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(Clemmer 1940, Sykes 1958), but until this study, formal linguistic analysis had rarely been considered a tool relevant in prison research. Thus, our study caught many off guard. Both nonresearchers and researchers intuitively knew that, in social science, numbers are scientific-even when statistical findings have no cultural relevance-and words are worth less. In the highly politicized context of PREA, our research drew an inordinate amount of scrutiny-much of it negative and extremely personalized. Advocacy groups like Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR) had awaited empirical findings that endorsed its allegations of endemic prison rape and horrible treatment of inmates in American prisons. These groups expected that inmates would clamor to talk to interviewers and report abusive prison conditions, sadistic prison staff, and rape. Alternatively, these groups also worried that inmates would intentionally underreport sexual violence, fearing retaliation by prison administrators, managers, and guards. Correctional agencies, on the other hand, worried about vindictive prisoners lying about and inflating the frequency of prison rape. A consequence was that PREA-funded studies, in general, were closely scrutinized by national news media, advocacy organizations, elected federal officials, and social scientists at the National Institute of Justice. Our investigation in particular encountered singular scrutiny and criticism because the findings were a far cry from what stakeholders, including government officials, correctional administrators, advocacy groups, and even some researchers, had expected to read-a report expounding on the high prevalence and incidence of prison rape.] Instead of a statistical report, readers came face to face with a cultural study, which analyzed the semantics of prison inmate discourse. We learned that prison rape stories have a primary cultural function, as a linguistic mechanism that enculturates and socializes men and women inmates into prison life. Stakeholders failed to understand the theoretical foundation and goals of the research, and their lack of expertise in cultural and linguistic research, led to acerbic accusations against our integrity, objectivity, and ethics. Vehement public reactions condemned our research findings. Ours is thus a cautionary tale about the depth of professional harm that can result from a continued misunderstanding of qualitative research, generally-and cultural and linguistic analysis, specifically-particularly on such a politically charged topic. So what is ethnosemantic research? How does it provide a window into culture? How can the findings of a cultural study contribute to criminological theorizing? The term ethno- is a synonym for the concept of culture. Cultural semantics refers to people's mastery of a repertoire oflinguistic forms and meanings, which convey culture-specific interpretations within human cultures (Hymes 1970). This chapter draws on our research in The Myth o/Prison Rape, and looks carefully at the theory and methods of ethnosemantic analysis. I begin with an overview oftheories oflanguage, culture, schemata, and the function oflinguistic enculturation as a means of acquiring cultural knowledge and competence in the oral culture of prisons. Next, I illustrate the methodological processes necessary

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to derive cultural infonnation from linguistic data. 2 I describe data coding as a type of semantic analysis, and explain domain analysis and the taxonomic nature of cultural knowledge. These types of analysis are illustrated with linguistic data elicited in our ethnosemantic study of prison rape, which explains that inmates' source of knowledge about prison rape and sexual behavior derives primarily from prison oral culture's verbal storehouse ofrape and sexual violence stories. The conclusion returns to the political context of the study, and addresses fundamental conceptual flaws that result when criminologists overlook culture and language in theories of antisocial behavior and designs for crime prevention and intervention initiatives.

Culture and Language This study's theoretical and methodological foundations were situated within the broader scholarly discipline of cognitive sciences that includes cognitive psychology, computer science, cognitive anthropology, and cognitive linguistics. Empirical and theoretical advances in the conceptualization oflanguage enhanced our understanding of language as an information system (Chomsky 1968), and reinforced our theories on the role of language in shaping thought (Sapir 1927, 1949; Whorf 1956). A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that language affects speakers' subjective orientation, with vocabulary and grammar shaping the ways people perceive and conceptualize cultural experience (Friedrich 1991; Quinn 1991; Siobin 1990, 1991). This point, that language and culture are inextricably interwoven such that language affects thought and cultural interpretations, had become known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Sapir 1927). In one of my earliest prison studies, I applied an analysis of inmate speech to interpret cultural experiences of black, Hispanic, and American Indian prison inmates. When I was a graduate student in cultural anthropology and linguistics, I studied componential analysis (Goodenough 1956), ethnoscience 3 (Werner and Fenton 1973), structural analysis of mythology (Levi-Strauss 1955), the ethnography of speaking (Bauman and Sherzer, 1974), and theory and techniques of linguistic analysis-phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. I applied componential analysis-a structured technique that, like factor analysis, identifies linguistic themes-to prisoners' time tenns (Fleisher 1972). I chose prison time tenns for a cultural reason. Inside prison walls inmates are detached from American culture's annual cycle of community and personal holidays. Memorial Day weekend in prison passes as just another culturally empty series of days. Prisoners' expression- "doing AMs and PMs"-tells us that days are parsed in chunks of impersonal time. When free citizens go to work, go on vacation, and celebrate Thanksgiving, prisoners do time. Prison time can be done in many ways. Prison culture has transformed impersonal chunks of time into personal units of time which have personal meaning for individual inmates. An inmate can do hard time, do dead time, do rack time, do Dear John time, and do hole time, among other tenns. My analyses learned that inmates' cultural and ethnic

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identity infused sentence lengths-say twenty years-with instrumental and affective qualities; deemphasized absolute lengths of time; and imbued prison time with culture-specific social, functional, and emotional values. Inmates' cultural model of time was conveyed through speech molded by prison culture (Fleisher 1972). Cultural and subjective personal experiences are encoded in language (Casson 1983; see also Chomsky 1957, 1965). Ethnosemantics explores systems of cultural meaning expressed through language (Brown 1976; Kay 1969). A core premise of cultural analysis specifies that speakers of a language share a degree of coherence of cultural knowledge (Hill and Mannheim 1992). A degree of cultural coherence means that members of culture share both a common body of knowledge-a cultural blueprint-and knowledge unique to individuals' experiences. Knowledge changes from one culture to another and one person to another, and so does a cultural blueprint. Cultural research investigates knowledge people take for granted, which serves as the basis for interpretations of facts, events, and cause-and-effect relationships. Cultural research seeks to understand a culture on its own terms and explain how people use culture-specific knowledge to account for and interpret behavior. Cultural analysis seeks to uncover cognitive schemata-abstract representations of cultural knowledge about events, people, situations, sequences of events, actions, and similar constructs. Schemata Cognitive scientists have posited that schemata are mental representations of the external world generated by the cognitive processes the brain uses to categorize and store information conveyed in speech.4 Schemata are universal, in the sense that all humans create schemata, and particularistic, in the sense that members of particular societies acquire and share specific cultural schemata (Casson 1983). Schemata are conceptual abstractions that mediate between thought and verbalization, and represent knowledge about things we see and hear in the external world. Rumelhart (1980: 34) writes: Schema theory assumes that when individuals obtain knowledge, they attempt to fit that knowledge into some structure in memory that helps them make sense of that knowledge. Schema theory proposes that the individuals break down information into generalizable chunks which are then categorically stored in the brain for later recall. Schema theory is an active strategy coding technique necessary for facilitating the recall of knowledge. As new knowledge is perceived, it is coded into either a pre-existing schema or organized into a new script. Schemata are organized mental structures that allow the learners to understand and associate what is being presented to them.

Schemata store knowledge and rules of behavior that shape social interactions and influence interpretations of what people see and hear. All people who share schemas do not have an identical body of knowledge. What people know

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depends on their experiences in the community and their affi liations with social groups in particular places, and events and activities that occur in those places among those groups. Schemata come in many types, each type corresponding to forms of cultural knowledge. Object schemata, for example, organize know ledge about material things, like people, vehicles, tools, clothing, furniture, and the like. Event schemata represent activities and interactions and how events take place, such as interactions among inmate or between inmates and staff. Schemata are linked in chains, order sequences, contingency relations, and causal relations. Cognitive processes of language learning innately construct schema, and in that process of schema construction language learners acquire their community's worldview-the collective meanings derived from the interpretation of cultural schema.

Prison as a Speech Community Prisoners share schemas derived by exposure to language and life experiences both outside and inside prison. The diversity of prisoners' real-life experiences means that prisoners differ from one another and nonprisoners in schemas, language, and culture. Acquisition of prison schemata occurs in the process of thorough immersion in prison culture and exposure to prison speech. Clemmer's (1940) theory of prison culture posited that inmates acquire information necessary to adapt to a prison community through the process of prisonization, which immerses and exposes them to prison cultural knowledge conveyed in prison speech and witnessed by social behavior. Prisonization creates a community of prisoners who share a body of prison knowledge, prison vocabulary, and ways of speaking (Hymes 1974a, 1974b) unique to prison communities. Prisons are oral cultures. Inmates don't acquire knowledge of prison life by classroom learning and reading reference books and inmate handbooks. Instead, new prisoners learn prison speech and in that process add prison-specific vocabulary, expressions, and ways of speaking to speech repertoires brought into prison from the outside. That process of linguistic immersion functions to acquaint inmates with prison beliefs, attitudes, and values, as well as prescribed and proscribed prison behavior. In this way, prisons can be understood as speech communities: social groups whose members share commonalities of experience as well as commonalities in the way members use, value, and interpret language (Hymes 1973; Labov 1970). Speech communities have physical and social boundaries. Hospitals, universities, police stations, prisons and jails, and ethnic neighborhoods are examples of speech communities distinguished by physical and social boundaries. These boundaries separate social and linguistic interactions of group members inside from groups outside. In the case of prison speech communities, the result of separation over time creates a prison culture, social life, and language which

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are measurably different from outside speech communities. The oral culture of prisons is a storehouse of knowledge about prison culture and social life. Researchers' first methodological question asks: How can oral culture be retrieved in a systematic, replicable way?

Getting the Right Schemata Culture influences the meaning of words. Speech communities can use the same terms and attribute to those terms different meanings. New inmates and prison researchers encounter a similar linguistic conundrum. They both need to acquire the information necessary to formulate cultural schemata sufficient to understand behavior in prison communities. Prisonization operates over time and enables new inmates to generate cultural schemata by their exposure to daily speech situations. Prison talk exposes inmates to a world of prison life well beyond their immediate physical and temporal surroundings: prison speech molds inmates' perceptions and interpretations of real daily life as well as exposes them to talked-about past events. Indeed, we interviewed prisoners with less than a year's experience inside who recounted in detail and with proper linguistic affect events that occurred years before their imprisonment. A similar type of storytelling had occurred with prison staff (Fleisher 1989). In the practical matter of daily social interactions, what appears to be a simple conversation between two prisoners in fact requires thorough knowledge of object and event schemata; what to say, how to say it, and when to say it requires the cultural and linguistic information necessary to permit culturally acceptable social and verbal interactions. Researchers, on the other hand, do not learn prison culture and language through the enculturation process of prisonization. Instead, they have learned a system of language and cultural semantics acquired in the free community. Ethnosemantic methods analyze cultural information stored in object and event schemata retrieved by eliciting inmates' verbal responses to researchers' questions. Questions are our diagnostic tools. Yet, when researchers cross cultural boundaries-in this case, move from community culture into prison culture-we have an immediate methodological problem. What questions allow researchers access to prison schemata? How do researchers acquire prison cultural schemata sufficient to generate culturally appropriate questions? In order to understand the cultural nuances of prison speech, researchers must have knowledge of the cultural meanings to which inmate speech refers. A paradox occurs: even research questions that fall far afield from prisoners' cultural schemata will elicit inmates' responses; however, these responses will not likely offer the types of information we seek about prison culture. Simply put, culturally relevant questions are more likely to elicit culturally relevant responses. The success of our research depended on asking culturally relevant questions, which in turn, depended on acquiring knowledge of prison cultural schemata.

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Our desire to ask culturally relevant questions differed from a standard approach of prison researchers who use their own rendering of prison culture and inmate behavior as the basis of elicitation questions. That distinction (read: how inmates think vs. how researchers think) appears in the history of prison sex research. Concern about prisoners' same-sex sexual relations have been traced back to medieval writers (Geitner 2008). They attributed same-sex sexual behavior to causes similar to American prison researchers who, since the early decades of the twentieth century, have reported on bits and pieces of prison sexual behavior in different prisons in different decades. American researchers have continued to explain prison sex like it was understood in the medieval era, as an effect of harsh prison conditions and inmates' heterosexual sex deprivation. Male same-sex sexual activity has been diagnosed as psychopathic behavior (Devereux and Moos 1942) caused by prison sexual deprivation (Clemmer 1940; Fishman 1934; Sykes 1958) and has even been conceptualized as a contagious disease (Fleisher, 2013). Our contemporary research-PREA research influenced by politicized conceptualizations of government officials, correctional administrators, advocacy groups, and researchers-had to resist a priori political and cultural biases about the nature of homosexuality, male and female homosexual sex, and causes and conditions of sexual behavior and sex-linked violence. Sociolegal definitions that categorize types of sexual violence on the outside cannot be assumed to correspond to cultural meanings of sexual violence on the inside. 5 Even our use of the term rape on our interview instruments posed a serious semantic problem. The term rape-or other linguistic cues like sexual assault, coercive sex, and forced sex-meant that informants (read: inmates who volunteered to participate) could conceptualize our questions and respond through cultural schemata derived outside prison. That conceptual ambiguity could occur because inmates' knowledge about prison life acquired through prisonization does not replace or necessarily override knowledge inmates learned in the free community. In that sense, prisoners are bilingual and bicultural; they have learned a body of knowledge about how to speak and live in the free world and another body of knowledge about how to speak and live in prison. They can think in two worlds-a world inside prison and a world outside prison-that allows them to switch from one linguistic and cultural system to another. Our conundrum rested upon how to differentiate cultural knowledge acquired inside from knowledge acquired outside prison. Cultural questions ask, What is rape in prison (read: what are the distinctive properties of a behavior labeled rape)? What are the denotative and connotative meanings of prison rape (read: how does prison culture identify and interpret rape)? Before we asked those questions, we had to take step back and ask: Is rape a term used in natural speech in prison speech communities? Is the etiology of the term rape internal to prison culture, or was the term borrowed and imported into prison from the

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free community? If the term rape had been borrowed, has prison culture altered its meaning? If so, what meanings has the term rape acquired in prison culture? We knew the term rape would be virtually impossible to avoid while doing interviews, so we designed elicitation instruments to collect synonyms and near synonyms of the term rape used by prisoners, and then in interviews we used those culturally meaningful synonyms. We turned first to prison cultural experts to help us understand these cultural and semantic complexities of the cultural concept of rape in prison. Learning Cultural Schemata: The Production of Linguistic Datasets Ethnosemantics-the science of language, culture, and meaning-was well suited to explore the cultural logic (Hymes 1964, 1980) specific to prison institutions. When we began our investigation ofprison oral culture, we needed to elicit specific terms that denote people, acts, processes, and sexual relations acquired in prisonization. These terms were the building blocks of our empirical analysis of prison culture's logic on sexuality and sexual behavior. The fundamental terms we gathered are called lexical items (lexemes), which are units of semantic meaning that correspond to a word or sequence of words. Lexemes are head-words in dictionaries. We prepared for our study by compiling a basic dictionary of prison culture's sex-related lexemes. We gathered a panel of six former male and female prisoners who offered to share personal prison experiences. The panel members were asked this question: "If you all were going to study prison rape, what questions would you ask?" Among their responses, a fifteen-year veteran of men's prison said we need only ask one question: "How do you get along with your cellie?" We were taken aback at first by his response. He went on to explain that something as simple as getting along well with a cellie eventually led to one of many outcomes, among which can be a sex act between a strong and a weak cellmate. He explained the terms strong and weak as these are defined in inmate culture and then linked these terms to the modes of resolution for situations like debt, personal protection, and interpersonal social and emotional relations. In other words, the causes and conditions ofprison sexual aggression were driven by a cultural logic radically different from scholars' accounting of both in-prison same-sex relations and acts of aggression and violence. While researchers often account for sex-related aggression and violence by pointing to the deviant nature of homosexuality, sexual deprivation, and sexual psychopathology, veteran prisoners we interviewed in our study characterized inmate sexual behaviors in ways similar to our panel offormer prisoners. Veteran prisoners interpret prison sex acts by means of cultural logic learned in prison. Those interpretations differ from the cultural logic in free society. Our analysis had to avoid imposing free society's analytic explanations on prison sexual behavior. Conversations with our inmate panel steeped us in their perceptions and vocabulary of prison sexual violence learned in prison culture. We field-tested

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our first elicitation instrument in men's and women's prisons, disambiguated questions and probes, ensured these were culturally valid, and, as much as possible, equally applicable to men and women inmates. Ultimately, our study incorporated a systematic random sample of 564 male and female inmates in 30 high-security and medium-high security prisons in 10 states in each geographic region of the country. A team of three researchers interviewed inmates between February 2003 and September 2005. We met with five or more inmates a day in sessions lasting from forty-five minutes to many hours. The result was thousands of hours of data collection. The value of interviewing hundreds of inmates came from the data collected and from being steeped in thousands of hours of listening to inmates talk about the complexities of prison sexual behavior. Those interview sessions were our exposure to prison oral culture, immersed us in the process of cultural knowledge acquisition, and gave us an intuitive sense of the prison cultural dynamics and culturally valid ways to explain prison sexual culture in the voice of prisoners (see Geertz's 1973 explanation of "thick" cultural analysis). The political sensitivity of the research prohibited our use of recording devices. Thus we focused our attention on verbatim transcription of informants , responses, including, most critically, their use of lexical items in naturally flowing speech unaltered by interviewers' questions and interruptions. At any point in the interview when an inmate's discourse included sex-role or sexactivity-related terminology, these terms were recorded and highlighted. Tenns were defined, synonyms and near-synonyms logged, and examples of each tenn used in full sentences were gathered. The research team held debriefing sessions each day after interviewing when we systematically reviewed inmates' responses as these occurred in the elicitation instrument. We generated out of these sessions iterations of codes for lexical items, activities, and processes, among other semantic categories. Our analytic techniques are discussed in more detail below. Lexical elicitation was one of our primary goals. It gathered data that, when analyzed, would identify semantic building blocks of the schemata that organized prison sexual culture. We included basic cultural categories, such as tenns for sex acts, tenns for sexual pressure, tenns for same-sex relations, and terms for social decisions that lead to some type of sexual behavior. Table 6.1 enumerates our lexical elicitation questions. These open-ended elicitation questions do not impose restrictions on the infonnants' responses and do not emphasize tenns researchers have selected (cf. Moster and Jeglic 2009, p. 73). Lexical items generated by questions in Table 6.1 decreased ambiguity between an interviewer and informant by using culturally significant semantics that locate questions in an appropriate cultural schema and speech register. Data generated on aggregate for each question amassed lexical items, as well as contextual meanings and amplification, through inmates' personal experiences and institutional tales.

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Table 6.1. Lexical Elicitation Questions.

Acts

• Are there different types of sex acts? • Are there terms for each act? • Are there terms for calm sex, rough sex, really rough sex? • Are there terms for inmates who play a dominant role in sex, a passive role, and inmates who go both ways?

Activities, processes (sexual pressure)

• Are there terms for inmates who buy sex from an inmate like they would buy sex on the street? • Are there terms for inmates who trade sex for drugs like they would on the street? • Are there terms for inmates who sweat inmates who have never had sex in prison to give it up? • Are there terms for inmates who force, by violence or threat of violence, armed or unarmed, inmates to have sex with them? • What terms are used for an inmate who was forced into having sex? • What terms are used for inmates who were forced into having sex the first time and then continued to have sex? • Do inmates date one another like different-sex couples do on the street? • Do inmates date one another like same-sex couples do on the street? • List the terms used for inmates in dating relationships?

Items: rape synonymy

• Do inmates use the term rape? • What do they mean by rape? If not, what terms do they use? • Are raped inmates thought to be like rape victims on the street? • List the terms for inmates who rape inmates? • Are rapists thought to be like rapists on the street? • What do inmates you know think of inmates who rape inmates?

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• What terms are used that mean the same as street prostitute? • What terms are used that mean the same as "john?" • What terms refer to street heterosexuals who have same-sex sex inside? • What terms refer to a prison homosexual? • What makes prison homosexuals different from inmates who have sex with them? • What terms are used to refer to an inmate who has sex with a prison homosexual but isn't labeled as a prison homosexual? • What terms are used to refer to inmates who have sex with one another in a long-term relationship but are not called homosexuals? • What prison terms refer to inmates who never have sex inside?

Social processes

• Are there terms for the way inmates get involved in sex with inmates? • Are there terms for not getting involved in the sex scene inside? • Do gangs pimp non-gang members? Explain. • Are there terms for non-gang members pimped by a gang? • Are there terms (or ways of saying) that inmates buy sex from a prison homosexual like they would buy sex on the street?

Ethnosemantic Analysis You have to realize the mentality o/the inmates you're dealing with; it s one that is so unrealistic. They have their own logic and reality. -An inmate

Our research design elicited linguistic data necessary to formulate a resource grammar, a discourse grammar, and natural conversation paradigms. The term grammar, in this usage, refers to linguistic data compiled for specific analytic purposes. A resource grammar refers to the largest body of raw narrative data

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gathered in a style that elicits informants' talk about a topic. It was the primary dataset. As the research continued, the dataset expands in style, content and complexity of verbal expression. A next step constructed a discourse grammar, which includes stylistic usage of terms, when and how these terms are used, regional dialect variations, and so on. A complete discourse grammar is a cultural dictionary. Our Lexicon o{Frison Sexuality and Homosexual Sex (Fleisher and Krienert 2009, Appendix) is a cultural dictionary of prison sexual violence. A discourse grammar's cultural validity can be tested by prison researchers, and can be deconstructed into a sociocultural analysis, which we did in our ethnosemantic analysis of prison sex and social life. Ethnosemantic analysis has an ideal outcome: identification of assumptions and premises underlying inmate logic and the construction of customary rules of social life in prison. Ultimately this analysis engenders a vision of the prison culture worldview, representing the equivalent of testable hypotheses in statistical analysis. Specifically, an ethnosemantic construction of prison worldview should provide a person with sufficient knowledge and behavior rules to live in prison. Figure 6.1 illustrates a flow diagram of the process of generating a semantic analysis, or a paradigm of inductive inferences, with four analytic levels that

Figure 6.1. Analytic Paradigm ofInductive Inferences.

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utilize data from our resource grammar. Analysis Level I includes coding and text analysis; Analysis Level 2, cultural schema; Analysis Level 3, worldview, and Analysis Level 4, prison rape lore. These analytic levels represent the process of inductive inference, from coded text (Levell) to high-level abstractions and concepts (Level 4). The remainder ofthis chapter illustrates these analytic processes. Codes and Coded Text Coding texts is an empirical and replicable analytic method used to analyze narrative data (see Ryan and Bernard 2000). Complexities of cultural thought require simple mechanics to keep complex ideas well organized. Codes are that mechanism. Codes are equivalent to jigsaw-puzzle pieces. Coding creates a type of dictionary, a retrieval mechanism, which allows researchers to identify bits and pieces of cultural knowledge. Codes are ideas we assemble into patterns. Coding is a process researchers utilize to identify thought patterns characteristic of a social group, in this case, a population of prison inmates. Code patterns are analogous to hypotheses. We apply an inductively generated set of codes to interview texts, for the purpose of identifying code frequency, code-use patterns, and co-occurrences of codes. Code patterns track ideas, attitudes, and social processes and allow us to posit interpretations of the information conveyed by codes. Cultural schemas are data-driven patterns of codes comparable to an interpretive analysis of the principle components of a culture. A cultural analysis relies on interview narratives to generate codes by induction. Codes are a short-hand system that index acts, events, processes, and additional types of semantic categories. Preformed codes, or a preponderance of codes, are ill-advised. There are no simple ways to create codes or do the mechanics of coding narrative texts. Code derivation requires laborious, time-consuming, and painstaking effort. Qualitative analysis software replaces pencils and 3 x5 cards I used in previous field research but does not replace the hard work of reading and rereading and studying narrative texts. Applying codes requires a search for similar words, strings of words, meanings of terms, and semantic nuances. A search for commonalities within an initial handful of interview narratives begins the process of generating codes. Preliminary codes are tested, first applying them to a dozen interviews and then, if codes appear to label ideas properly, these can be applied to an increasingly large body of narrative data. Texts are inmates' responses to questions. For example, take this response to the question: what's the reputation of a rapist? A rapist wouldn t be looked on nicely. He'd be totally disrespected. Sayan individual come in here first time and he s weak; someone will take him under their wing and educate him. If someone came along and just took the guy off, someone would take that guy off because that s disrespectful. We all recognize that everybody was in the same boat, so we tried to keep peace. Us old guys stay with our oldfashion ways. We have inside policemen, we have our justice system too, except it s all [of us].

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I illustrated code development by highlighting significant ideas, words, word strings, social processes, and cultural nuances that would likely be used to create codes and to build higher-level abstractions (ideas) about topics, such as social control and relations between newer and older inmates. Higher-level abstractions refer to ideas and concepts constructed out of multiple sets of similar codes. Here is the excerpt again. Brackets enclose hypothetical codes. Quotation, code Rape_Reputation: A rapist wouldn't be looked on nicely. He'd be totally disrespected. [rapist_disrespected] Sayan individual come in here first time and he s weak [new inmate_weakness]; someone will take him under their wing and educate him [social suppor(JJersonal_under_the _wing]; [social control_ education_under_the-wing]. Ifsomeone came along andjust took the guy off[new inmate_rape], someone would take that guy off [inmate social control_rape_ rapist_violence_toward] because that s disrespectful [inmate social control_rape_ disrespect_to_others]. We all recognize that everybody was in the same boat [inmate social controlJecognition of], so we tried to keep peace [inmate social control_ collective effort]. Us old guys stay with our old fashion ways. We have inside policeman, we have out justice system [inmate social control_collective_effort] too, except its all [of us].

Codes applied in that text cover a range of topics, or code categories. Note that a code category (rapist) and its codes (disrespected) are used together in text analysis. A code category represents a more abstract concept than a single code. We apply codes to increased number of texts to test code validity. Codes in Table 6.2 show details about the theme, rapist reputation. These codes are sufficiently general to apply to more texts. Codes have an internal taxonomic hierarchy, which theoretically mirrors the structure of information in cognitive schema (read: documents are stored in files stored in directories). Codes [weakness] and [rape] compose the code category [New Inmate]. The relationship between codes and code categories reads: Y [codes] are attributes of X [code category], signifying that weakness is an attribute of new inmates. We asked inmates "how do rapists choose Table 6.2. Sample Code Categories and Codes. Code Category [XI

Codes [VI

New Inmate

[new_inmate_weakness] [new_inmateJape]

Social Support

[social support~ersonal_ under_the_wing] [social control_education_under_the-wing]

Inmate Attitude toward Rapist

[rapist_disrespected]

Inmate Social Control

[inmate social controlJapeJapist violence_toward] [inmate social control_rape_ disrespecCto _others] [inmate social control_recognition of] [inmate social control_collective effort]

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victims?" By asking this and related conceptual questions we did not seek to uncover whether or how often prison rape occurs. Instead, these types of questions query the cultural concept of sexual behavior inmates had acquired in the enculturation process of prisonization. The acquisition of such cultural knowledge socializes inmates and gives them the cultural tools necessary to negotiate life in prison. Inmate response: [Rapists pick] people that look young for their age. and soft and weak. They lookfor easy prey in everything. don't want to work hard ifyou don't have to, small doesn't necessarily mean he So weak.

Table 6.2 shows that the weakness code has several applications. Knowing there is a quality of [weakness], we would expect to find a quality of [strength]. Thus, if we ask why some new inmates are vulnerable while others aren't, the answer is "some are weak" or "some have weakness" and "some are strong or show strength." Then we'd comb text to find examples of weak and strong. Internal code hierarchies join similar ideas and are the initial set in cultural concept formation. A set oflogically similar ideas is a concept. Table 6.2 shows that Inmate Social Control is a concept, but more data, that is, an expanded set of codes, are necessary to argue that Inmate Social Control fits somewhere into the conceptual explanation of prison rape. It should be abundantly clear that deriving codes, creating codes, applying codes, and interpreting patterns of codes requires substantive knowledge of the topic area. Moreover, codes should emerge from text with sufficient empirical justification, to avoid researcher bias. Each code must be unambiguously defined, so we can specify differences between weak and strong. In addition, codes should be empirically measured. Code counts and co-occurrence counts within a linguistic dataset are measures of the distribution of acts, events, ideas, and processes across a resource grammar or dataset. Hundreds of interviews generate thousands of pages of narrative data. The analysis ofthose data increases in complexity and expands code lists. Code formation done well creates codes that form linkages-patterns of thought, which are logical within a specific culture, in this case, men's and women's prisons. The final product of a well-coded text links codes to specific acts, such as an older inmate "schooling" a younger inmate on the ways of prison life, and, more abstractly, to concepts, like "taking someone under the wing" as a means to facilitate informal social control. A coded text results in schemas-patterns of codes signifying social relationships governed by social norms and rules of prescribed and proscribed behavior. Culturally valid schemas make sense to a culture's participants. Social norms and behavior in one culture, like prison, can be thought of as alien, illogical, or even repulsive to people in another culture, like free society. Inmates and free people can interpret a similar sex act in be wildly different ways.

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Semantic Feature Matrixes: Moving Toward Cultural Schemata Lexical elicitation gathers narratives and descriptors for actors, acts, activities, social processes, and physical and social settings. A careful reading of discourse allows researchers to situate lexical items within social and cultural contexts. Contexts show actors' ways of participation in a variety of activities and relations among actors. Actors' interaction across social contexts and actors' participation in those contexts offer a basis for analytic induction. For example, the cultural dialogue of sexual aggression in prisons across the country identified a variety of players on the sex scene. Semantic categorization presumes that social life in human culture organizes around people, events, and social processes. In our research, player labeled a semantic category that included a wide range ofterms representing multiple contextual relationships. The two verbatim responses below are complemented by 562 more responses and create an in-depth linguistic and cultural paradigm for placing players within the context of prison sexual culture. Response 1: Sheep and lions aren 'tjustfor sex, sheep are targetsfor extortion, bootie bandits in [another state prison} with open bar cells, the doors all open at same time, this one fellow would slide into the cell and hide under the bunk and put a blanket over him and when the guy would come back from work, would get the guy, they know they'll get caught; they just want their five minutes.

In response I, the inmate uses common metaphors for culturally defined qualities of inmate victims (sheep) and aggressors (lions). Aggressors, like lions, stalk victims, lay in wait and spring when victims are least suspicious. Passive inmates, sheep, cannot defend themselves. Passives have neither physical strength nor temperament to fight off threats. Inmates' vulnerability prompted the following research question: In this culture, how do the physically vulnerable inmates seek protection? That question led into another major cultural category: ways inmates seek protection from sexual predation (N.B.: sexual predation is a cultural category and does not infer that sexual predation actually occurs). In response to that question, inmates noted that bootie bandits are a type of sexual aggressor. We learned that bootie bandit denotes male inmates who are usually middle-aged and older, have had multiple terms of imprisonment, have a continuous interest in same-sex encounters, and try to cajole or trick inmates into sexual encounters. Bootie bandits are not culturally identified as violent predators. Bootie bandits' specific type of trickery, hiding under a blanket under a bunk, occurs repeatedly in prison sex folkloric tales gathered across the country. Here is another response that places players in cultural context: Response 2: Husband, wife, that s my ho, that s my hooker, that s a term ofendearment in here. A homosexual would smile and accept that and blush. A wife is totally opposite ofa prostitute on the outside, here it reverses the praises, dudes don't want housewife, they want ho, a ho will do anything for their dude. A ho is way up and a housewife

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is down low. A ho will hustle, wash clothes, make money, in a housewife relation the husband is the provider, it's a whole different relationship. For the dominant: That's my man, husband, pimps, macks, homosexuals prefer a straight man to be their man. Diffbetween a gay male and a hetero who messes with a homo, they mightflip flop, a hetero likes the female aspect, no flip flopping but ignore their dick. Homos want the strength and security of a hetero not a gay man.

This response generated a rich social scene that includes numerous semantic categories: persons (husband, wife, ho', hooker, housewife, man, husband, pimp, mack, homosexuals, straight, gay, hetero, homo, prostitute); attributes (female aspect, strength, security, dominant); activities (flip flop, hustle); relations (provider, housewife); functions (wash clothes, make money); and affective responses (smile, accept that, blush). The process ofprisonization exposes inmates to prison linguistics (read: vocabulary items and uses of vocabulary in behavioral contexts), and stories about prison life shared by inmates and staff members. Responses 1 and 2 exemplify relations among people, events, and social processes. The nature of these relations depends on similarities and dissimilarities of distinctive features. Distinctive features are semantic distinctions people use when talking about people, events, and processes. People have attributes, events have descriptors, and processes have antecedents and consequents. Semantic features are bundled abstractions embedded in lexemes. Our analysis of the semantic category players identified fifteen types of players distinguished from one another by a distinctive combination of semantic properties. Speakers are not necessarily consciously aware ofthe distinguishing semantic features. These distinctive features are the basis for semantic codes, which highlight semantic features of people, events, and process. Table 6.3 empirically distinguishes players in a semantic feature matrix. Response 1 above provides the data. A semantic feature matrix is a worksheet that helps researchers think beyond inmates' literal responses, organize abstract concepts, keep track oftheir thinking processes, and remain mindful of free-community thinking biases that can unwittingly creep into an analysis. A semantic feature matrix starts with lexemes, which can be a single word (sheep, lion) or string of words (slide into cell, hide under bunk) which cannot be parsed into smaller units without losing meaning. Table 6.3. Semantic Feature Worksheet Matrix. Lexeme

Denotation

Connotation

Symbolism

Cultural theme

Bootie bandit, Lion

Aggressors

Strong, strength

Exploiters, Tricksters

Strong dominate the weak

Sheep

Targets of aggression

Vulnerable, vulnerability, weakness

Predation, exploitation

Domination vs. subordination

Slide into cell, hide under cell

Aggressive tactic

Stealth, cunning, manipulation

Interpersonal manipulation

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Analysis of lexemes requires semantic inferences, for denotation, inmate term, connotation, symbolism, and cultural theme. Prison culture characterizes the aggressor-victim relation with metaphors (lions, sheep), symbolic qualities of its actors (strong, weak), and antecedents of aggressive acts (debt, insult). Metaphors, symbols, qualities of actors, and event antecedents and consequents can be used as culturally induced codes. A code identifies a semantic feature inherent in events, actors, and social processes. Bundles of codes integrate to form cultural themes-the cultural schema referenced in figure 6.1. Themes comprise logically related patterns (see Bernard 1998; Bernard and Ryan 2010; Ryan and Bernard 2003), and are the threads of meaning that imbue cultural logic in narrative discourse. Validation of cultural themes comes in repetition of row values among numerous lexemes. For example, a cultural theme in Response I above (illustrated in table 6.3) identifies an exploitive relation between aggressors (strong inmates dominate or exploit weak inmates) and victims (weak, vulnerable inmates). Exploitation of the weak by the strong was a recurring cultural theme characterizing inmate social relations. Then we had to ask, What is the nature of weakness and strength? What are the behaviors of weak and strong inmates? Response 2 (and in the additional 562 interviews) helped fill empty cells in a semantic feature matrix, keeping in mind that cells might be empty because the culture has no appropriate denotative term. Some matrices can be more complete and insightful than others, and that's okay. Toiling on these worksheets illustrated how natural conversation expresses cultural content, helped us get beyond literal meanings, enabled us to stay focused on cultural semantics, and helped us avoid an inadvertent researcher bias (read: using what we thought rather than laboring to identify what inmates thought).

Domain Analysis Domain analysis has long been a mainstay of cognitive anthropology (see Spradley 1970). When inmates respond to questions like those in table 6.1, responses describe components of informants' cultural world. Components represent aggregates of cultural knowledge called domains (Weller and Romney 1994). An organized set of lexemes refers to a single cultural concept called a semantic domain (Romney et al. 1993). Domain analysis identifies the taxonomical structure of and relations among lexemes. Domains are arranged so that lower level terms are exemplars ofa superordinate category, with a domain's structure referring to the arrangement of terms relative to one another. Figure 6.2 illustrates our analysis of the domain Sexual Behavior. Domains are composed of themes; themes are composed of subthemes. Themes have a structural position in a domain and a semantic definition. The domain Sexual Behavior has two themes: straights and players. The term straights has one subtheme: down lows. The term players has four: turn-out, homosexual, gcry, and queen. Turn-out homosexuals might end up a second subtheme, because

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Figure 6.2. Sexual Behavior Domain: Taxonomic Structure and Distinctive Features.

turn-outs aren't culturally equivalent to homosexual players. Distinctive features are noted in brackets. Distinctive features apply [+] or don't apply [-]. A semantic definition of straight is [- same-sex]. A down-low straight has samesex relations, although ostensibly hidden [- open] from public view [+ straight, + same-sex, - open]. Aggression transforms a straight into a turn-out homosexual [+ same-sex, + open, + aggression]. Within the subtheme homosexual, a gay and a queen share features [+ same-sex, + open] and are distinguished by the way they present themselves [+ persona] by degrees of culturally defined aesthetic characteristics of costuming, speech, speech mannerism, and gait. Figure 6.2 does not include bootie bandits. Prison culture does not classify bootie bandits as homosexuals even though bootie bandits have same-sex sex. The distinction between gays and bootie bandits require further semantic refinement and additional semantic features:

• •

Bootie Bandit [- homosexual, + aggressive, + manipulative] Gays [+ homosexual, - aggressive, - manipulative]

The difference appears in culturally defined cognitive distinctions measured by semantic features that inmate culture accepts as prescribed behavior. Cultural semantics seeks to identify those semantic similarities with domain analysis. Distinctive features analysis, a component of domain analysis, forces empirical analysis. In the voice of an inmate, aggressive transformation of a straight into a homosexual sounds like this: "they done turned you out and you liked it so you just keep looking for it." Empirical analysis of that statement looks like this: straight [+ straight, - same-sex] or a down-low straight [+ straight, + same-sex, - open] transforms into homosexual [+ same-sex, + open] or a turnout [+ same-sex, + open, + aggression]. When we consider

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sexuality from an outsider's perspective, the logic of prison sexual culture seems contradictory, with a down-low who has same-sex sex considered straight. In that instance and others, we interpreted inmates' sexual behavior through their culture's semantic lens on sexual behavior. Lexeme analysis was an empirical step that identified distinctive types of inmate sexuality and semantic features of prison culture's logic on inmate sociosexual behavior. Inmates and staff members have been prisonized and acquired prison culture's logic on sexuality and sexual behavior (see Fleisher and Shaw 2001). Prison culture's range of sexual categorizations depends on both prison inmates' and correctional staffers' cultural assessment of inmate sexuality and sexual behavior. For example, prison culture's logic on sexuality allows inmates to change sexuality over time with impunity. When a sexuality shift occurs it happens without condemnation of the inmate whose sexuality has shifted. Consider this example culled from interviews. A male inmate comes into prison straight. In two weeks he "gets turned out." In another month he displays aesthetic characteristics of a gay homosexual. Later he displays himself as a queen. Sexuality and sexual behavior in the context of prison sexual culture are malleable in the minds of inmates and correctional staff. That fact revealed itself through cultural domain analysis. Prison Folklore All groups of people who share a common core of traditions, gestures, slang, and ways of talking share folklore (Dundes 1965). I learned as a graduate student in cultural anthropology that the fiat-everything informants say is folklore until proven otherwise-was a useful interpretive perspective in doing fieldwork in nonwestern, non literate cultures where, for example, people can believe that disgruntled souls of dead ancestors cause physical illness in their living relatives. The expressive culture of prisons embraces an amalgam of facts, fantasies, and creative thinking. In our study, natural conversation paradigms were revealed in recurrent patterns oftypes of speaking (gossip, hearsay) and speech content (types of sexual violence). The most common paradigm included undocumented, unobserved tales about sexual violence that occurred at an unspecified time in the distant past. An exemplar appears in the folkloric cultural figure of Boxing Betty (see Box 1), who appeared either by name or activity in men's prisons across the country, as did the similar folkloric figures of Lick 'Em Lenny, Brutus, and Purple Passion. Folkloric stories ofthese cultural characters might be grounded in the social reality of a distant past or can be truly fictional creations of active imagination. In telling tales of these folkloric characters, fact or fantasy doesn't matter. The hallmark features of tales about these folkloric characters include sexrelated behavior so distorted, twisted, and exaggerated that listeners recognize the fantastical nature of these tales and go on to laugh and enjoy the sexual humor as if they were listening to Boxing Betty tales at a comedy club. The

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storytellers, like stoic comedians, tell these tales as if these were true, the way parents tell children that Santa will slide down a chimney with gifts if they have been well-behaved boys and girls. Inmates told us they actually were acquainted with Boxing Betty, which wasn't surprising. Prisonization acquaints inmates with folkloric tales at the moment they enter prison and hear the first time that Boxing Betty eagerly awaits their arrival in his cell block or plans to greet them on the Big Yard. Folkloric tales convey critical information about inmates' adaptation to the potential dangers of prison life, and through these tales inmates acquire a prison rape worldview. Box 1. Boxing Betty Inmates told us tales about the antics of Boxing Betty. In most versions of Boxing Betty, he had been a professional boxer, who now stands tall as an on-the-yard bodybuilder. He does not look like a novice inmate's image of a prison homosexual; Boxing Betty is an aggressive homosexual prone to extreme violence ifhe doesn't get his way. Boxing Betty, the tales go, enjoys giving young, weak inmates blow jobs. His request can be rebuked but only at the peril of an unsuspecting inmate. Tales of his antics were repeated across the United States in dozens of prisons separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles. Boxing Betty was a regular old dude, four dudes raped him in the shower at old [OTHER STATE PRISON] before they tore it down so he worked out and started lifting weights and came back five years later and raped and beat them up every single one ofthem; he got them back. I was nine when this happened. He's gay now but he made them suck his dick; he's considered a legend, he's a cool person you would never know. We used to have this one legend that this guy called Boxing Betty, a homo well-known. He used to box when they had the boxing program. He liked taking it both ways, and if he seen someone he liked that he wanted sex with, he'd beat them up and force them to fuck him in the ass.

The majority of inmates laughed at Boxing Betty's antics. Those inmates knew he was a folkloric character of prison culture. A few inmates, however, swore they personally knew Boxing Betty or knew where he was imprisoned. Boxing Betty, I met him, he is not to be fucked with, met him in [UNIT NAME] a year and a haIf ago; he lived up to his name; he targeted young guys when he was out of prison; he would beat you up until you would let him suck your dick or have anal sex with him. He learned from his ways. He wentto [OTHER STATE PRISON] or [OTHER STATE PRISON].

Boxing Betty tales tell us that if you prejudge a man's sexual orientation by his physique then you can find yourself in serious trouble; if you prejudge any man by a sexual label then you can be quite mistaken and get into trouble; if you are approached and sexually propositioned, then fighting or arguing or giving in are probably not good strategies. Other versions of rape lore combine physical strength, fighting ability, and homosexuality. Folklore figures exemplify this combination of traits and illustrate the strength of homosexuals. (Source: Fleisher and Krienart 2009: 58).

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Qualitative researchers' theories and analyses are grounded in what people say. The use of speech as data raises the following questions: What infonnation does speech convey? On what reasoned basis do we interpret infonnation in stories people tell us? Researchers' literal interpretation of Boxing Betty narratives can suggest that American prisons are places of chronic sexual violence, which attests to the abject failure of prison governance-prisons allow a free-for-all of sexual violence. Our cultural interpretation reveals a contrary message: Boxing Betty and other characters are part of a pantheon of violent homosexual folk characters that can be interpreted as stories-with plot lines, familiar settings, and specificity of outcomes of events (Polletta et al. 2011). These stories carry a broader message about the nature of prison life and individual inmates' roles in daily prison happenings. Prison folklore talks about prison goings-on, assesses incidents and events, and recommends prescriptive and proscriptive courses of action in a range of customary inmate situations (how to handle sexual advances; an offer to exchange illegal drugs for sex). Analysis of sex-related narratives finds that cultural variables influence inmates' collective decision about whether a sex act was rape. Variables include: cultural motives (debt repayment); antecedents and consequents of a sex act; sexual predators' and rape victims' personal attributes, including their preimprisonment personal and sexual history; and an inmate audience's shared perception of an alleged rapist's and rape victim's pre-sex act behavior. These cultural variables influence inmate culture's interpretation of a sex act: Was it rape? Or, was it some other type of sex act? Cultural questions have no wrong answers (D' Andrade 1981). In cultural analysis, how do we know the validity of inmates' knowledge? When inmates are asked to name types of sexual behavior and actors in a prison sex scene, we presume that sex-related terms are limited in number, that prisoners share complementary subsets of the total set of sex-related terms, and that what prisoners know depends on the nature of their personal experiences. The cultural validity of inmates' responses depends on concurrence of inmates' terms and explanations. The range of lexical variability within the sample of 564 inmates included identical tenns, synonyms, and near-synonyms. Abstract questions (do prison staff protect inmates from sexual violence?) generated wider response variability, because inmates' pre- and in-prison experiences differ widely. Yet, narratives elicited from 564 male and female prisoners in 10 states and 30 prisons uncovered a coherent, shared, and pervasive body of cultural knowledge about prison sex, sex-related behavior, and culturally detennined ways to distinguish sexual violence from other types of sexual behavior. Prisonization will transmit that knowledge to new generations of inmates who will hear stories about Boxing Betty and other characters in stories about prison sex. Prison folklore can interest researchers who conduct statistical studies ofthe incidence and prevalence of prison rape. We did not collect data necessary to do statistical research on sexual violence, yet the topic of rape prevalence recurred in folklore. Commonly repeated expressions like "it's [rape] gotta be happening somewhere,"

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"there isn't any rape," and "it [rape] used to happen but now it doesn't" join dozens of folk expressions about locations where rape does or did happen and hints at its frequency. The interview excerpt below illustrates a familiar prison sex story-that an inevitable consequence of imprisonment is prison rape. Interviewer: How many prison rapes have you seen firsthand? Inmate:

None.

Interviewer: How many prison rapists have you known? Inmate:

None.

Interviewer: How many prison rape victims have you known? Inmate:

I knew a few dudes but they liked to be taken and that kind of sex looks like rape.

Interviewer: How many friends do you have who have seen firsthand a prison rape? Inmate:

None.

Interviewer: Have you ever overhead an incident that could have been a rape? Inmate:

I heard things but rape could sound like assault and murder.

Interviewer: So you cannot be sure what you heard was a rape? Inmate:

I can't be sure.

Interviewer: If you had to tell outsiders-like folks who don't know much about life inside a prison-how often prison rape happens, what would you say? Inmate:

T'd say it happens a lot.

Interviewer: If you put a percentage on "a lot" what would that percentage be? What percentages of inmates were raped in your experience of fifteen years in prison? Inmate:

I'd say about 70 percent.

Interviewer: You just said you have never seen a rape or know anyone who has seen rape or known a rapist or a rape victim. How can you say that 70 percent of inmates are raped? Inmate:

Hey, it's [rape] got to be happening somewhere.

The inmate speaker tells the rape story as if the ubiquity of prison rape has behavioral versus cultural reality. That prison rape story seems real to listeners. Inmates had heard about prison rape long before they had been arrested and housed in county lock-ups over months or years. The longer men and women remain injail and prison, the greater their exposure and familiarity with prison rape stories (Fleisher and Krienert 2009). In this instance, the storyteller had no first-hand knowledge of incidents of prison rape and yet insisted those incidents occurred. His tale confirmed only the omnipresence of rape stories. Was Boxing Betty a flesh-and-blood inmate who had done time in dozens of American prisons? Who knows? Boxing Betty was and continues to be a real character in the folklore of prison sexual culture.

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That interview and tales about Boxing Betty illustrate the verbal transmission of folklore and the power of prisonization. Verbal prisonization includes folkloric accounts of sexual-related situations and descriptions of new inmates watching what happens in dominoes and card games and exchanges of commissary goodies, each of which can be a situation inmates commonly link to sexual exploitation. Generations of inmates add to, modity, twist, reinterpret, exaggerate, and dramatize sex folklore. Knowledge of prison sex folklore slowly becomes one thing prisoners everywhere have in common (Fleisher and Krienert 2009). Prison Rape Lore and the Prison Worldview

Stories about sex and sexual violence compose prison oral culture, which conveys cultural lessons about daily life in prison, information inmates need to know about living in prison, and prescriptive and proscriptive rules of social behavior among inmates and between inmates and staff. Rape stores are rife with life lessons aimed directly at inmates: if you borrow, pay your debts; be respectful of others' personal space and physical space (cell or dorm space); don't look at someone's sex partner or physically touch property that doesn't belong to you; mind your own business; and, you don't have to get into the sex scene-say "no." These life lessons occur in conjunction with a verbal warningrape is inevitable, particularly if you violate the rules of inmate decorum. That warning not only gets new inmates' unabated attention (Fleisher and Krienert 2009: 125), it also comes with a calming disclaimer: prison rape happens in other prisons but doesn't happen here in this prison; and, prison rape used to happen but doesn't anymore. Prison sex folklore represents a repository of cultural knowledge. Prison rape lore is the primary vehicle of the transmission of culture-specific knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and interpretations of prison social life and sexuality, including sexual violence. When we understand the cultural meaning ofrape lore in prison social life, we have interpreted prison rape within the epistemology of cultural relativism, which reveals how prisoners perceive and interpret their world. In a confined community of convicted felons, prison social life operates well if community participants (inmates and staft) share a consensus of knowledge and rules of behavior. That message appears in the coded narrative text [Quotation, Rape_Reputation], which illustrates that inmates deliberately attempt to keep peace at an individual and a group level, and that rapists violate individual and group harmony. Sex folklore insists that rapists are disrespected by peer inmates; rapists' behavior falls outside prescribed rules for peaceful behavior; and rapists will be punished if their disruptive behavior continues. Inmates' deliberate attempts to protect interpersonal and intergroup harmony regularly reappear in interview narratives. Inmates' efforts to maintain social order on behalf of the public good emerged as a dominant cultural theme. Inmate culture has a strong sense of public good, prescribes inmates' prosocial prison behavior, and embraces

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attitudes and beliefs that maintain a relatively peaceful, nonviolent institution. The folkloric image of the Rapist represents a contrary person who violates weak inmates' physical well-being and in turn also violates everyone's social well-being. The unmistakable thematic irony in prison sex folklore is inmates' cultural expectation of a peaceful and calm way of life and their willingness to commit violence to achieve it. That expectation is conveyed by themes in a communal response to the Rapist: peace benefits everyone; violence benefits no one; peace will be achieved by killing the Rapist. Conclusion: Language, Culture, and Crime

Criminological theory and cultural anthropology make strange bedfellows. Or do they? So it would seem by the rancorous political attacks against our ethnosemantic investigation of prison rape. Accusations ranged from claims that it was unscientific to assertions that I was a deeply biased apologist for sadistic prison guards. Deep misunderstandings ofthe purpose, goals, methodological strategies, and rigor of ethnosemantic cultural research-and the belief that statistically significant outcomes, even without cultural significance, are the "science" in social science-deemed our study as unnecessary or worse. But consider the following: Anthropology and sociology (and thus American criminology) had a common origin in the Chicago School. From the 1890s to 1920s, a joint venture of the departments of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago were home to key figures in American anthropology (Wilcox 2004). Edward Sapir, an American anthropologist and linguist, trained under Franz Boas at Columbia University, joined the Chicago School in the 1920s and influenced notables like Robert Redfield, who championed the concept of folk societies (1941, 1957). The mutual influence of anthropology and sociology appears in Sellin's (1938) seminal essay on Culture Conflict and Crime. In it, he defines culture conflict as "a conflict of conduct norms ... [that] arise as a result of a process of group differentiation within a cultural system" and argues that "we must establish in the persons or groups studied ... the existence of a norm conflict within personality, within a cultural group, or between norms of two groups" (98). The union of the concepts of culture, culture conflict, personality, cultural systems, conduct norms, and the etiology of group conflict in norm violations heralded the study of deviance in anthropology and crime in sociology. Over the past century, the concept of culture lost its theoretical power in the sociological study of crime. Instead, narrowly crafted theories seek culture-free causes and conditions of criminal behavior. As a consequence, criminological theories account for statistical outcomes but cannot explain human behavior (Western and Jackman 1994). Theories absent of culture's effects on human thought raise a question: Can culture-free theories of behavior explain the behavior within a species whose survival over hundreds of thousands of years had depended on cultural and language learning? Culture-free theories leave

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behind only the thinnest plausible explanations of complex behavior, offer no platform to transform statistical findings into new information about behavior, and have no basis for the interpretation of causes and conditions of behavior within human communities. Why should culture and language impel criminologists' rethinking about human behavior? While criminologists have looked past the complexities Sellin identified-culture, language, culture conflict-and have overlooked theories of mind, like frame and schemata theory, criminaljustice systems have run headlong into the consequences of culture conflict across cultural and linguistic boundaries. High rates of imprisonment of racial and ethnic minorities and whites who represent minority subcultures mean that lawmakers and lawbreakers see the world, to some degree, through culturally distinct lenses. Social science relies on a precise lexicon. Culture is no longer just a fuzzy idea. Cultural anthropology gives the concept of culture a conceptual definition, like the one used in this chapter-a body of knowledge and rules of behavior learned through enculturation-and empirical methods to measure cultural consensus (Weller 2007). There are formal mathematical models that measure semantic domains within and between cultures (Romney 1983). A sign of promise appears in the recent return of the culture concept in sociology. "[A]cross the social sciences, frustration with the limits of quantitative methods that are limited to making claims about statistical associations has revived interest in understanding causal processes and mechanisms" best understood through the investigation of culture (Small 2011: 74; Young 20 I 0). Prison folklore also fits into a bigger picture ofthe complexities of human culture. Cultural ethnosemantics finds that prison rape stories are a primary cultural mechanism for enculturation and socialization of men and women into prison life. Prison rape tales heighten inmates' awareness oftheir physical and social environment while simultaneously proffering the culture and linguistic tools necessary to live safely in prison. Rape stories do more. Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead's (2001) pioneering studies of culture and personality had shown that cultures' folklore and numinous symbols appear in religions and expressive culture, such as stories. Folkloric tales are psychological projections of a group's collective joy and agony transferred unconsciously from childhood to adulthood (Lillard 1998; Vedder et al. 2006; Whiting 1963). In our research, those projections appear in prison expressive culture. Prison rape stories are metaphoric expressions, mythic representations of inmates' painful lives. These stories are hard to ignore. Stories frighten, heighten emotions, and call attention to the agony and suffering criminologists report in statistical form, that children and adolescents suffer physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and that these abused and neglected children, unless diverted, are highly likely to end up in prison. How does study of culture, language, and folklore relate to criminological theory? In their current iterations, criminological theories are applied

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generally to social groups, irrespective of groups' culture and language, and in doing that, narrowly crafted theories seek causes and conditions of criminal behavior in a sterile environment, seemingly untouched by human hands. Theories absent of considerations of diversity in language and culture's effects on thought and behavior lead researchers to a conundrum. How can theories of human behavior explain prosocial and antisocial behavior without consideration of the sociocultural, linguistic context of actors' enculturation and socialization? Culture-free theories applied in crime prevention and intervention programs are based on the assumption that all humans share similar cultural expectations that propel them along a path from birth to death. Culture-free programs can be replaced by culturally relevant intervention and prevention initiatives, which are especially important among youth with low education levels (Campinha-Bacote 2002). Quantitative and qualitative social sciences hold the same objective: to clarify why people do what they do. Cognitive linguistic anthropologists describe and analyze what's heard, nothing more, nothing less. Ethnosemantic research searches for cultural and semantic patterns in what people say. Shared patterns of thought and speech, even in communities like American prisons, create a cultural reality. How we integrate cultural and linguistic methods into criminological research has yet to be worked out. The first step requires conscious recognition and deliberate action, so that anthropology and criminology can again find common ground. Acknowledgements This research was funded by the National Institute of Justice, grant number: 2003-RP-BX-1 001. Opinions expressed in this document do not represent the official position or policies of the National Institute of Justice. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

In an ironic twist, long before data collection even began, politicians and advocacy groups alleged that the study would be tainted because I had worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in the late 1980s and early I 990s. As a paradoxical result, we were not even permitted to question inmate interview volunteers about their personal experiences with rape victimization or perpetration. Regardless, research findings were vilified for not addressing the incidence and prevalence of prison rape. A thorough summary of this research, along with elicited interview data, are available at: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSRlstudies/4556. Ethnoscience and ethnosemantics are scholarly products of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which sought to define the theoretical relationship among language, thought, and culture with scientific methodologies (see Goodenough 1956). I use the concept of schema as a heuristic device in order to explain the relationships between language, culture, thought, and behavior as those relationships were debated at that time ethnosemantic methodologies arose. Schema theory, one among numerous cognitive theories on language acquisition, posits a systematic conceptualization of language learning by the process of induction. Language acquisition

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Qualitative Research in Criminology theories are constrained by empirical conditions posed by the fact that humans form valid generalizations of language spoken in their communities on the basis of finite samples of speech heard in the first few years of life. Formal models of language learning have been posited in mathematical linguistics and by modeling language acquisition on mechanistic models of cognitive simulation used in computer models of language acquisition. Pinker's 1979 seminal paper summarizes theoretical arguments on language acquisition, mathematical models, and computer simulations of language acquisition. The terms homosexual and rape used in free communities of American culture's sociolegal society have cultural denotations and semantic connotations different from the same terms used in prisons by inmates. The controversy alluded to earlier can be explained, in its simplest form, by prison outsiders' failure to grasp the idea that the same terms can and do have different cultural meanings in different speech communities.

References Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. The Ethnography o/Speaking. New York: Cambridge University Press. Beck, Allen J., and Paul Guerino. 2011. Sexual Victimization Reported by Adult Correctional Authorities, 2007-2008. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Washington, D.C. Bernard, H. Russell. 1998. 'Text Analysis." Handbook in Cultural Anthropology, 613. Bernard, H. Russell, and Gary W. Ryan, eds. 20 I O. Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches. New York: Sage. Brown, Cecil H. 1976. "Semantic Components, Meaning, and Use in Ethnosemantics." Philosophy o/Science, 43: 378-395. Campinha-Bacote, Josepha. 2002. 'The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services: A Model of Care." Journal o/Transcultural Nursing, 13(3): 181-184. Casson, Ronald W. 1983. "Schemata in Cognitive Anthropology." Annual Review 0/ Anthropology, 12: 429-462. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ---.1965. Aspects o/the Theory o/Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. (1968). The Sound Pattern 0/ English. New York: Harper & Row. Clemmer, Donald. 1940. The Prison Community. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. D'Andrade, Roy Goodwin. 1981. "The Cultural Part of Cognition." Cognitive Science, 5: 179-195. Devereux, George, and Malcolm C. Moos. 1942. "The Social Structure of Prisons, and the Organic Tensions." Journal o/Criminal Psychopathology, 4: 306-324. Donaldson, Stephen. 1993. 'The Rape Crisis behind Bars." The New York Times. December 29. Retrieved from: Academic OneFile. Web. Dundes, Alan. 1965. "The Study of Folkore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation." Journal 0/American Folklore, 78: 136-142. Fishman, Joseph F. 1934. Sex in Prison: Revealing Sex Conditions in American Prisons. New York: National Library Press. Fleisher, Mark S. 1972. 'The Possible Application of Ethnosemantics to Prison Argot." Anthropological Linguistics 14,213-19. - - - . 1989. Warehousing Violence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. - - - . 2013. "Homosexuality as Pathogen: A Historically Informed Critique of the Theories of Sexual Violence in Prison as Manifested in the Prison Rape Elimination Act of2003." Open Journal o/Social Science, 1(2): 46-51.

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Fleisher, Mark S., and Jessie L. Krienert. 2009. The Myth ofPrison Rape: Sexual Culture in American Prisons. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fleisher, Mark S., and John R. Shaw. 2001. "Celibacy in American Prisons: Legal and Interpretive Perspectives." Pp. 229-245 in Sandra Bell and Elisa J. Sobo eds., Celibacy, Culture, and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Celibacy. University of Wisconsin Press. Friedrich, Paul. 1991. "Polytropy." Pp. 17-55 in James W. Fernandez (ed.), Beyond Metaphor: The TheOlY ofTropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gaes, Gerald G., and Andrew L. Goldberg. 2004. Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature. Washington, DC: National Institute ofJustice. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" Pp. 3-30 in The Interpretation of cultures: Selected Essays. NY: Basic Books. GeItner, G. 2008. The Medieval Prison: A Social History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goodenough, Ward. H. 1956. "Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning." Language, 32: 195-216. Guerino, Paul and Alan J. Beck. 2011. Sexual Victimization Reported by Adult Correctional Authorities, 2007-2008. January 2011, NCJ, 231172. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Hill, Jane H., and Bruce Mannheim. 1992. "Language and Worldview." Annual Review ofAnthropology, 21, 381-406. Hymes, Dell. (1964). "A Perspective for Linguistic Anthropology." Pp. 92-107 in S. Tax (ed.), Horizons ofAnthropology. Chicago, IL: Aldine. - - - . (1970). "Linguistic Method of Ethnography." Pp. 249-325 in P. Gavin (ed.), Method and Theory in Linguistics. The Hague, NL: Mouton. - - - . (1973). "Introduction." Pp. 3-58 in Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York, NY: Random House. - - - . 1974a. Foundations in Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. - - - . 1974b. Ways of Speaking. Pp. 433-451 in R. Bauman and 1. F. Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography ofSpeaking .New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. - - - . 1980. Language and Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays. Language and Ethnography Series. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Kay, Paul. 1969. Some Theoretical Implications ofEthnographic Semantics 24. LanguageBehavior Research Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley. Labov, William. 1970. The Study ofLanguage in its Social Context. New York, NY: Springer. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. "The Structural Study of Myth." The Journal of American Folklore, 68, 428-444. Lillard, Angeline. 1998. "Ethnopsychologies: Cultural Variations in Theories of Mind." Psychological Bulletin, 123( I): 3-32. Lockwood, Daniel. 1994. "Issues of Prison Sexual Violence." Pp. 97-102 in Michael C. Braswell, Reid H. Montgomery, Jr., & Lucien X. Lombardo (Eds), Prison Violence in America. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Mead, Margaret. 2001. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Moster, Aviva N., and Elizabeth L. Jeglic. 2009. "Prison Warden Attitudes toward Prison Rape and Sexual Assault: Findings since the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)." The Prison Journal, 89: 65-78. Polletta, Francesca, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gharitty Gardner, and Alice Motes. 2011. "The Sociology of Storytelling." Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 109-130. Prison Rape Elimination Act, 42 § 15602-15609 U.S.c. 2003.

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Quinn, Naomi. 1991. "The Cultural Basis of Metaphor. Pp. 56-93 in James W Fernandez (ed.), Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Redfield, Robert. 1941. The Folk Culture ofthe Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - - - . 1957. 'The Universally Human and the Culturally Variable." The Journal of General Education, 10: 150-160. Romney, A. Kimball, Susan C. Weller, and William H. Batchelder. 1983. "Culture as Consensus: A Theory of Cultural and Informant Accuracy." AmericanAnthropologist, 88: 313-338. Rumelhart, David E. 1980. "Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition." Pp. 33-58 in Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer (eds.), Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension: Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum. Ryan, Gery W, and H. Russell Bernard. 2000. "Data Management and Analysis Methods." Pp. 769-802 in Norman K. Denzin, and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Methods, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Ryan, Gery W, and H. Russell Bernard. 2003. 'Techniques to Identify Themes." Field Methods. 15: 85-109. Sapir, Edward. 1927. "Speech as a Personality Trait." American Journal of Sociology, 32: 892-905. ---.1949. "Sound Patterns in Language." Language, 1,37-51. Sellin, Thorsten. 1938. "Culture Conflict and Crime." American Journal of Sociology, 44: 97-103. Slobin, Dan T. 1990. "The Development from Child Speaker to Native Speaker." Pp. 233-256 in James W Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt (eds.), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - - - . 1991. "Learning to Think for Speaking: Native Language, Cognition, and Rhetorical Style." Pragmatics, 1: 7-26. Small, Mario Luis. 2011. "How to Conduct a Mixed Methods Study: Recent Trends in a Rapidly Growing Literature." Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 35-86. Small, Mario Luis, David J. Harding, and Michele Lamont. 2010. "Reconsidering Culture and Poverty." The ANNALS ofthe American Academy of Political and Social Science. 629: 6-27. Spradley, James P. 1970. You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. NY: Little, Brown and Company. Struckman-J ohnson, Cindy and David Struckman-J ohnson. 2000. "Sexual Coercion Rates in Several Mid-Western Prison Facilities for Men." The Prison Journal. 80: 379-390. ---.2002. "Sexual Coercion Reported by Women in Three Mid-Western Prisons." The Journal ofSex Research, 39: 217-277. Sykes, Gresham M. 2007. The Society ofCaptives: A Study ofa Maximum Security Prison. Princeton University Press. Vedder, Paul, Gabriel Horenczyk, Karmela Liebkind, and Goele Nickmans. 2006. "Ethno-Culturally Diverse Education Settings; Problems, Challenges and Solutions. Educational Research Review. 1: 157-168. Weller, Susan C. 2007. "Cultural Consensus Theory: Applications and Frequently Asked Questions." Field Methods, 19: 339-368. Weller, Susan c., and A. Kimball Romney. 1994. Systematic Data Collection. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Werner, Oswald and Joan Fenton. 1973. "Method and Theory in Ethnoscience or Ethnoepistemology." Pp. 537-578 in H. Russell Bernard (ed.), A Handbook ofMethods in Cultural Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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Western, Bruce and Simon Jackman. 1994. "Bayesian Inference for Comparative Research." American Political Science Review, 88: 412-423. Whiting, Beatrice B. 1963. Six Cultures: Studies ofChild Rearing. Beatrice B. Whiting & Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard University (eds.) New York: John Wiley. Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings ofBenjamin Lee Whorf, (lB. Carroll, ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Wilcox, Clifford. 2004. Robert Redfield and the Development ofAmerican Anthropology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Young, Alford A. Jr. 2010. "New Life for an Old Concept: Frame Analysis and the Reinvigoration of Studies in Culture and Poverty." The ANNALS of the American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science. 629: 53-74. Zweig, Janine M., Rebecca L. Naser, John Blackmore, and Megan Schaffer. 2006. Addressing Sexual Violence in Prisons: A National Snapshot of Approaches and Highlights ofInnovative Strategies. Final Report, Urban Institute, Washington, DC.

Part III Positionality and the Study of Criminalized Social Worlds

7 Being Trusted with "Inside Knowledge": Ethnographic Research with Male Muslim Drug Dealers Sandra M Bucerius

Ethnographic research on criminological topics with male populations is most often conducted by male researchers. Apparently, there is still a widely held belief among those involved in this type of research that it is easier for male researchers to penetrate the often violent and male-dominated world of drug dealers, gang members, and others engaged in illicit acts. Thus, it is not surprising that many of the contemporary qualitative projects on people involved in illicit acts are conducted by male researchers on male participants (see, for example, Bourgois 2003; Brotherton and Barrios 2004; Contreras 2012; Jacobs 1999; Rios 2011; Sandberg and Pedersen 2009; Venkatesh 2008). Being different from one's research participants is often viewed as a researcher liability, while being a woman engaged in ethnographic research of male drug dealers and gang members is perceived as an even more challenging burden to overcome. Some female researchers who have conducted research on predominately male research participants have contributed to our perception that criminological research in this area is better left to male researchers. For example, Patricia Adler comments in her ethnography on upper-level drug dealers that she would not have been able to gain access to her research participants without her husband as a research partner (Adler 1993). From feminist ethnographers studying male-dominated worlds outside ofthe criminological area, we know they come across extreme power struggles and gender discrimination in the research process, which suggests that these aspects are not only integral to research with men engaged in illicit social worlds but a

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more general phenomenon when female researchers study male research populations (Arendell 1997; Grenz 2003; Pascoe 2007). Building on five years of ethnographic research with fifty-five second-generation immigrant male drug dealers between the ages of sixteen and thirty-one (mean age twenty-three) with guest-worker backgrounds l in Frankfurt, Germany, I will focus on (1) how my gender and ethnicity-while clearly being different from my research participants-became a tool for developing a better understanding of the population under study; and (2) how the ethnographic data I could gather as being "an outsider trusted with inside knowledge" contributes to our theoretical understanding of immigration and crime, in particular as it relates to the choices my subjects made with respect to their drug-dealing activities. In my larger study on which this chapter is based, I examined the relationship between immigrant status (particularly with guest-worker background), social exclusion, and drug dealing, particularly focusing on how my research participants' opportunities in the formal economy were significantly altered by the way institutions (like the German public education system) and German society operate, while at the same time providing the young men with rationalizations for their drug-dealing activities. I met my research participants at a local community youth center in 200 1 and followed their lives for a period offive years. The largest subgroup (n = 27) were of Turkish background, the second largest (n = 8) Kosovo-Albanian, and the third largest were Moroccan (n = 6). The remaining participants were of Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and multinational backgrounds. Despite these national differences, they shared many commonalities. For example, their primary language for communication was German; in fact, most of the young men claimed that their German language skills exceeded their mother tongue fluency-some of them had only very limited knowledge of their parents' language. They also all grew up in the same neighborhood, to which they were really attached. Further, they shared their immigrant status in Germany and a Muslim heritage, and although they did not necessarily engage in traditional Muslim religious practices, being Muslim was an important part of the identity for the great majority of them. Further, they all had very disadvantaged educational and socioeconomic backgrounds and faced a significant amount of social exclusion in the German public education system (see Bucerius 2008; Bucerius 2013). Lastly, they all shared an involvement in drug-dealing activities (e.g., they typically sold marijuana and cocaine to a fairly steady customer base) (see Bucerius 2007; Bucerius 2013). In this chapter, I will only touch upon a small aspect of my larger project (see B ucerius 2014).

Gender and Ethnicity From the outset, I was set apart from my research participants in several important ways: most obviously, I am of a different gender, but, in contrast to them, I am also of German Christian heritage (like essentially everyone who is "ethnically German").

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Moreover, with my upper middle-class upbringing, the young men viewed me as a person who has had many more chances and opportunities in life than they had themselves. Feeding into this, [ was also a graduate student when meeting them, whereas the great majority of the young men had left the formal education system in grade nine (quite a few of them as early as grade six). My research participants had very clear ideas about and perceptions of two of my status traits that were nonnegotiable: being female and being German. This is not very surprising. For most of my research, I was the only woman present among the young men. The young men who became my study participants were used to hanging out in a homosocial setting-women were not part of their social friendship network. At the same time, all of them grew up in families that had very traditional expectations with respect to gender roles. While not necessarily fulfilling what was traditionally expected of them as men (e.g., although they would provide financially, they did not do so in a legitimate way but through drug deals), they still clung onto those very traditional gender role expectations when it came to women their age. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, they did not bring along women they dated when spending time with their male friends. The community youth center where I initially met the young men and spent a lot of time in the first two years of my fieldwork also had no female visitors-in fact, [ was told by the social workers that [ was the first woman to have entered the center in the past ten years. Naturally, being the only female at the youth center-a location to which they would never bring the women they cared about most-raised a lot of questions and sparked many debates about gender roles and expectations between us. [t made me suspicious and, as my interaction with Talaf and Rahim indicates, fed into their stereotypical views on German women: Tal at:

I would never allow my sister to hang out here. This is no place for girls. Your family must be crazy.

Me:

Well, I think my family trusts me ... they would not tell me not to hang out somewhere.

Rahim: Trust, trust ... whatever ... that's bullshit. This has nothing to do with trust. They don't know us. This is why all those German bitches sleep around with fifteen. Because the parents trust them. Talat:

They just don't care about their daughters. They have no honor these Germans.

Essentially, by hanging out at the youth center, I played directly into their stereotypical view of females who come from families that do not take care of their daughters, families without any honor (Bucerius 2008). For them, this was the case for German families in general, so the intersection of being female and being German cast me in a rather negative light. [was also the only member of mainstream German society present among the young men. For the longest time, it was nearly impossible for second-generation

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immigrants (or immigrants of any other generation, for that matter) to become German and receive German citizenship, despite the fact that they were born and raised in the country. Thus, it is not surprising that forty-nine out of the fifty-five research participants in my study did not have German citizenship. This fact, coupled with negative experiences my research participants had in the German school system and with German society more generally, shaped their opinions about the country and its citizens (Bucerius 2012). Having been raised and having to negotiate their everyday lives in a country that would not officially acknowledge their belonging, my respondents did not view the country or Germans very positively. Gezim explains what he means when talking about typical Germans: A typical German? A wimp ... somebody who works like a robot, no feelings involved, no honor at all, no clue about family values ... or simply a Nazi. 3 Let's face it: most Germans are Nazis. Tdon't mean Nazis like the Americans ... they are not so much against blacks, but just against foreigners in general.

Because [ am a German, the young men were automatically suspicious of me. They were not used to forming positive relationships with Germans, and in many ways, they lacked deeper social interactions with members ofthe German mainstream. When I hosted a going-away party at my house before moving to the United States, a few of the young men commented that they had never been to a "German home," reminding me and themselves that despite attending German schools, the young men have always been segregated from German students and peers. As Akin's statement "I've never been invited to a German kid's birthday party" reflects, while play dates with German kids were not part of their childhood, they were also excluded from events that are usually more inclusive, like birthday parties. This segregation only further strengthens stereotypical assumptions (on both sides). Being female and German-two status traits that the young men had clear ideas about-could theoretically be seen as a liability for doing ethnographic work with the population I wanted to study. In many ways, however, it actually became an advantage in the research process. Clearly, my research participants thought that I was not living up to my role as a "female" as traditionally expected of me. For example, I had my own place, as opposed to living at home with my parents until marriage. I did not obey the young men's demands to clean the youth center or serve them food as they initially tried to persuade me to do, and [ was hanging out with a big group of young men-a setting that was, in their eyes, inappropriate for a female. My "inappropriate behavior" as a female and my ethnic/religious background disqualified me as a spousal candidate,4 a position reserved for traditional Muslim women. This fact took potential serious courting out of our interactions, which made my attempts to gain the young men's trust a lot easier.s At the same time, the young men used my status as a German female as a knowledge base and

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sounding board for their many questions about women in general and female sexuality in particular. For many of them, I was the first female to whom they were able to pose questions, and very quickly I took on the role of a "sexual educator" for the young men. While they did have many sexual encounters with one-night stands or sex workers, they knew very little about female sexuality and thus had many burning questions: Rahim: Sandra, come here, we're having an argument. Me:

What's it about?

Tbor:

We're talking about how often a woman has her period and this moron thinks it's four times a year! I've been telling him it's just twice."

Rahim: Whatever you idiot! Sandra, tell him I'm right!

My interaction with Rahim and Ibor was quite typical and reflects how being a German female and having answers to their questions became an unexpected basis for establishing trusting rapport. I had knowledge that no one else was able or willing to offer them or that they were not comfortable tapping into through anyone else. They repeatedly stated that they could not ask "their own women" similar questions. Consequently, I was able to bring my own personality into the research process, something that feminist researchers have long argued is necessary for establishing trusting rapport (Oakley 1981). At the same time, their negative perception of German society reflected on how they viewed me, and initially, many of our discussions were shaped by the fact that they saw me as a representative of German society and/or the German state. This was likely amplified by the fact that for many of them, I was the first German to actively engage with and show interest in them. This also meant that, for the great majority, I was the first German that they could actively ask questions about Germans and test their stereotypical assumptions, as Inanc's statement indicates: Before hanging out with you ... you know ... I just never hung out with ... you know ... with Germans. So ... you know ... you're kind ofthe first one I talk to. It's not that Tever wanted to ... you know ... it's not that T really missed anything ... but it's like Trealize now that Tnever really had a German friend before. But you're not a real German anyways ... so maybe that's why we hang out.

Inanc's statement makes clear that, over time, the young men and I were able to establish a trusting relationship independent of the fact that I was a German and a nontraditional female. Because they had rather negative opinions about people holding these status traits, they eventually started viewing me as an "exception" to their commonly held view. In other words, they did not change their overall perceptions of Germans, and German females in particular, through interacting with me. In contrast, they made sense of our developing rapport by identitying me as

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"different" from the rest. For them, I wasn't seen as the German they suddenly became friends with; I became the person who is "not a real German." This was significantly shaped by the fact that they did not expect a German to be seriously interested in them. Unlike the assimilationist efforts they experienced at school, my interactions with them never signaled a desire to promote their assimilation into German culture (see Heitmeyer, MUller, and SchrOder 1997: 21). As ScheperHughes would say, I became the "minor historian" for people who otherwise would have no history (1992: 29). In that sense, being German yet showing an interest in them seemed to work significantly in my favor". As bzgur stated, You're just not areal German. Really, you're like a foreigner-l mean, you're not like us, like Kanaken [derogatory term used for second-generation Muslim youth involved in street life in Germany] ... because you're like a doctor or something but you're more a foreigner than a German. And you're like a sister. I don't have a sister, but I think this is what it would be like.

Very often, and especially in criminology, researchers believe that conducting effective research that crosses gender, ethnic, and class lines is nearly impossible. As a result, we often hire community-based research assistants to work with members of groups involved in illegal activities whom we are interested in studying, or we at least attempt to match as many of our own identity markers with those of our research participants. Gender is a particularly salient characteristic when considering the differences between a researcher and her research participants. When I give talks at criminological conferences, for instance, people's first question to me is often, "How could you do this research as a woman?" It is generally assumed that studying drug dealers or gang members is a dangerous activity and should be left to male fieldworkers. What goes unnoted, however, is that even male researchers studying male-dominated groups that engage in illegal or illicit activities often feel that they have to prove their masculinity by engaging in stereotypically masculine behavior. For example, Ferrell (\998) joined his participants in spray-painting graffiti and was eventually arrested. Bourgois (2003: 127ff, for example) engaged in alcohol consum pti on with his parti cipants to faci Iitate m ore open conversati ons, an d Venkatesh (2008) even climbed the ranks of the gang he was investigating to supposedly become a gang leader. Moreover, male researchers are often either suspected of being spies from rival gangs (Venkatesh 2008) or undercover police officers (Bourgois 2003; Jacobs 1998). For the most part, I was not subjected to the same assumptions. 7 Female researchers may not have to engage in such activities precisely because it is not expected that they perform "manhood acts" (Schwalbe 2005). For example, my research participants never urged me to consume drugs or alcohol with them, and they even indicated that I would lose credibility were I to partake, because oftheir bias that women ought not to consume drugs. In effect, then, being a female researcher who studies male-dominated groups occupied with illicit or illegal acts is not a liability to overcome; however, it does

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produce different points of access. 8 [t is not surprising that being a woman at once facilitated access (it permitted me to serve as relationship counselor, for example) and also impeded it in other circumstances. [ could not follow the young men into brothels and observe their interactions with sex workers, who were among their biggest cocaine clients. Overall, however, being a woman allowed me to participate in sensitive conversations about women and sex-something that is missing in many of the criminological ethnographies on drug dealers and gang members-and to serve as a sexual educator whenever required, all of which helped me secure their confidence and respect. It was not unusual, for example, that a young man would ask me to give advice on how to write a love letter to a girl or how to determine whether a girlfriend finds their encounters sexually pleasing, questions that they would never pose in front of the other young men but always in one-on-one situations. As a German woman, [ could obtain certain information that a male or a non-German likely would not have been able to access. Had I been a woman of their own background, they likely would not have been able to have such open conversations about these sensitive topics. As Akin says, "We would not want to dirty our own women with sex talk and stuff." Most importantly, however, the ethnographic research allowed me, as a woman, to gain a deep understanding of my participants' plans for their future "after drug dealing," and thus [ was able to contribute to the theoretical question of whether criminals age out of crime (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983; Massoglia and Uggen 20 [0) or whether certain life events (Laub and Sampson 2003) trigger them to quit. My participants viewed marriage as the only valid option for which it would be worth quitting drug dealing and the lifestyle associated with drug dealing. However, not every woman would qualify as a marriage partner for whom it would be worth quitting. Indeed, they identified that only pure women-who, in their minds, were Muslim virgins-would be worth making the transition into a more mainstream existence (see Bucerius 2014). As a witness to many discussions about women-which were amplified because I am a woman myself-I was able to develop a deep understanding of how my participants viewed relationships and what expectations they had about members of the opposite sex. [n many ways, this understanding could be developed in juxtaposition to their interactions and discussions with me-a woman who clearly did not fulfi II their ideas of "pure womanhood" (see Bucerius 2014). As a German female researcher, then, [was able to attain this highly sensitive and personal data about their dreams and hopes for the future but also their thoughts on finding a suitable wife. Ethnography in Criminology: On Being an Outsider Trusted with Inside Knowledge My research experiences challenge the long-cherished assumption in anthropological research that "the key to understanding ... appears to be to build relationships of trust with people to gain privileged insider status," for without

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that insider status, one "learns less" (Tope, Chamberlain, Crowley, and Hodson 2005: 489). Fay's provocation, "Do you have to be one to know one?" (1996: 9), raises the question of whether membership in a group is in fact necessary or sufficient to gain in-depth knowledge. My fieldwork demonstrates that I was able to develop an intricate understanding of my research participants while remaining an outsider. Throughout the five years of my fieldwork, I formed very close relationships with some ofthe young men (while being rather loosely connected to others) and spent countless hours with them hanging out in the streets, in bars or cafes, or cruising around in cars. However, being a German woman, I never truly became "one of them." I never got rid of the status traits that set me apart from them in the first place. While the young men allowed me many insights into different aspects of their lives, they were always aware that I was not truly "one of them" and that my life was quite different from theirs. As Kash would state, "It's not like in your life, Sandra, it's not like anyone [would come to our] place and playa board game with [us] and drink red wine [with us ]-that's your life, not ours." However, instead of impeding the research process, my outsider status encouraged the young men to trust me with inside information that they would not otherwise have shared with "real insiders" (Fonow and Cook 1991). For example, Akin, one of the young men who, after a rough start (see Bucerius 2014), became one of my closest research participants, divulged to me the story of his parents' divorce. His parents had been divorced for several years, which he had successfully hidden from the rest of the young men. While I knew that some of the young men speculated about the relationship status of Akin's parents, they would never openly question Akin about it. Aissa explained it this way: Aissa:

This is none of my business. He has reasons to keep this to himself, so I won't ask.

Me:

It just seems a bit weird to me that you guys are so close but then you don't talk about this stuff. I mean, it must have been hard on Akin when his parents split-so you'd think that you guys talk about this?

Aissa:

That's family stuff, that's personal. We're friends, but we don't talk about this personal stuff. I did not tell anyone when my parents split. You and Nermin are the only ones that know. [Nermin is his brother.]

Family-related issues were taboo among the young men. They tried consistently to distinguish themselves from Germans, whom they considered to be lacking in family values and morals; so by admitting that ones' parents are split, they were running the risk of being seen as coming from a family without values and morals (and most importantly, honor). However, because I was not "one of them," they could tell me about their families without fearing to be judged. Thus, as an outsider, I could be trusted with inside knowledge and information that probably never would have been shared with an insider (Fonow and Cook 1981).

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I listened to Akin (and Aissa, for that matter) and gave him advice and psychological support, and he called me the "female best friend he never had." These aspects of our relationship (which also applied to many of my relationships with the other young men) were possible because I had entered the field as an outsider. However, establishing the kind of trust as an outsider that prompted the young men to open up about their best-kept secrets-insights into their families-took a very long time. Indeed, I was able to observe large cocaine deals or know where they kept their drug stashes many months before I learned anything sensitive about their respective families, which reflects how careful they were not to talk about topics that might portray their families in a negative light (like a divorce). Gaining such knowledge, however, enabled me to develop a better understanding of just how important the status of their family is and how much they cared about their family's honor. Because the young men were constantly doing what Michele Lamont (2000) calls "boundary work"-that is, justifying their position in society by creating boundaries to the ones above (the German families who had no honor in the first place) and below (immigrant families who had lost their honor, for example, through divorces )-it was all the more necessary for them to keep up their picture ofthe "perfect family" to the outside world. I am absolutely confident that I never would have been able to gain insights into these topics had I not build a long-term, trusting relationship as outsider with the young men-in other words, if I had used any other methodology for my research. Likewise, had I been an insider, I likely never would have been entrusted with sensitive information about their families. While we still often assume that being as close to our research participants as possible assures the collection of interesting data, being an insider can also be a liability to the research process, since many assumptions go unquestioned. I had this experience when entering my field site after paying close attention to the descriptions the social workers at the community youth center had given me about "our [their] young men." Many of my early interactions with the young men were, thus, influenced by the social workers' advice and their predictions regarding the young men's reactions to my presence. The social workers presented themselves as "insiders" and told me that the success of my research would hinge on what the "leaders" among the young men thought of me. They pointed out Akin and Inanc as the main leaders and stressed that I needed to understand the social workers' position and their inability to keep the young men in check. They also stressed that even if they wanted to, they could not really protect me. Based on this information, I spent much time the first few weeks try ing to establish rapport with these two young men that were pointed out to me. It was only later that I learned that Inanc had lost his status among the young men a long time ago-a fact that the social workers were oblivious of. Believing that they were "insiders," they never questioned whether the hierarchical patterns among the young men might shift and undergo changes. While I initially trusted their analyses of the group hierarchies more than I trusted my own as an outsider, I eventually came

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to realize that my role as an outsider had its own potential. The social workers' claims to insider status in fact often impeded their knowledge ofthe group. For example, they often refrained from asking questions about group dynamics or the drug trade, since a "true insider" would likely already know the answers. In my presence, they often presented their assumptions about group hierarchies and drug dealing as facts, thereby implicitly reinforcing their insider status. Yet I was probably in a better position to witness dynamics and politics, because I was not already enmeshed in the group (Fay 1996). I could pose detailed questions that only an outsider could ask about group life and the drug trade, and the inside knowledge with which I was increasingly entrusted allowed me to gain a more complete picture of the young men over time. Eventually, I came to realize that being an outsider trusted with inside knowledge can be a great research asset (see also Powdermaker's [1966] motif of stranger and friend). While arguing that being an outsider trusted with inside knowledge will yield different, and sometimes even more interesting, data than a true insider could collect, I still want to stress the importance of ethnographic research-especially in the area of immigration and crime. I believe that I could have gathered significant data about my participants' drug-dealing activities and/or their immigration history by simply conducting in-depth interviews; however, I doubt that I would have been able to fully examine how their immigrant status, in a largely excluding and xenophobic country, played into their drug-dealing activities. As Akin stated at some point during my ethnographic project, "No one knows us as well as you do, I don't need to explain this to you." While I never fully became an "insider," I was constantly trusted with "inside knowledge" and was able to get to know the young men in much deeper ways than would have been possible with other methods of qualitative inquiry. This was especially important when it came to understanding the more mundane forms of social exclusion the young men were experiencing in their everyday lives. Many of the encounters that I would clearly identify as discriminatory or excluding had become so commonplace in the lives of the young men that it would not even have occurred to them to mention them to me as being noteworthy. They often did not pay much or any attention to them; as Bourdieu (2004: 341) would argue, they had become so ingrained into their daily lives that it was nothing out of the ordinary. In other words, much of the very interesting data I could collect and interactions I could observe likely would have gotten lost and neglected when doing other types of inquiry. One such example is when Akin asked me to accompany him to the local branch of his bank. At that point, he and I had established a good relationship, and he would often ask me to come along when he was running errands. On that day, he had an American $100 bill that he wanted to exchange for euros and was anticipating problems. He asked me to wait in the foyer of the bank while he talked to the clerk at the counter. As he had expected, the woman refused to exchange the currency, stating that she had "no idea where you [Akin] got the

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money from." From what [ could tell standing in the foyer, Akin was very polite, trying to convince her that she would probably not ask other customers where their money came from and arguing that he was a customer at this branch, but she would not change her mind. Akin returned to me, handed me the bill, and asked me to exchange it on his behalf. I went back to the same counter and asked the banl( clerk politely to exchange my bill. She did so without hesitation. I was too shocked to ask why she had not exchanged the bill for Akin or to ask her whether she knew that this was exactly the same bill that she had refused to exchange two minutes earlier. Akin was not surprised at all; quite the contrary, he seemed to gain great satisfaction from the fact that [ was so puzzled: Why are you so upset? That's normal business. If I had not known that this would happen, I would not have asked you to come along. Things like these happen every day! Tknow, T know, everything is different in your student world.

Akin's insistence that this incident was part of everyday life made me very curious, so [ started to accompany the young men on their daily chores (shopping, going to the post office and bank, etc.). I was forced to rethinl( my own hypothesis that, in addition to a certain degree of racism in society, the explanations for the young men's negative treatment was that they generally came across as rude. While I believed that they would probably receive the same treatment as I did, if only they were polite enough to the people they were dealing with, this proved to be a very naiVe assumption. The arbitrariness with which Akin was treated seems to be natural for mainstream society and gets largely ignored, thereby justifying the existing social structures (Bourdieu 2004). Obviously, this kind of day-to-day discrimination shaped the young men's perception of Germany and German mainstream society. These kinds of disadvantages that they experienced in the educational system, job market, criminal justice system, citizenship policies, and so on provide us with an understanding of the context in which the young men formed their negative opinions of Germany. The discrimination they encountered kept them from feeling as ifthey belonged to Germany and thus from "feeling German." More importantly, it kept them from fulfilling Germany's main expectation of immigrants: full assimilation and, most importantly, believing in German mainstream values and norms. Consider Ozgur's comment: When I was younger, I really wanted to be German. I hated it in the village [that his parents are from and where his family spent their summer vacations] and I really could not understand why parents liked it so much in Turkey. T was very little and did not get anything. And Tthought the Germans are super cool ... Tnever understood why parents don't like them. But everything is different today. Today, I'd rather cut my dick off before being German. I've seen things and ... you know ... I get that they treat us like shit. It's like, now T don't want to anymore. T mean, T want to live here but that's all. They would never accept me as German anyways ... T would always be a Turk for Germans.

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If I had not accompanied the young men in their day-to-day lives in and interactions with German society, I would not have been able to contextualize statements like these appropriately. This is not only reflective of this particular group of young men but also reflective of research with immigrant groups more generally. In a different project, a colleague and I were examining risk and resilience to radicalization among young Somali Canadians by conducting in-depth interviews. These young immigrants were telling us about some "discriminatory" instances in the interviews that, for many of them, appear to be once-ina-lifetime events. Interestingly, they did not mention negative encounters with the police at all and only spoke about their interactions with the police after probing from our side. While they did not report anything positive about these interactions, it did not seem to cross their mind to talk about police encounters when we asked them about discrimination experiences. From their perspective, it was just to be expected that "police are assholes." While we could establish with our qualitative data that our research participants experienced some form of discrimination that they did not necessarily find particularly noteworthy, we were unable to get a real handle on how these discriminatory acts actually played out on a day-to-day basis, which strategies our participants utilized to cope while faced with discriminatory acts, in which ways those moments affected their wider outlook on society, and, most importantly, how exactly these experiences played into their decisions to stay resilient to crime or to become involved in illegitimate activities. For it is after the experience of particular belittling moments that the young men in my ethnography who were generally less involved in criminal activities took on an "I don't care" mentality, neglecting their resolutions to stay out of trouble. Aissa, talking about a moment in which he was identified by two police officers while having a coffee in a cafe on a date, told me this: These two fuckers know exactly that Tam not doing any shit when being on a date, but they had me do a full body check ... in a fucking cafe ... you know ... in public. My mom could have walked by. Youjust never get out of this, for them you are always the gangster ... there is no change ... you know ... they will always see you this way and they will always find those soft spots and fuck you whenever they can. It's a sport for them. So, why do T even try to change? It does not make any sense ... you know.

While my ethnographic study takes place in Germany, the general themes of immigration, social exclusion, and drug dealing are not "typical" German topics. Quite the contrary, across borders and for reasons that are still up for debate, it can be observed that most second-generation immigrants experience higher crime levels than their first-generation counterparts (Berardi and Bucerius 2013; Tonry 1997). Second-generation immigrants seem to be more receptive to discrimination, exclusion, and systemic disadvantages than their parents' generation and are much less likely to interpret them as isolated incidents (Viruell-Fuentes 2007). As such, the question whether experiences of

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exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination have an influence on individuals' involvement in informal markets, such as the drug trade, is one that pertains to all Western countries. Ethnographic studies in this area can help us expand our criminological knowledge in the area of immigration and crime beyond the well-known fact that there is a generational pattern for immigrant crime, with first-generation immigrants generally less involved in crime than the respective native population and crime rates increasing with subsequent generations. Ethnographies allow us to understand why second- and third-generation immigrants tend to be more involved in crime than their parents and in what way their reception into the new society plays a role in their criminal involvement. Most importantly, they help us contextualize our findings. For example, I was present when two police officers came to Nermin and Aissa's house, inquiring about a stabbing that had taken place within their network of friends. After the police officers had left, both Aissa and Nermin were furious about the "racist cops." From my perception, the interaction that I had been able to witness was actually quite friendly, so I had to inquire as to what exactly it was that Nermin andAissa were so upset about. It turned out that the police officers had not taken off their shoes before entering the apartment-an act that is part of Muslim culture. As Nermin stated, This.i ust shows their disrespect. If they work with Muslims, they know this. I tell you, they do know this and they do it on purpose. When they are rude to you ... like call you names or ID you in public or ... you know ... are treating you like shit ... that's one thing because it is against you. But this is disrespect against everything, against your house, against your family, against all Muslims, you know. Because they would do the same thing at the next house, too. It has nothing to do with me ... you know ... they know fucking well to take their fucking shoes off. I am sure people have told them this one thousand times.

It is precisely these experiences and moments that were salient for understand-

ing my research participants' attitudes to German society (and the police, as an extension of that society}-moments that I was able to witness firsthand and that helped me to contextualize the young men's opinions, attitudes, and ultimately decisions for their life choices in ways that could not have been achieved by simply conducting in-depth interviews. Concluding Remarks: On Doing Cross-Gender and Cross-Ethnic Ethnographic Research with Immigrants In many ways, my study demonstrates that ethnographic research in criminological fields of inquiry across gender, ethnic, and class lines in fact opens up opportunities for gaining access and trust, and ultimately a deeper and more nuanced understanding of our research participants. Researchers in general, and criminologists in particular, often make a mistake by assuming that the identity markers that render us as outsiders will compromise our efficacy-that they

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are liabilities we must overcome. In fact, I discovered quite the opposite-they were key to garnering insider information and to facilitating effective research. It is precisely this type of insider knowledge that we need in order to get a better understanding of the patterns of immigrant crime. If we ever want to move beyond stating the facts to understanding the contextual framework of why, for example, certain ethnic groups are much more resistant to criminal involvement than others despite facing similar socioeconomic disadvantages, we need to understand the micro-level interactions of immigrants and how these are shaped by larger structural conditions. It is only when we start closely examining the reception of immigrants in a particular host society, and analyzing their interactions with that society but also within their own ethnic network, that we can start understanding why, for example, second-generation Moroccans in the Dutch context have much higher crime rates than those of Turkish background, despite having very similar immigration histories and socioeconomic backgrounds (Tonry 1997). Since the literature on immigration and crime has consistently shown that immigrants are, on average, not more involved than the native-born, it would be much needed to move beyond reproducing this message for different localities and move to a more nuanced understanding of why certain immigrant groups show higher involvement in crime than others. Within the German context, then, my study contributes to our theoretical understanding of immigrant criminality. Specifically, by studying the microlevel, day-to-day interactions of my participants and German society, I was able to develop a nuanced understanding of why second-generation immigrants in Germany often find their "places of belonging" outside of the mainstream and how they can justify their engagement in illicit activities. As many immigration scholars claim, the young men experienced different forms of social exclusion and structural limitations (Boos-Nuenning 2000; Green 2001: 31; OEeD 2006: 9f; Spiwak 2008). However, this, in itself, does not explain their engagement in crime. After all, many second-generation immigrants are faced with similar structural barriers yet do not engage in crime. Existing studies leave us wondering why some immigrants who face structural barriers "innovate" (Merton 1938), while the great majority of immigrants comply with the law (Bucerius 2011; Hagan, Levi, and Dinovitzer 2008; Rumbaut and Ewing 2007), and how they justify their criminal activity. It is precisely these questions that ethnographic studies are uniquely able to address. By observing my participants on a daily basis and with "deep hanging out" (Geertz 200 I), I was able to understand the underlying micro-level processes that guided their actions. It would be wrong to assume that the young men in my sample simply had a lower standard of morality, making it easy for them to engage in crime without feeling guilty. In contrast, my research was able to uncover that these young men had developed a very nuanced and distinct understanding of purity and impurity (Bucerius 2007) that would, for example, guide their decisions with respect to the substances they sold and to whom they sold. This concept-though

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often irrational to outsiders-internally made sense to the young men and also helped them justify their participation in the drug market. They applied the same internal logic of purity and impurity to Germany as a country, which they clearly identified as "impure," a country that did not "deserve any better." For them, Germany, Germans, and non-Muslims were "impure." Thus, they neither had to comply with the law nor feel pressured to stay out of crime for moral (or religious) reasons. As Faton put it, Germany does not deserve any better!! This country is almost as fucked up as the U.S. Germany is just ... this is just such a dirty country. Just look around you. Girls fuck around as soon as they are out of elementary school, parents throw their kids out when they are 18, everybody is a cold-blooded robot or a Nazi. This is fucked up. I don't sell to Muslims-so whatever, you know! I mean, it's not my fault that Germans use drugs, is it?

Attitudes like this allowed them to confer guilt on Germans rather than on themselves. Based on their experiences in Germany and the way they perceived German culture, they felt that German culture had no boundaries and seemed to allow "everything." By abiding by their own principles, they were able to view their actions in a more positive light. This distinction was important becauseagainst all odds-they felt they had a future in Germany. Maintaining principles that they evaluated as "good," the young men could save face and demonstrate that they still cared for the country, in contrast to "other, real criminals." If you sell crack, you are really fucking up people big time. Not only people ... umm ... you are fucking up everything ... like Bockenheim, Frankfurt, everything. Or selling to kids ... umm ... that's just a no-go. Selling marijuana or even powder to university students is a totally different game. It's like natural stuff ... it's different.

Theoretically speaking, here again, we see the young men engaged in boundary work (Michele Lamont 2000), drawing distinctions between themselves and the ones considered above or below them, to justify their own position in society and create a positive sense of self. The young men's use of boundary work was particularly obvious when they distinguished between "good" (someone who does not sell to children) and "bad" (dealers who sell to anyone) and "pure" (drugs of natural substances, like cocaine) and "dirty" (chemical drugs). By portraying themselves as pure dealers, they distinguished themselves from those who were dirty and created a positive sense of self, despite engaging in activities that were widely deemed immoral-not only by Germans but also and especially by their own families and religion. In conclusion, it is highly doubtful that I would have been able to gain a nuanced understanding of the young men's use of boundary work or the concept of purity and impurity (theoretically leaning on Mary Douglas 1966) had I engaged in any other form of data collection. To really understand what microlevel processes drive actors and allow them to deviate from the norm (in this case,

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the fact that immigrants usually have lower crime rates than the native-born), we need to study the populations we are interested in from a close-up perspective. [t is only when we have a nuanced understanding ofthe population and its actions that we can develop meaningful policy interventions. The young men's ideas about only quitting drug dealing when finding an adequate marriage partner, for example, are crucial because we learn that the young men do not seem to have any other meaningful alternatives to drug dealing that might encourage them to leave their illegal lifestyle, even before getting married. As such, adequate policies should focus on providing young immigrants such as the young men in this study with meaningful alternatives to drug dealing. Likewise, programs that target young men like the ones in this study would likely be most successful when holding the young men to their self-ascribed concepts offamily honor and purity and pointing out how they might potentially contradict those values through drug dealing. The prerequisite for successful programs and policies, then, is a nuanced understanding of the target population, for which qualitative studies are essential. Notes I.

2. 3.

4.

5.

After the Second World War, Germany (and other Western European countries) recruited guest workers from Turkey, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Morocco and other countries to fill their labor needs in the booming German postwar economy. The recruitment of these guest workers was meant to be a temporary arrangement only, but many of them stayed and settled permanently. All names are pseudonyms. The young men used "Nazi" frequently and relatively loosely; they clearly did not mean Nazi in the WWTI sense ofthe term. Instead, they used it for different people, often Germans, who discriminated against them (i.e., immigrants). Using the term also reminded them and others of Germany's past. By using the term that hurts the German conscience more than anything else, they essentially underlined the legitimacy of their assessment that Germany and Germans were, indeed, discriminating against them at the end of the day; thus their rationale that "Germany fucked up before" (Akin). When I started my field work in 2001, I was twenty-three years old, similar to the mean age of the young men at the time. Thus, my efforts to gain the young men's trust and build rapport were compounded by the fact that we were of similar age. This automatically put me into the age range of a potential partner. While some of them still tried to flirt with me in the beginning months of the research, they did not flirt with me overtly-precisely because I did not fall into their commonly agreed-on category of the "perfect woman"; the ubiquitous presence of pornography at the youth center, however, added a sexual charge to the environment, and although the young men did not see me as an appropriate romantic partner, they nevertheless projected their sexual needs onto me (see Grenz 2005) from time to time. This is not uncommon; many feminist scholars have discussed the sexualized dimensions of gender dynamics when female researchers study male research participants. For example, Arendell (1997) describes how she encountered sexism and inappropriate gestures when interviewing divorced men. Over time, the flirting subsided and the young men saw me "like a sister," as Ozgur explains:

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And certainly, most of the guys still want to lay you ... but, you know, only in theory, only in theory ... But you know, that's just not a topic anymore, that is ... how do you call it? ... a "no-no" ... it's a taboo. Just like a sister. If you think about it ... you could have a sister who is a sexy chick but you would never ever have sex with her, never. 'Cause it would be disgusting! 6.

7.

8.

Importantly, the young men did not equate me with "the typical Gennan robot woman" who "only cares about her career, career, career and nothing else" and "never laughs, hates her children, and can't cook at all" (Talat). In fact, they had trouble identifying me with all the negative and xenophobic connotations that they associated with what it meant to be "German," particularly since my interest in the group signaled to the young men that I was not xenophobic. They recognized over time that I was honestly interested in them, and they were continuously asking about "the book" (similarly encountered by Tertilt 1996: 81). At the very beginning of my research, a few young men entertained the idea that I might be an undercover cop; however, they quickly dropped this conjecture, and I did not have to prove anything to dispute it. They essentially decided for themselves that I was not a police officer. Just as having a different ethnicity or class background would similarly impact one's relationship with his/her research participants.

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8 Recalling to Life: Understanding Stickup Kids through Insider Qualitative Research Randol Contreras

Introduction

Between 1999 and 200 I, and intermittently from 2003 to 2012, I did fieldwork on Dominican "Stickup Kids" in a South Bronx neighborhood (a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium). I hung out with these drug robbers, who robbed upper-level drug dealers that stored large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash (Contreras 2013). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were a part ofthe roaring crack market, a roller coaster ride of money, women, and luxury that gave them a kingly status in their South Bronx neighborhood. However, these men became superfluous in the new drug market world of the late 1990s, a time when young people stigmatized crack use and preferred alcohol and marijuana (Contreras 2013; Curtis 1998). Then they experienced an economic strain as they exited a crack market; pressured, they created a new, violent niche in drug robberies. Here, they tortured upper-level drug dealers-maimed, burned, and mutilated them-to get to the hidden drugs and cash. To understand these Stickup Kids, I used several methods of analysis. First, I used a C. Wright Mills approach, which calls for understanding people by linking history, social structure, and biography (Mills 1959). Thus, I contextualized these drug robbers within a particular historical era, which I then tied to their life course. Second, I relied on my biography. I was born and raised in the South Bronx, and I was an insider to its illegal drug market. So I saw its transformation up close as it changed from one generation to the next. I also witnessed its 155

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impact on family and friends, who either fell to hardcore drug use or skyrocketed to unimaginable success. Below, I explain how these insider observations, which I recalled to life, added another dimension to my drug market understanding and enhanced my ability to link history, social structure, biographies, and crime. I then provide suggestions for insider researchers who study crime and end with a discussion of insider research's promises and position within criminology.

Biography and Experience There I was, one scorching-hot summer day, walking down a South Bronx street with my mother. I was pleading with her to buy me a piragua, which for me, a five-year-old at the time, was a special treat. Eventually, my mother gave in and ordered one from a sidewalk vendor. The vendor then vigorously shaved a smooth block of ice, placed the shavings in a paper cone, and poured my favorite fruit syrup-coco---over it. As I savored the icy treat in the hot sun, my mother went inside a corner bodega to get some grocery items. Suddenly, a disheveled, emaciated man approached me, partially blocking the sun. With a huge smile, he told me to give him some of the piragua. He was hot, he said, and needed to cool down. Reluctantly, I gave it to him. He took two huge bites and sipped some of the coco syrup. Then he gave the cone back to me, said gracias, and walked away. I felt embarrassed and unsure whether to continue eating my once-treasured icy treat. When my mother returned, I told her what had happened. She spotted the culprit walking down the street and told me that he was a tecato. Ten cuidado, she warned, eso tecatos could harm you. Tecato? I had never heard the word. But it stuck with me from then on (to this day, whenever I see a piragua, the word comes to mind). As I neared my teens, I learned that tecatos were hooked on heroin (Moore 1978). This was why they appeared greasy and grimy and wore tattered clothes. They also desperately tried to earn money through washing neighborhood cars and selling stolen goods. When high, they were comedic delights. They entertained us with cool street sayings in their slow, raspy voices. They were street sages who always had a scam and had seen it all. To my knowledge, none of my 1970s childhood friends ever became tecatos. If anything, they stigmatized heroin users, often making fun oftheir "dope fiend lean" (a high heroin user sometimes leans extremely forward or sideways but somehow remains standing). And it was a serious offense to call a non-heroin user a tecato as a putdown. Heated arguments sometimes ensued, even bloody fistfights. However, a few older neighborhood acquaintances did use crack cocaine. This was during the mid-1980s, when inner-city drug users still saw powder cocaine as a harmless drug (Massing 1998). So when crack appeared (which is derived from cocaine), they saw it as a cheaper way of getting a more powerful cocaine high.

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Hooked. Almost overnight. Crack users no longer were the neighborhood teens who were into gettingfiy girls, dressing infresh clothes, and standing on corners in their B-boy stance (the South Bronx's coolest pose). They became a hyper version ofthe tecato: they were always looking for money, always peeking into parked cars, always scanning the sidewalk, always neglecting their children, always losing their jobs, always stealing from neighbors and family, always asking friends for some change, for a dollar, always on the go (Williams 1992). For instance, there was Jerome. He could outrun, out-jump, and out-boogiepop everyone within three blocks. He also had blazing speed, which everyone marveled at when he played sports. Damn, bro, did you see Jerome make that move? Ha-ha! But then he started hanging out with some guys known for snorting cocaine. Soon, he fell into all-out crack use. For the next fifteen years, he wandered through the neighborhood, all day, all night, always half-sprinting towards a familiar face to ask for a dollar or two ... I need some carfare to go downtown . .. I need to visit my mom at the doctor . . . There was Belinda-Que belleza! La Princessa del Barrio! She was a pretty neighborhood girl, who only went out with the baddest papi chulos around. All the younger guys fantasized about her; all of us wanted to be her "man." But then the rumors began: Yo, she:S a crackhead. You just need some crack to get with her. And in a year or so, we saw her transform from our South Bronx princess to a committed crack user, who now flashed a missing front tooth and looked worn out, soiled. Then the older neighborhood men began bragging about paying her for sex. Everyone now laughed and shook their heads when she walked by. And there was Emilio. He was my nineteen-year-old older cousin, who arrived from the Dominican Republic in the early 1980s. He lived with my family and slept on a thin roll-up mattress on the apartment's living room floor. He always complained about his less-than-minimum-wage job (in Spanish): I came to this country to make me the money! To make myself rich! Where am I headed with this job that pays crap? Eventually, he quit his job and moved out to sell crack cocaine. Now, when he occasionally stopped by for dinner, he sported large gold chains, fashionable Miami Vice-style clothes, and a huge potbelly. He also pulled out a knot of rolled-up twenty-dollar bills to send me out for soda and beer. A few years later, the rumors started: Yo, Emilio looks real bad, man. He be hanging out with this girl who:S a crackhead. The rumors were true. He showed up at my family'S home one day smelling awful, in dirty clothes. When he greeted me, he smiled meekly, revealing two missing front teeth. As he spoke to my mother privately in the kitchen, I heard him sobbing, saying that his life was a mess, that he was on crack, that he needed a place to stay but had no place to go ... EI pobre, my mother called him from that point on. Most of my neighborhood friends who were in my age group avoided crack use. For recreational drugs, most smoked weed and drank malt liquor beer. Very few ventured into cocaine. Only one friend experimented with snorting heroin, and he did so to pass time while serving seven years in prison.

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However, many of my peers tried their hand at crack dealing. They had seen the Big Willy dealers drive their expensive cars with tinted windows and booming stereo systems. They had seen them date the neighborhood's finest, cutest girls and spend money extravagantly onjewelry, sneakers, and clothes. They had also seen them spend money flippantly, with apparently little thought: a round of sodas and potato chips for the neighborhood kids; a round of beer for the adult neighborhood crowd. They had seen them earn respect and achieve fame on the streets. Drug dealing-that was the way to go. A few of my neighborhood friends would achieve that drug-dealing superstardom, riding a wave of money, power, women, violence, and self-destruction for well over a decade (Contreras 2013). I would become part of one drug dealer's entourage and sometimes ride that wave with him, a flurry of parties, women, champagne bottles, limousine rides, and nightclubs. But most of my peers struggled as dealers, lasting only two or three months. Some, like myself, desperately tried to hang on for about a year. I must admit that, at that time, I saw the Crack Era as a wonderful and inspiring moment, a time when everything I ever wanted seemed within reach. I wanted fancy cars; I wanted designer clothes; I wanted thefiy girls, the expensive jewelry, the knot of money-I wanted to be somebody, to be known. I wanted to achieve high status the American way, and I saw people just like me-people who looked like me, talked like me, and came from the South Bronx like me-attain those things. So one day, I said, "Fuck it," and I dropped out of college to try to become the best crack dealer that I could be. However, to make a long story short, I would never make it to the big time. No matter what I tried, I failed. I then decided to go back to school and attended a community college in Upstate New York. Afterward, I returned to New York City and attained my BA from City College-CUNY and then gained admission into the doctoral sociology program at the Graduate Center-CUNY. As a graduate student, it took me some time to adjust to the graduate school's upper-middleclass milieu. So I often went back to the familiar-to my South Bronx neighborhood and to my South Bronx friends. We hung out on the streets, in bars, or in their homes. I noted how some of them had remained drug dealers. Yet they now struggled to earn money within the crack market. The high-life moments were gone-the confidence and security were gone too. All were replaced by desperation, frustration, and a determination to continue their economic success. Then I observed them become Stickup Kids, or drug robbers, who organized to rob upper-level dealers that stored large amounts of drugs and cash. And to get to those drugs and cash (whose worth could be in the hundreds ofthousands of dollars), they brutally tortured their drug -dealing victims. They went beyond punching and kicking their victims: they electrocuted them; they burned them with hot irons; they chopped off their fingers and sliced off their ears. These men, whom I had grown up with, had transformed. Now they were the worst perpetrators of violence in the drug world.

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I was fascinated (and disturbed) by this violent phenomenon and started field research to understand it intellectually. Linking Biography and Experience to Historical Context I later realized that my drug experiences shaped much of my intellectual project. For instance, when I began my drug market field research, I immediately saw drug market "stages" and generational differences in drug use: During the 1970s, neighborhood hardcore drug users mainly consumed heroin, which youngsters stigmatized. Then, during the 1980s, these youngsters grew up with cocaine as their recreational drug of choice. Some of them would then succumb to crack use, which then the new generation of young people stigmatized. Then, during the mid-1990s, the younger generation chose to smoke marijuana and drink malt liquor beer over smoking crack or snorting cocaine. In terms of drug dealing, I saw "stages" and generational differences as well. During the early 1980s, most neighborhood residents never dealt hardcore drugs. Also, I saw how my first-generation immigrant family members, who immigrated to the United States during that period, never got involved with drug dealing. Then, during the mid-1980s, mom-and-pop crack operations popped up everywhere. And many of my neighborhood's younger generation and older generation tried to strike it rich through crack or cocaine sales. Also, many of my male first-generation immigrant family members-and their children-now entered the wholesale cocaine market. They supplied cocaine for crack dealers, becoming drug-dealing heavyweights in their time. And these personal observations were critical in my understanding of the drug market. During the late 1990s, the media and politicians swayed much ofthepublicincluding me, for a moment-into believing that law-enforcement practices influenced drug market fluctuations (for analysis of this phenomenon, see Beckett 1997; Tonry 1995). However, I began seeing that my experiences resonated with research that highlighted "drug eras" and showed how a community's acceptance or resistance of a drug could influence an individual's drug of choice (Adler 1985; Agar 2003; Curtis 1998; Curtis 2003; Dunlap and Johnson 1992; Tonry 2004). My personal experiences also echoed the ethnographic research that historically contextualized the experiences of drug market participants (Adler 1985; Bourgois 2003). Thus, I began to study my participants' high material and income aspirations, along with their drug market participation within the following context: a declining manufacturing economy, a deteriorating South Bronx, the media bombardment of gluttonous consumption, and a growing national divide between the rich and the poor. Then I thought about this context as coinciding with one of most salient historical moments in drug market and inner-city history: the Crack Era. This is when I began heeding the clarion call of C. Wright Mills (1959). I needed to link history, social structure, and biographies to understand the lives of drug market participants. Drug eras shaped criminal opportunities and drug use, which impacted communities broadly and individuals specifically.

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Within my Millsian analysis, [ found one particular theory that resonated with my past experiences and research observations: strain theory. [n his classic work, Merton explains that "strain" can be used to understand how countries, institutions, and people that struggle to reach cherished values and goals may feel pressure to break the rules (Merton 1938). As a result, a frustrated few become innovators, creating deviant or criminal pathways to success. l And these innovators can be found among struggling Ivy-league students, highly pressured athletes, or American corporate executives verging on financial collapse. 2 In my neighborhood, the main innovators would become crack and cocaine dealers. They wanted to become fi Ithy rich, but they had little opportunity to do so legally. [ also noted that the mass of neighborhood innovators emerged as drug dealers during the mid-I 980s-not the 1970s. And this occurred because during the 1970s, a few monopolistic heroin organizations in New York City made it nearly impossible for outsiders to enter the drug trade (Curtis 2003). However, crack's rise during the 1980s swiftly changed the city's drug market opportunity structure. Since cocaine (the main ingredient of crack) was cheap and crack's demand high, one only needed minimal startup capital to enter the crack trade (Adler 1996; lackalll997; Stone 2002; Williams 1989). So crack changed the criminal opportunity structure, which allowed many more marginal residents to enter drug dealing and achieve American-style success (Hagedorn 1994). With this in mind, [ turned to Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's version of strain theory (1960). They added that the existence of innovative opportunities mattered too. [n other words, along with race and gender (which could ease or block criminal access), the presence or absence of criminal opportunities shaped ifand how a frustrated person innovated to commit crime. This point was pivotal. The Dominican men I studied had first become innovators as drug dealers when the crack market was just coming down from its peak stage (Hamid 1992). So when the crack market shrank during the 1990s, so did their moneymaking opportunities. Pressured, they would innovate again by becoming Stickup Kids, who robbed upper-level dealers storing large amounts of drugs and cash. This holistic approach gave me unique insight, one that allowed me to challenge popular street crime research. For instance, some criminological studies confined crime to emotions, solely focusing on how the exhilaration of wrongdoing-of doing evil-caused crime (for instance, see Katz 1988). Other researchers wrapped their analysis around a destructive street culture. Here, street cultural imperatives pressured criminals into self-destruction-into heavy drinking, heavy drug use, heavy gambling, heavy sex, and heavy crime (Jacobs 2000; Shover and Honaker 1992; Wright and Decker 1997). And most failed to exit such a life; they simply could not outrun street culture's mighty tentacles, which dragged them back into a life of hedonism, of wickedness-a wretched existence. Such narrow frameworks, though, missed the big picture-missed how larger social forces could influence marginal residents into pursuing thrills not through legitimate paths, but instead through crime. [t also missed how the pursuit of

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pleasure, thrills, and materialism-even in their extreme-mirrored the goals of mainstream society. Thus, they isolated marginal minorities, placing them in an emotional and cultural bubble, a solitary world where crime originates because of individual and cultural faults. Fortunately, my insider status and biography broadened my theoretical and analytical perspectives. From my first encounter with a tecato at age five, to my adolescent years growing up at the height of the Crack Era, to my observations of drug dealing and drug use among friends and family, to my own attempts at drug dealing-all of these experiences enhanced my drug market understanding as [ related them to the literature. All of these experiences stimulated my sociological imagination to show how macro social forces affected the micro, affected the everyday lives and immediate decisions of marginal inner-city residents, especially those that do crime. Doing Insider Ethnographies on Urban Crime As I did my crime research, no guide to minority insider research existed. Most fieldwork manuals catered to outsiders, focusing on how one gained group access, wrote up field notes, and made a detached analysis (for instance, see Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Lofland and Lofland 1995). Insider discussions were limited. Thus, [mostly relied on the feminist scholarship of Dorothy Smith (1987) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000). They argue that one's positionality is a valid starting point for knowledge creation and a critical methodological tool. Thus, researchers coming from oppressed groups have a specialized and legitimate knowledge, one gained through group experiences and membership. This complicates the dominant group's ways of producing and expressing knowledge, which we often take for granted and consider unbiased or universal. Yet studying one's group is complicated, because as Dwyer and Buckle (2009) warn, there is always "the space between." In other words, researchers' different statuses (such as race, class, and gender) can make them both insider and outsider depending on the situation-even when minority researchers study minorities (Contreras 2015). For instance, there is Victor Rios (2011). He was born in Mexico, became a gang member in Oakland, and then, as a researcher, he studied African American and Latino boys in his Bay Area hometown. Though he met his study participants through his research, he was once ensnared in the criminal justice system, and he understands the anguish caused by constant surveillance by the state. There is Robert Duran (2013). He is a former gang member from Ogden, Utah. He later became a sociologist who studied Mexican and African American gangs in Denver and Ogden. He was also a gang interventionist, which framed his understanding of, and interaction with, his study participants. Then there is me. I was born to Dominican immigrant parents and briefly sold drugs in the South Bronx. As [ studied my friends in the drug market, [ began my own journey as a scholar and started seeing the social world in ways that

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differed greatly from my friends. Though [ understand their hopes and dreams, their pain, anguish, and frustration, [ now carry a unique set of theoretical and conceptual tools that make me stand apart. In all, insiders differ in experiences, especially in relationship to their study participants who commit crime. Thus, those embarking on insider research should become familiar with the feminist standpoint literature. It provides insights into how our social position, experiences, and biography validate and inform our research. In the previous section, I detailed how my insider status framed my theoretical framework and helped me gauge and challenge existing research. I also discussed how [ used my insider status to contextualize the lives of study participants within larger shifts in the economy, community, and drug market. Below, [ provide three more matters that insiders should flesh out to enhance their research.

Becoming a Member First, insiders should think about their ties to the crime or criminalized group, reflecting on how and why they became a member. They should also search for answers within friendship and family ties, and residential location. For instance, as a teenager, I wanted to experience the big money and live a material high life a todo 10 que da (or as far it could go). The kings of capitalism made a powerful impression on me, those Wall Street and real estate giants who wore fancy business suits, drove expensive cars, and sailed luxury yachts (Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was one of my favorite television shows). Also, some of my South Bronx family members and friends sold crack and cocaine in large amounts. My childhood friend Pablo eventually taught me the fundamentals of crack dealing and included me in his party entourage. The successful drug dealers in my family spent endless rolls of money-on women, partying, jewelry, and clothes. I wanted to emulate them all. This is how I became a drug market insider.

Degrees of Insiderness Second, insiders should think about how much of an insider they were and on how long they were members. [fno longer members, they should figure out how that happened and reflect on how their academic training affects their insider status or group membership. In my case, I unsuccessfully tried my hand at dealing crack, angel dust, and marijuana for about a year. So as a failed drug dealer, I dropped out of the drug market to attend a community college in Upstate New York. However, I spent time around drug dealers for almost my entire life. I often saw my friends process, package, and distribute their drugs and then spend their drug profits. Even as a graduate student, [ hung out in the South Bronx. For a while, [ was an outsider within academia, not knowing what to say and do. Yet back in the

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Bronx, [was still "Ran," who could still chill and drink beer on street comers, who could still dance to merengue and bachata in nightclubs. [ also felt comfortable in the South Bronx drug market milieu, never wavering while in the company of drug dealers. They were my family, my friends. As I progressed in graduate school, I noticed a growing disconnect between my neighborhood friends and me. I had become a student of Marx, the Frankfurt School, feminist theory, and C. Wright Mills. More important, I incorporated their powerful ideas into my everyday thinking and being. I no longer chased the most vulgar version ofthe American Dream. I no longer championed capitalist exploitation. [ rarely remained silent when someone made a sexist, classist, or racist remark. My friends, on the other hand, willingly exploited and duped anyone for profit. They also continuously fed the dominant narrative that reinforced race, class, and gender inequality. My insider status was slipping, sliding, slinking farther and farther away. Clearly, my drug-dealing friends saw my transformation. They began asking me to settle their philosophical disputes (I was the "professor") and for help in the legal world (I had acquired some upper middle-class cultural capital). But their impressions became most obvious when they remarked, Yo, you los in , it, Ran, after I had apparently done or said something wrong. I now occupied a different social space. They knew it. [ knew it too. The academic world eventually became my second home. [ would make great friends with academics, who shared my ideas despite having backgrounds unlike my own.

Examine Member Meanings Third, insiders should think about how their scientific analysis differs from how group members interpret their experiences. Also, insiders should think about how their current intellectual understanding differs from when they were members. In my case, as a drug dealer, I championed the dominant US narrative that accused the poor of being lazy and culturally deficient. If one simply worked hard, [ thought, then they could become filthy rich-Presto! And if one could not legally reach the limelight, the highlife-the riquezas, baby!-then one should put his or her heart and soul into the capitalist drug market. They just had to strike it rich-there was no question, no doubt. Rarely did [ question the existing social arrangement, which benefited the rich and criminalized the poor. Rarely did [ question the almighty US cultural message: that you were nobody, or nada, if you neither were rich nor owned expensive material toys. However, as a graduate student, my South Bronx world became illuminated by more than dimly lit street lamps. Again, the theoretical ideas of Marx, the Frankfurt School, Merton, feminist theory, and C. Wright Mills shone on every crack and crevice that I had missed or ignored. I learned how larger social structure, social inequality, and mainstream culture shaped and influenced the lives ofthe poor.

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To be clear, my drug-dealing friends thought critically too. They often deconstructed an oppressive state, which arrested and incarcerated them rather than providing them more legal avenues for success. Yet when I told them stories of capitalist crimes, they often smirked in affirmation, supporting the exploits of slick white-collar criminals. Or when I challenged their sexist and racist perspectives, they justified racial and gender oppression in ways that benefited them. Despite my frustrations, I knew where they were coming from. I too had occupied their social space. Thus, I used my previous experiences to understand their sense-making. Still, the reality remains: my training as a sociologist made me less of an insider in our world. In short, an insider can take advantage of his or her pre-professional relationships with group members. In this way, an insider can go way back to see how social structural shifts lead to a member's entry into and exit out of crime. 3 Moreover, the insider can weigh this knowledge against existing criminological theories and research. Here, they determine why their observations fit some work but not others, which then provides an opportunity for novel insights. To do so, insider researchers understand their position throughout the research process. Learning one's insider status, one's changing relations to the group, one's change in meaning-making from one point to another, one's positionality as it relates to choices in theories and frameworks-all can inspire and enhance insider research. Conclusion: Insider Promises ... and Pitfalls?

The promise of qualitative research, especially ethnographic field research, lies in its ability to clarify theory and show it in action. It provides powerful firsthand accounts, which allow researchers to link and reformulate various theories creatively. My own field research allowed me to discover hidden pieces of a theoretical puzzle. I then snapped these pieces firmly into place for a complicated understanding of criminal trajectories and lives. Yet my insider status enhanced my theoretical framework. It gave me a lifetime of drug market-related observations to work with. Real life informed real science, in both methodology and theoretical approach. However, I am learning about the downsides of insider qualitative research. To be clear, they have nothing to do with the work's integrity or rigor, or with theoretical and analytical potential. But given some criticism of my research, traditional outsider researchers can raise such concerns. For instance, one colleague called my insider research "totally autobiographical." I was shocked. An autobiography solely focuses on the writer, and when others appear in the text, they only contribute to key points in the writer's life. I only analyzed my relationship to the field site and participants in my book's methodology section. Yet this was enough to have someone question-and instantly diminish-my work's theoretical and analytical contributions. Also, if an insider does research on a hard-to-reach population, outsiders can question whether an insider is truly an insider-after all, the insider is

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an academic, a member of a world that hardly has access to such groups. For instance, an anonymous manuscript reviewer questioned my research access to drug robbers. The reasoning was that after finding my faculty photo online, the reviewer found no visible tattoos or scars on my person. Sadly, he or she based my work's merit and integrity on whether or not I exhibited any stereotypical signifiers of criminal minorities (especially as seen on television and film). As an insider researcher, I am troubled by such reasoning. Yet I understand its origins. Most ethnographers are outsiders to the groups or societies they study. Thus, the (unspoken) standard requires ethnographers to confront or collide with unfamiliar worlds. Then, through much trial and tribulation, outsiders gain enough access to write about them with authority (Johnson 1984). As of now, outsider research is the academic norm and tradition. In other words, most ethnographers come from privileged spaces, and it seems that an outsider "test" exists to determine whether one's research is legitimate. Insider research, on the other hand, deals with the familiar. A visit to an old neighborhood, a phone call to a friend, or a simple walk out of one's front door can start the research immediately. Thus, an insider suffers less than an outsider in gaining group access. But this means more than just physical access. It means access to the standpoints that the target group uses to frame, interpret, and map their social world. Insiders can recall to life their previous positionalities or standpoints, which helps them understand their study participants much faster (though this doesn't necessarily mean "much better"). This makes insider research distinct and unusual next to traditional outsider research. This, I suspect, makes insider research vulnerable to critiques that it is less "real" and rigorous. Insider research, whether it wants to or not, challenges dominant ethnographic methods. It is a lifetime of experiences and observations-or an ethnography longue duree. Insiders can go back in time and unearth sparkling, rich memories and moments that put them in a time and place when no other present-day researcher was there. Also, the insider sees people's lives unfold, revealing complications. In my case, I saw how there was more to criminality than emotional thrills or a rigid street culture. Drug market shifts, along with structural and cultural forces that occurred outside of the "streets," shaped and influenced my study participants over a criminal and legal life course. But, of course, insiders accomplish this only if they choose to break from the dominant mode of seeing and doing research. A potential insider may approach fieldwork through the traditional outsider perspective. Why? They may view their biography as a hindrance, or a barrier to the much-touted positivist goal of "unbiased" research. Or they may think about their audience: a room full of old-school quantitative researchers or a panel that features law-enforcement types, social analysts, or politicians. In all, they may experience a "standpoint crisis," or fear how revealing and taking advantage of their insider status may de legitimize them and hurt their academic careers (Contreras 2013).

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As the number of insider ethnographies increases (for instance, see Duran 2013; Rios 2011; Walker 2013), I hope that reluctant insiders take heart. I also hope that the distance-in terms of the perceived legitimacy-between insider and outsider research lessens, especially since insider research can enhance and broaden analytical and theoretical possibilities for understanding crime. Thus, in the same ways that insiders benefit from the theories and research produced by outsiders (all of the great work that I build on has been conducted by outsiders), insider researchers can bring fresh criminological insights that benefit all. Notes 1.

2. 3.

For an expanded and highly nuanced version of strain theory, see Robert Agnew (2006). For a more comprehensive version that focuses on how our economic institution dominates all other social institutions, which eases economic crimes, see Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (1994). These are my examples. To be clear, outsiders can do a long-term ethnography and take advantage of observations collected over the course of many years. An excellent example is Timothy Black (2009), a white ethnographer who conducted an eighteen-year ethnography on three Puerto Rican brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts. He observed them as they entered and exited drug dealing, drug use, prison, and gangs, and he contextualizes these observations within broader and local shifts in the economy, drug market, and criminal justice policy.

References Adler, Patricia. 1985. Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography ofan Upper-Level Dealing and Smuggling Community. New York: Columbia University Press. Adler, William. 1996. Land ofOpportunity: One Family s Questfor the American Dream in the Age of Crack. New York: Penguin Books. Agar, Michael. 2003. "The Story of Crack: Towards a Theory of Illict Drug Trends." Addiction Research and Theory 11 (1): 2-29. Agnew, Robert. 2006. Pressured Into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Beckett, Katherine. 1997. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Black, Timothy. 2009. When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets. New York: Pantheon Books. Bourgois, Phillippe. 2003. In Search ofRespect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press (original edition, 1995). Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin. 1960. Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. New York: Free Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Contreras, Randol. 2013. The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Berkeley: University of Cali fomi a Press. - - - . 2015. "Standpoint Purgatorio: Liminality, Fear, and Danger in Studying the' Black and Brown' Tension in Los Angeles." Pp. 249-265 in 1. Auyero, P. Bourgois, and N. ScheperHughes (eds.), Violence at the Urban Margins. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Curtis, Richard. 1998. "The Improbable Transformation ofInner-City Neighborhoods: Crime, Violence, Drugs, and Youth in the 1990s." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88 (4): 1233-1276. Curtis, Richard. 2003. "Crack, Cocaine and Heroin: Drug Eras in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1960-2000." Addiction Research and Theory 11 (1): 47--63. Dunlap, Eloise, and Bruce D. Johnson. 1992. "The Setting for the Crack Era: Macro Forces, Micro Consequences." Journal ofPsychoactive Drugs 24 (4): 307-32l. Duran, Robert. 2013. Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider sJourney. New York: Columbia University Press. Dwyer, Sonia, and Jennifer L. Buckle (2009). "The Space Between: On Being an InsiderOutsider in Qualitative Research." International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8: 54--63. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel 1. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago. Hagedorn, John. 1994. "Homeboys, Dopefiends, Legits, and New Jacks." Criminology 32 (2): 197-219. Hamid, Ansley. 1992. 'The Developmental Cycle of a Drug Epidemic: The Cocaine Smoking Epidemic of 1981-1991." Journal ofPsychoactive Drugs 24 (4): 337-348. Jackall, Robert. 1997. Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jacobs, Bruce A. 2000. Robbing Drug Dealers: Violence Beyond the Law. New York: A1dine de Gruyter. Johnson, Norris B. 1984. "Sex, Color, and Rites of Passage in Ethnographic Research." Human Organization 43 (2): 108-120. Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Lofland, John, and Lyn H. Lofland. 1995. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Massing, Michael. 1998. The Fix. New York: Simon and Schuster. Merton, Robert K. 1938. "Social Structure and Anomie." American Sociological Review 3 (5): 672--682. Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfield. 1994. Crime and the American Dream. Belmont: Wadsworth. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, Joan. 1978. Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prisons in the Barrios ofLos Angeles: Temple University Press. Rios, Victor. 201l. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys: New York University Press. Shover, Neal, and David Honaker. 1992. "The Socially Bounded Decision Making of Persistent Property Offenders." Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 31 (4): 276-290. Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Stone, Michael. 2002. Gangbusters: How a Street Tough, Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New Yorks Most Dangerous Gang. New York: Knopf. Tonry, Michael. 1995. Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Tonry, Michael. 2004. Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Walker, Michael. n.d. unpublished manuscript. "Jim Crow in Jail: Race as a Mechanism of Social Control in a Penal Institution."

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Williams, Terry. 1989. The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story ofa Teenage Drug Ring. New York: Addison-Wesley. - - - . 1992. Crackhouse: Notes from the End ofthe Line. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Wright, Richard T., and Scott H. Decker. 1997. Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups and Street Culture. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

9 Queer Anomalies?: Overcoming Assumptions in Criminological Research with Gay Men Vanessa R. Panfil

Criminological "Realness"

Questioning assumptions is important before conducting any study in the social sciences, but especially with populations that generally have not been studied or have been maligned within the research enterprise when they were the focus of research. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) populations have a troubled history as subjects of criminological study, ranging from an early preoccupation with their alleged heightened involvement in sexual offenses to a contemporary focus on victimization experiences, sometimes to the exclusion of their role in offending and as criminal justice system actors. Although "queer criminology" is an emergent field that seeks to provide a more holistic picture of queer-spectrum peoples' varied experiences and to challenge the discipline's theoretical boundaries and underlying assumptions, this field has seen exponential growth only within the past few years and is still in its developing stages. Regarding gay men, questioning assumptions is also vitally important in light ofthe stereotypes we have of them. Many ofthese hinge on effeminacy, passivity, weakness, and even downright buffoonery, as indicated by their depictions in several popular sitcoms and movies. Notable exceptions of gay gang- and crime-involved men appear in critically acclaimed drama series such as Oz and The Wire. While these modern representations move closer to depicting gay men as fully realized humans, they still fail to paint a particularly rounded portrait of gay men as citizens who mayor may not engage in violence, crime, and gangs. 169

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I sought to address this sizable gap in criminological research by exploring the experiences of gay gang- and crime-involved men with my multi-year, interviewbased and partially ethnographic study of fifty-three such men in Columbus, Ohio. The majority of participants were men of color who were in their late teens or early twenties; forty-eight of the fifty-three self-identified as current or former gang members. I conducted in-depth interviews with all participants, whom I obtained by snowball sampling a group of men previously known to me. I also spent additional time (over 225 hours in total) with just over half of them to better understand their lives. The interested reader should consult Panfil (20 14c) for a more thorough description of the sampling strategy, interviews, and sample characteristics. Conversations I have had with fellow criminologists about this research have revealed the incomprehensibility of gay men as offenders and gang members. Many of my interactions have followed a fairly uniform pattern: First, I'm asked to repeat the phrase "gay gang members," because they believe they misheard me. Then I often have to field a variety of related questions: Are they real gang members? Do they belong to real gangs? How do I know they're not just friendship networks who scry they're gangs, when they're not? Some colleagues have even gone so far as to tell me that my research participants are not gang members and they do not belong to gangs, but rather that they and their friends engage in "gang-like" behavior (although, luckily, these instances are becoming much rarer). I sometimes then specify that these allegedly false gangs fit with the dominant criminological definitions of gangs, and even with many law enforcement definitions of gangs. That is, they are durable, street-oriented youth groups whose identity includes involvement in illegal activity (Weerman, Maxson, Esbensen, Aldridge, Medina, and van Gemert 2009: 20), and each is also an "ongoing formal or informal organization, association, or group of three or more persons" that has common identifiers, a pattern of criminal activity, and the commission of criminal offenses as one of its primary activities (Ohio Revised Code, § 2923.41). Beyond this, my research participants self-identifY as gang members, though many prefer to use an alternate term for their group, such as "posse" or "clique." For the aforementioned reasons, I suppose I am not surprised that some criminologists find phrases such as "gay gang members" or "gay violent offenders" to be oxymoronic. Beginning about thirty years ago, other criminologists who labored to bring LGBTQ persons' victimization experiences to light faced similar battles regarding their research participants' statuses as "real" victims. Interestingly, "realness," which is the ability to convincingly exude a particular persona (whether a chosen one or the reflection of true personality traits), was a term I often heard during my data collection. I also had many conversations with research participants about "real gangs," "real men," and "[real] gay people," and they were well aware of the ways their "realness" would be questioned by outsiders.

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I begin this paper by touching briefly upon (the lack ot) empirical and theoretical engagements with LGBTQ populations in criminology, but I focus more specifically on the emergent field of queer criminology. I then discuss various lessons learned from my qualitative study of gay gang- and crime-involved men. I lead with an exploration of how I gained access to and rapport with my research participants by possessing (and employing) a certain level of shared knowledge of queer culture and experience. I then detail how field observations and interviewing with other participants present provided opportunities for additional detail and methodological rigor. Finally, I describe how, in my efforts to not reproduce assumptions about gay populations, I nearly avoided investigating important themes that the scant criminological literature on gay populations has uncovered; however, I avoided those errors primarily by trusting the inductive process of qualitative methods. Throughout, I focus primarily on men because the research study I discuss was conducted with gay and bisexual men, but I also mention other sexual and gender minority groups. I do not purport to have expertise on all sexual and gender minority persons (or full understanding of gay men, for that matter); rather, each group has different considerations and experiences that very well could shape their stories. Regardless, I hope that this work is convincingly illustrative of the importance, challenges, and promise of conducting qualitative criminological research with queer-spectrum populations. The Emergent Field of Queer Criminology

To say that criminological works have assumed gang members and offenders to be heterosexual males is a gross understatement. Although the majority of crime is committed by males, feminist critiques of criminological research include its focus on males to the exclusion of females, its lack of attention to the ways that crime commission is both gendered and is a performance of gender, and its assumption of heterosexuality among offenders (Collier 1998; Messerschmidt 1993; Miller 2002). Several generations of scholars have characterized gangs and delinquent peer groups as all-male or mostly-male spaces to construct an aggressive hypermasculinity through activities such as the sexual conquest of females, an exhibited propensity for violence, and engagement in violent attacks on persons perceived to be gay (e.g., Katz 1988; Miller 1958; Thrasher 1927/2000), with gay bashing as an avenue to construct masculinity and reproduce a heterosexual public persona even for closeted gay gang members (Totten 2012). Although some flexibility exists regarding the variety of masculine personas that are available for gang members to enact (e.g., Hagedorn 1998), the ways gang masculinities have been represented in the literature remain fairly uniform and nearly always presume heterosexuality (see also Panfil and Peterson, forthcoming). By contrast, research on gay men's crime has been largely limited to their involvement in sexual offenses and "deviancy" (Woods 2015), likely because of societal and disciplinary assumptions regarding gay men's alleged non-normative gender presentation, which presumably results in their inability

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or unwillingness to engage in violence, crime, and gangs (Panfi I 2014a). It is these broad brush strokes of assumed "normative" gender and sexual ity that queer criminology seeks to challenge. Although I characterize queer criminology as an emergent field, I would be remiss if! did not acknowledge the important and influential works on LGBTQ people that have existed for several decades. Pioneering works include, for example, Comstock's (1991) and Herek and Berrill's (1992) research on violence against lesbians and gay men, as well as Renzetti's (1992) and Island and Letellier's (1991) work on lesbian and gay intimate partner abuse, respectively. These and other bold books published in the early to mid-1990s focused on an important area of study: that of LGBTQ people as victims of homophobic bias crimes and same-sex intimate partner abuse. Also during the 1990s, critical criminologists began calling for a "queer criminology," one that focused on exploring both the criminalization of and the criminal worlds of gay and lesbian people (Ferrell and Sanders 1995: 318-319) and that urged criminology to face the ways it has heterosexualized theory, offenders, and responses to crime and crime victims (e.g., Collier 1998; Messerschmidt 1997). Subsequent queer criminology works have charted criminology's heteronormative discourse, partially by reaching all the way back to our field's beginnings. Articles such as "Was Lombroso a Queer?" (Tomsen 1997) and "Perverse Criminologies: The Closet of Doctor Lombroso" (Groom bridge 1999) even employ the rhetorical use of the "closet" (typically a discourse applied to LGBTQ people disclosing their sexual and/or gender identities) to anchor their critiques of the discipline. To date, much more is known about LGBTQ peoples' victimization experiences than about their offending behavior (Panfi I 20 14c; Woods 20 14b), though this is being rectified. Present-day queer criminology approaches move beyond depictions ofLGBTQ individuals as victims in order for us to properly understand the varied life experiences of queer people. The burgeoning queer criminology literature boasts research on queer-spectrum persons as victims, offenders, and criminal justice professionals and also critically engages with criminological theory. How, then, are we to describe "queer criminology" as it currently exists? Queer criminology includes diverse approaches, ranging from fairly traditional criminological research with LGBTQ populations to projects that are strongly influenced by queer theory and that argue for a complete deconstruction of identity categories. They can be empirical (qualitative or quantitative), theoretical, methodological, applied, and any combination thereof. Because queer criminological projects are generally a response to the lack of empirically sound research on LGBTQ populations within the discipline, they often aim to guide theory, policy and practice, and future scholarship. Two very recent anthologies are composed exclusively of varied examples of queer criminological work, much of which has been produced with goals of reducing inequality, injustice, and invisibility, and makes suggestions for the future (Ball, Buist, and Woods

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2014; Peterson and Panfil 20 14), while other recent interdisciplinary anthologies (e.g., Scherer and Ball 2011) also feature queer criminological work. There is even a developing literature on queer research methods and ethics (e.g., Browne and Nash 2010), complete with initial efforts to integrate queer perspectives into qualitative methods in criminology and criminal justice (e.g., Panfil and Miller 2015). Of the term "queer," Ball and Scherer (2011: 1) state that it is not merely a synonym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, questioning, and queer persons, but rather that it "ought to be read as a reference to all who defy being pigeonholed, pushed to the margins, or being pressured to adopt common social narratives regarding gender and sexuality." Consistent with this sensibility, Ball's (2014a; 2014b) work suggests that queer could describe research participants but should be conceived of as a disposition. That is, queer should also be a verb, and a "queer/ed criminology" would fit within a deconstructive framework that challenges the boundaries not only of mainstream or traditional criminologies but also critical criminologies, by questioning the ways individuals' subjectivities have been circumscribed. Others, such as Woods (20 14a; 20 14b), attempt to strike a balance between identity-based and deconstructive approaches by extensively critiquing extant criminological theory for its representations and assumptions of queer people, and by outlining how identity categories such as sexuality and gender should be thought of as relational concepts that can structure individuals' lives, just as other statuses do. In addition to queer criminology's contributions to theory, empirical work on LGBTQ populations and their interactions with agencies of social control have produced excellent insights for policy and practice that can conceivably improve the lives of and services for queer people (see, for example, Dwyer 2014; Messinger 2014). The present article isjust one example of a queer criminology project that falls somewhere in the middle ofthe queer criminology continuum, as 1 retain recognizable categories of gender and sexual identities (as they have salience for my research participants) but seek to critically interrogate existing criminological assumptions about queer people. Indeed, at least some level of critique is arguably necessary in all queer criminological research, in light of criminology'S history of questionable engagement with LGBTQ populations (Panfil and Peterson 2014). And of course, queer criminologists need not identify as queer themselves, though it seems that many of us do identify somewhere on the spectrum, with some of us acknowledging our own positionality as part of our work (even if only by using terms such as "I," "we," or "us" in order to reflexively refer to queer populations of which we are a part). This article provides specific examples of how membership in queer circles can aid in quality data collection and rapport building with members of queer populations. It also illustrates how employing the sensibilities of qualitative methods can help overcome circumscribing the identities of understudied populations, which is consistent with a queer criminology sensibility.

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Shared Understandings A common challenge for qualitative researchers is related to access-how to successfully recruit participants and gain rapport in order to produce rich and revealing data. In the case of my study, the combination of underground and stigmatized activities (criminal activity/gang membership and gay identity) meant that participants were wary of a complete outsider. Indeed, my white skin did prevent some would-be interviewees from participating, for fear that I was the police, and my sex and race were factors I often had to negotiate in the field. While most of my participants and I were different on many dimensions, including biological sex, race, education level, and current or former gang status, our shared experience of growing up gay allowed for us to have similar experiential knowledge from which to build in the interviews. I understood their narratives of feeling "different," the process of coming out as a seemingly never-ending series of personal disclosures (with varying levels of risk associated with each, though many are fairly innocuous and without negative consequences), and the struggle to live as an openly gay person while steering clear of pitfalls. We all have lived and come out in a society where conservative political rhetoric compares even committed same-sex sexual relationships to incest and bestiality; some of us came out before the US Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). I am no stranger to rejection by peers, hearing homophobic epithets, and generally feeling uneasy in certain locales. I still sometimes pause before I identify my partner by name or as "she," and I am acutely aware of the impression management that is sometimes required of us in public interactions where the rules of engagement are unclear. My initial sample of research participants and I even utilized the services of an LGBTQ youth drop-in center at the same time; it's precisely how we came to know one another. Beyond our shared experience of growing up gay, I am also a Columbus native and am well versed in both gay lingo and gang/criminal justice system argot, which helped to make interviews more productive. Having some insider or "indigenous" knowledge can assist in gaining rapport, asking effective follow-up questions, presenting plausible hypothetical scenarios, determining the veracity of responses, and providing a general sensibility for the topics discussed, such as not imposing the stereotypes of the larger culture on the population of study (Holstein and Gubrium 1995; Zinn 1979). When participants didn't feel the need to elaborate on a gay-related concept, they would sometimes say, "You're gay, you understand." Our shared knowledge was useful to me to understand the context, but I almost always pressed for detail. I cannot presume that I do know what they mean-our families of origin were often very different, and the fact that I was not born male and did not have to contend with masculine expectations already means that I may not understand. I also did not want to assume that their experience was exclusively related to their sexual identity, when it was likely dependent on their sexual identity's interaction with other social statuses, such as their race. I would ask for them to explain it to me so I

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could hear it in their own words, or I would ask for them to explain it "to my tape recorder." I would then sometimes have to field questions about lesbians and/or "the lesbian community," which only reifies my statement that I perhaps didn't intuitively understand their experiences as well as they thought I did, since they apparently were unclear about my own experiences and social world within the LGBTQ community. If! and other queer researchers assume we know how our research participants think, feel, and act as a result of our shared identification with LGBTQ communities, this can stifle our motivation to explore participants' own meanings (see too Gorman-Murray, Johnston, and Waitt 2010). While it is entirely plausible that a heterosexual person could have gained rapport with my research participants, in this particular case, my gay identity was a necessary condition for them to consent to an interview, especially in light of all of our other differences. I know this because a number of them told me this explicitly, and entire gay gangs were only willing to consent to interviews with me after receiving confirmation that I was gay. In fact, upon their learning this, I have heard exclamations such as "She family, y'all!" and "Get it, gurrrl" and "Now that's wassup." My queer identity and my desire to bring the stories of queer young people out of the margins and into the larger consciousness were very appealing to participants. Jeremy effectively summarized why a project about gay people conducted by a gay person was of importance and convinced him to participate: "Because! It's about time for my voice to get heard. It is. I been waitin'. That's what I really did it for. It's time for ... We hear like, other like, straight novelists that put they ideas of what gay mean, you know? And no, we want somethin' that comes from our mouth." Although sexual and gender differences along the queer spectrum characterize diverse groups, it is very telling and deeply meaningful that Jeremy ascribes one mouth, essentially one voice, to all gay people. I do not believe that he means all gay people are alike (indeed, Jeremy and others drew extensive boundaries around acceptable gay behavior), but rather, he is communicating two fundamental principles: he is acknowledging that their experiences are different, at least in a number of salient ways, from heterosexual people; also, that all queer people want and deserve equality. Of course, the foreground of the quote is also fairly clear: that the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of queer people's lives should be replaced with authentic voices from LGBTQ communities, highlighting why gay identity provided a shared place of trust between a researcher and a (her) marginalized group. Accidental Methodologies and Fortuitous Rigor I now describe my data collection methods more specifically. I discuss not only how my research methods allowed me to gather the data that I did, but also how these methods (some of them accidental) saved me from shaving off critical meanings and moments in participants' lives through omission or making assumptions.

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Ethnographic Fieldwork and Interviewing in the Presence of Others Initially, my study was meant to be an interview-based study only, in light of the fact that it was my dissertation research and I was hoping to graduate within a particular timeframe. However, interviewing participants in their homes and other locations of their choosing allowed me to see how they interacted with romantic partners, friends, and family members, which presented me with unique opportunities to see how they constructed identity in a variety of contexts. My field observations further illustrated the ways traditional masculinity was brought out as a trope to achieve certain ends, a form of what some criminological scholars might call code-switching, and what others might describe as deploying cultural repertoires (e.g., Anderson 1999; Lindegaard, Miller, and Reynald 2013). Secondary encouragement to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in addition to in-depth interviews arose from my initial trouble with securing a sample larger than about a dozen participants. I decided I should spend more time with existing participants to gain deeper data in the event that I'd have to abandon my goal of a substantial number of interviews, and perhaps during this fieldwork I would meet new, study-eligible men. However, I am thankful that I continued to conduct fieldwork even after my recruitment substantially improved, because some of the most powerful encounters (both emotionally and analytically) in my study were outside of the interview scenario. These additional interactions brought greater insights into turning points, desistance or persistence, transitions to adulthood, and identity formation. For example, remaining in periodic contact with several desistance-minded participants over the course of months or years provided an illustrative contrast between their ideal or expected transition out of gang membership/crime commission (as presented in the interview) and what they experienced in reality (as demonstrated in our interactions post-interview). But it was the times when there were others present that contributed to the construction of group meaning, which was especially useful for my study, as the majority of participants were gang-involved and questions about group dynamics inhabited extensive space on my interview instrument. Although interviews were one-on-one, many of the interviews took place with the referring party or other study participants, friends, fellow gang members, or family members within earshot of the interview or in an adjoining room. Sometimes this was out of necessity, such as the six interviews that took place in my car because we could not find a suitable indoor location on a few cold and snowy days. Other times, it was simply due to the layout ofthe home in which I was interviewing, or because people would come and go from the home as they pleased. This was often beyond my and the participant's control, as I frequently interviewed participants in locations other than their own homes. There were also a few occasions where participants were very willing to let their friends listen so that these individuals could hear the questions and decide whether they wanted to complete their own interview. When I was not able to secure a quiet, private, low-traffic place for

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us, I was careful to let each participant know that we could reschedule for a time when no one else would hear us; no participant took this option. They sometimes suggested that their friends "knew everything" about them anyway. Interestingly, these exchanges with "spectators" sometimes produced deeper data, as those folks who were listening helped to elaborate concepts without my prompting by asking follow-up questions that I would not have thought to ask, filling in forgotten details, or challenging their friends' statements in ways I often would not. Although these environments may have prevented some participants from being fully honest, there were times when they revealed sensitive information that (audibly) surprised the other individuals present, which suggests candor. Still, although it is unknown exactly how much was stifled as a result of these conditions, the benefits seemed to outweigh the negatives, as it gave me unique opportunities to know when a participant might be bluffing, to know when their responses were deemed acceptable or unacceptable in their circle of friends, and hints for how to dig deeper into those themes in subsequent interviews. I refer to this as a source of fortuitous rigor: I don't regard the others chiming in to construct group meaning as a way to "correct" any perceived untruth, but rather, it helps me know how to deal with such scenarios in the future, and it helps shed light on group dynamics, while also highlighting tensions and contradictions. As such, most excitingly, it illustrated how shared meanings can be spontaneously constructed in a group setting. For example, when I asked a participant about his drug use within earshot of the rest of his all-gay gang (the Royal Family), it resulted in much laughter from multiple men and the denial of using anything besides marijuana and illicit prescription pills. Javier, the undisputed head of the gang, declared (though it was not his interview), "We don't dance with the white wolves." The "white wolves" he referred to were so-called hard drugs, primarily cocaine and crack, but the discussion also touched on avoiding heroin and crystal meth. But interestingly, which I only found out as I conducted more interviews with the gang's members, almost every man in the room had tried crack or cocaine at least once; some had smoked it for lengthy periods oftime, one even ending up in rehab for his addiction. However, the group wanted to assert its position and reputation as a gay group whose members do not do coke, which was a negative stereotype of the local gay community. This group identity construction was especially important because of well-known figures in Columbus's gay scene who were, as this gang described them, "coked out" and willing to engage in unsafe sexual acts for drugs or money to purchase drugs. The group was willing to grant recreational use but not open or proud recreational use; and it gave approval for its members to trade sex for money, provided it was done with prophylactics and at a price that was not exploitative of the man selling sex. Another example from an interview with the Royal Family's members is revealing. I was interviewing Baby, the first ofthree interviews that would happen that evening. This excerpt is drawn from the portion of the interview where

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we discussed illicit income-generating activities, some of which he had already told me about. We moved on to theft: VP:

So, you would steal from stores, did you ever take anything out of anybody's house, or ... ?

Baby:

No, I don't do that.

Hurricane, Aga, and Javier: (simultaneously) Hmm-mmm. Baby:

No, Tdon't steal from people, Tsteal from corporations.

Hurricane: Someone that I know is insured. Javier:

O-kay!

VP:

What'd you say?

Hurricane: Someone that you know's insured. Baby:

Yes!

Imani:

Like I told you, 1-

VP:

(to Imani) You gotta remember, I gotta ask the same questions of everybody!

Tmani:

Ohhhh ...

Javier:

What's wrong wit y'all?

VP:

He told me though. So, you said that it's different stealing from a corporation than a person.

Baby:

Yeah, Tdon't steal from people.

VP:

So, why wouldn't you steal from a person?

Baby:

Because people work hard for that, you know what I'm sayin '? Corporation, they just ... They got their money! It'sjust sittin' out there, so why not? If the, if your employees aren't payin' attention, why not walk out the door? T have a perfect example. Like, [the dollar store] was stacked the other day, and one employee was sittin' outside eatin', the other one was in the back. Of course I'm gonna take a few things! Things I need. (pause) Yes.

Aga:

Shoulda got some more deodorant, honey.

VP:

(laughing)

Baby:

Honey, Tcan always go refill!

Aga:

I know. but ...

Baby:

Shit! I'm really in here spillin' T.

VP:

Was there anything else that you did to make money?

Baby:

What else have we done?

Hurricane: I've wrote a check or two.

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Oh yes, I have cashed a check ...

Hurricane: I swiped a few cards ... Javier:

Shhhh.

Baby:

They almost got me a couple months ago. Yes! On uhh, on [another side of town], the check was for like [just under $500]. I got away with it twice, I cashed two checks before, and, umm, you know, you can't go over five hundred dollars, cuz that's a felony, and I can't have no felony! So, you always gotta keep that in mind. And that's about it.

Imani:

You know they changed it to a thousand.

Baby:

I told you that!

Imani:

I know!

Javier:

Mmm-hmm. They did!

Baby:

Hmm. That's about it.

Hurricane: Get the fuck out of here! Baby:

No, you stay the fuck over there.

Javier:

Shhh!

The interaction begins with a moral declaration: that Baby would steal from corporations but not from people, followed by most of the men in the room agreeing audibly. Imani even draws attention to himself personally by reminding me that he has already told me this before. This reminder served at least two clear purposes: to indicate to me that his morality was in line with his group's orientation, and to demonstrate to his group that he was well aware oftheir sentiment and had already communicated that sentiment to me. Not only was this a moral declaration regarding not victimizing individuals, it was also an assertion that the gang is more savvy than low-wage workers, because they are able to steal without the workers catching them. Interestingly, Aga even encourages Baby to have taken more, perhaps because Aga has experience working in dollar stores, but also because he could benefit from the items taken. When Baby exclaims that he's really "spillin' T" (giving me the scoop), I take this as an indication of the natural end of that subject (due to this group's use of "the T" as a synonym for gossip or sensitive information) and move on to a more general question about other income-generating activities. He brings the gang back into the conversation by asking, "What else have we done?" He is explicitly drawing on the group's collective memory but also indicating that they have participated in these activities together, or at least shared information about how to engage in illicit activities. When Hurricane offers something to jog Baby's memory, Baby then provides a fairly detai led account of a crime that is also meant to communicate his savvy, partially through his attempt to avoid harsh consequences that could interfere with his future plans. Again, Imani chimes in to

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suggest that he knows these guidelines by reminding Baby ofthe current state of affairs; Baby wrestles this control from Imani by claiming he knew it first. And finally, when Baby claims that he is finished discussing his involvement in these sorts of activities ("that's about it"), Hurricane challenges this, prompting Baby to reiterate his control over the interview. Baby both encouraged and resisted interlocution from the spectators of his interview, depending on the information he wanted to disclose. And although Javier shushed and chastised participants other than Baby multiple times because they were not allowing Baby to speak during his own interview, Javier still vocally agrees twice with the main moral stance in the interaction (stealing from corporations and not people) and also later chimes in to provide factual information to his friends. His position within the group is solid, but Baby, Aga, Imani, and Hurricane, while core members of the group, were engaged in vying for status within the group through their interactions with me present. As can be seen, these sorts of interactions not only allow insight into group dynamics, morality, and meaning, but also can help to generate deeper data when group members challenge and contribute to each other's statements. In some ways, these interviews are reminiscent of an ethnographic field experience, or even of a focus group. It possesses structure for a conversation but still includes space for meaning construction among members of a preexisting group who likely have some amount of agreement on the subjects at hand. I occasionally tried to recreate dialogues such as these in the field (by asking two or three study participants who were all in the same room to answer a question I posed to them), with varying results. In the future I will be more cognizant of opportunities to integrate these types of scenarios into my repertoire of field methods for the insights they can generate. Confronting Disciplinary Assumptions as Well as My Own My chosen research methods also allowed me to rectify scenarios where I unintentionally reproduced assumptions of the criminological literature. I first discuss my interview instrument and what was missing from it, but then I detail how the inductive process of qualitative methods allowed me to gather detailed information that I nearly designed out of my study. In each interview, I asked questions related to participants' life histories, relationships and sexual identity, gang and/or criminal experiences, experiences with the criminal justice system, and what it meant to "be a man," among other topics. My interview instrument includes some questions that were inspired by, adapted from, or borrowed verbatim from other criminological and sociological sources (Copes and Hochstetler 2006; Edin and Kefalas 2005; Esbensen 2003; Miller 2001 and 2008). I also used my own lived experience as a queer person to guide the instrument construction, the interviews, and the study as a whole. I utilized a semi-structured method of interviewing participants, where we

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explored certain overarching concepts within the interview but had considerable leeway regarding how much participants could elaborate or structure their narratives to their liking. Despite drawing from extant sources' instruments, I intentionally did not borrow questions directly from the gender/queer studies literatures, or from existing criminological research with LGBTQ populations. I was convinced that this would produce findings disproportionately focused on victimization experiences (as these have been the primary foci of criminological research with queer populations in the last several decades), whereas my concepts of interest were more closely related to identity construction through crime commission and gang membership. As a response to what I perceived as an overrepresentation of gay men as victims of interpersonal violent crime, I did not explicitly ask any questions about homophobic bullying in schools, anti-gay bias crimes, or same-sex intimate partner violence. I was not even sure that those themes would be salient for my research participants, who are very different demographically than many ofthe samples utilized in studies on gay men's victimization (samples composed primarily of white and/or middle-class gay men). Thus, initially I attempted to shy away from victimization questions in general, and I absolutely avoided asking participants ifthey had ever experienced a crime (let alone been the "victim" of a crime) as a result of their sexual identity or gender performance. Of course, I soon realized that these exclusions were poor choices and that I could have supposed this from the findings of the aforementioned studies. Recent research with a national probability sample of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults suggests that half of all LGB adults have been harassed because of their sexuality, and well over one third of gay men have been the victim of a person or property crime (Herek 2009). Intent on highlighting agency outside the realm of homophobic encounters, I did not properly understand the potential role of victimization in their violence perpetration, even though that relationship (sometimes called the victim/offender overlap) has been evaluated in much criminological research. Without this insight, I risked committing the error that caused me to indict the heteronormative research that preceded me. The result of my error, of course, would be the erasure of gay peoples' experiences with violence, which are sometimes fundamentally salient to their narratives and even their day-to-day behavior. Fortunately, research participants described these scenarios precisely because they found them to be significant events in their construction of masculine and gay identities. Indeed, themes of homophobic bullying in schools, anti-gay bias crimes, or same-sex intimate partner violence arose again and again, to the point where I did start asking specific questions to elicit such experiences. In fact, so many narratives arose regarding these experiences that my first three publications from my study included these themes (PanfiI2014a, 2014b, and 2014c), and provide direct challenges to assumptions of gay men as weak or passive. In this way, their experiences also challenged (but still complemented) extant

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criminological research, all the while contributing to developing concepts that lie at the heart of my research study. Before [ began to better integrate questions about victimization experiences, these narratives arose from seemingly innocuous interview questions. In the life history section of the interview guide, I asked, "What was school like for you?" Among other reasons, I intended it as a warm-up question of sorts. To my surprise, many participants launched right into discussing how their school environments were sites of harassment based on their gender atypicality and/or gay sexual identity, which often led to fights on or off of school grounds (Panfil 2014b). More broadly, a major theme [ found in my research and that [ discuss in my early publications was related to physically fighting back against anti-gay harassers. [n each interview, [ continued to ask the life history questions and encouraged whichever narratives arose, since these questions provided important contextual information about participants' families and lives. [ also added additional follow-ups that I routinely asked whenever it seemed appropriate, such as after discussing the physical fights participants had been involved in, or after their recounting of the times they had been called a fag or faggot. However, I did not always have to explicitly ask, "Have you ever physically fought because someone called you a fag or a faggot?" These narratives could also be drawn out with fairly standard follow-up questions meant to elicit further detail, such as, "How did you react when he called you a faggot?" The commitment to be flexible with regularly asked follow-ups about specific themes of interest does not interfere with the necessity of asking questions to expand upon incidents, identities, and meanings that participants deem important. [n discussing their willingness (both within and outside of school) to fight back against anti-gay harassment, thereby proving their physical toughness and in turn defying negative stereotypes about gay men, participants engaged in a form of "talking back" (Blumer 1986: 22). That is, they utilized the interview as a space where they could resist and challenge perceptions of gay men, both those that exist in society and those that I, as a researcher, might have held. For instance, Derrick said, "['m not scared of no straight person, if you gon' come at me, I'm still a boy at the end of the day. [t don't matter like, how gay [ am, how gay [ might be, [ can still fight a straight dude." Echoing this unwillingness to be harassed for being gay, Jeremy asserted, "Just cuz you're straight, ['m not gonna back down." Although participants were well aware of stereotypes about gay men, they still expressed surprise when their opponents were "shocked" by their fighting dexterity; for example, Imani mused, "I don't know why they think gay people cain't fight." Johnny directly references and repudiates these stereotypes of gay men by declaring, "I will fight you like I'm straight." With these fights, participants not only reclaimed the masculine status that had been challenged, but they also sought to curtail future harassment. The general consensus suggested by participants was that once they fought back and "built a reputation" for toughness, their peers would see that they were not to be bothered, because

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they were willing to defend themselves. What a challenge fighting back presents to the portrait of gay men as passive victims of violence-a challenge that would not have been uncovered without a willingness to trust the inductive process. I took other steps to maximize the potentialities of the inductive process related to these themes (and others). Because I conducted and transcribed all of the interviews, I had an idea of some of the major themes before I began coding the data (using an inductive process by allowing themes to emerge from the data-see Glaser and Strauss 1967), but I wanted to be able to have rich data on these themes. Thus, interviews were transcribed and open-coded on an ongoing basis, which was concurrent with data collection. I used a basic word processing program to code the data. As themes began to emerge, I needed additional information to best make sense of some themes. I created theoretical memos, or writeups of my ideas about my codes (Lofland, Snow, Anderson, and Lofland 2006) that reflected my current thinking about the concepts. The memos also included ideas for how to gather the additional information that I thought would help flesh out the concepts. I then returned to the field with these ideas in mind in order to be able to delve deeper into those themes during subsequent interviews and fieldwork. Sometimes I was able to go back and ask a participant about a theme he had mentioned during his interview that I wanted to understand better; in other cases, I could only collect additional information during subsequent interviews with new participants. Near the end of the interview, I also asked participants if there was a question I should have asked; I routinely began asking some of these "left out" questions of subsequent participants. Thus, I do not have answers to some questions from all participants, but this is common when using such a process. The benefits, of course, include the flexibility to ask questions that are frequently consequential for research participants-sometimes clarified for the researcher in the ways participants "talk back" (see, for example, Miller 2001). The aforementioned descriptions of "fighting back" demonstrate the value participants placed on an honor-based, aggressive (or at least reactive) masculinity. It even could be tempting to assume that gay gang- and crime-involved men would prefer to be read as straight, and that being read as a "fag" was never acceptable. However, this means missing some ofthe nuanced possibilities for gender fluidity that exist within the context of fighting back. One option discussed by participants was "fagging out." When he was called a fag as an adult, Ricky said, I'd just fag out. Which is, you know, the typical word of getting really loud, acting really gay out of nowhere, just cuz they ... "You just, you wanna call me something that I know I'm not, but, hey, I'm a punk? No, I'm far from that. I'm gonna fag out on you, so everyone can know that you're the punk." That's what, that's basically what you do when you fag out. You scare somebody. They get scared, automatically. Like, "O-kay. This person's really ... Something's wrong with him." ... When you fag out, youjust click. It's like, say we were talking right now, and somebody was to come in the room and say somethin' real stupid,I would literally like, stop this whole conversation, and go off And the head'll be bobbin', and noddin', and the neck'll start goin', and the hand work' 11 start doin', and I'll be cussin' every other word! (laughs)

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Every other word out of my mouth would be a cuss word. Basically, that's fagging out. And that's when you like, start, that's when you start walkin' towards the person, that's when you fag out. I've fagged out at Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's, it doesn't matter.

Further reiterating the gendered aspects of fagging out, Imani explains, Like, people already know I'm gay when they see me. And then when T do get masculine, like, they don't know what to be with theirselves, cuz it's like, "Huh?" I am everything! I'm like a whole man sometimes, but I don't know! Some days, I be faggin' out! That's what be gettin' me together [making me confront someone/speak candidly]. Somebody'll say somethin', and I'll be like, "Uhhh-uhhhhh!" You know, somethin' like that, like, "Oh, gurl, no she didn't!" I be lookin' like a whole man, and then I fag out.

Imani's language suggests that regardless of his self-presentation at the moment before he reacts, "fagging out" then renders him as recognizably gay, and therefore he is perceived to be less of a man, instead of the "whole man" (normatively masculine) image he was enacting. However, the underlying goal of "fagging out" is to display a propensity to physically protect oneselffrom antigay harassment because he is a man, regardless of his gender presentation, and is therefore unwilling to tolerate disrespect. This particular aspect of "fagging out" is predicated on a refrain I often heard to justity fighting back, which was the aforementioned "I'm still a boy/man." Because being called a fag was often linked to non-normative masculine gender presentation, "fagging out" was a strategy to incorporate the genderatypical behavior that the insult addresses into a man's response to the insult. By magnitying the behavior, adding aggressive actions, and scaring the aggressor, they essentially inverted the insult and reduced their harassers to punks and "fags" (in the derogatory way that the harasser meant). Referring to oneself as a "fag" when winning a confrontation was a way to challenge a heteronormative slur. When a man withdrew from a verbal confrontation with him, Elijah said, "You just got punked by a fag. So who's the fag?" During a verbal conflict that eventually escalated into a physical fight that he knew he would win, Jayden warned his harasser, "I'm gonna show you what this faggot can do!" And Steve, when recounting a time when he severely beat a man who called him a faggot (resulting in blood coming out of his opponent's nose, eyes, and ears), said that he "showed him how big ofa faggot I was." Thus, participants' meaning system is complex and challenges static understandings of homophobic harassment. While "fagging out" has underpinnings similar to criminology'S well-documented masculine justifications for violence (such as fighting to address disrespect), it is unique in that it draws on gay normative schemata to achieve these ends. Associating aggressive and potentially serious violent demeanor with "fags" and flamboyant behavior is certainly not theoretically realized elsewhere in the criminological literature. And indeed, even among participants' talk,fagifaggot could be used as a noun, an adjective, and even a verb, with varying positive or

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negative connotations depending on context (Panfi I and Miller 20 15). This again highlights the importance of paying close attention to research participants' unique language, as certain words or phrases can distill important analytic concepts that provide insight into social interactions (Charmaz 2006). Finally, although participants did not view themselves necessarily as "victims," they wanted it to be known that they had experienced and responded to "gay bashing," and thus these were theoretically important concepts to explore. Without the flexibility and inductive analyses that qualitative methods allow, such insights likely would have been lost. Are Assumptions Useful? The title of this paper includes the phrase "overcoming assumptions"-what is my concrete advice for overcoming assumptions, now that I have laid bare many of my errors and happy accidents? My suggestion above all, while probably not surprising to a qualitative audience, would be to trust the inductive process. The inductive process that characterizes qualitative methods produces such rich, revealing, and unexpected data. Researchers utilizing qualitative methods should keep in mind their overarching concepts of interest and dig in deep---as deep as they can go. We are there to learn, so we should encourage our research participants to enlighten us and take us, theoretically, to unforeseen places. This does not mean we need to be complete strangers to our participants or seek out wholly unknown places to us. Clearly, what Lofland and colleagues (2006) might refer to as "starting where you are" can be a useful tool for gathering complex and nuanced data. Jones (2010) argues that research undertaken from a position of ignorance, rather than understanding, can also unintentionally exoticize and dehumanize our participants. Do I believe that heterosexual and gender-conforming folks can uncover rich data with queer populations? Yes, I absolutely do, but they would likely face serious hurdles in accessing some queer populations and in establishing rapport with these groups. While research participants may find it enjoyable to fully "school" someone who did not have the experience of growing up gay, this process would also entail being vulnerable to criticism by heterosexual outsiders. However, and perhaps just as stifl ing, insiders as well as outsiders may bring their own predetermined judgments to the research scenario that prevent them from fully exploring the meanings and themes they begin to uncover. Any assumptions brought to the field need to be regarded as potentially idiosyncratic and treated as malleable (or even disposable). To paraphrase a refrain of one of my mentors, if when conducting a qualitative study you hear nothing surprising, you're doing it wrong. If, as researchers, we just cannot resist making an assumption about gay gang- and crime-involved men, we should assume this: that they are neither wholly different from nor vastly similar to other comparable populations. As is clear from this paper, I assumed that my research participants were anomalous in two ways. First, I assumed that they had experiences that did not mirror other

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young gay men's experiences, especially as they related to homophobic bullying, harassment, and violence. That, of course, was absolutely wrong. Second, [ assumed that, based on long-standing heteronormative perceptions of street crime and gangs, participants would have to negotiate masculinity in heteronormative ways. To be sure, there was plenty of this sort of impression management, but often with a slightly different flavor. For example, my research participants were gang members, about half of whom were members of all-gay gangs, who used a range of repertoires with which to construct masculine and gay identities. The young men who joined gay gangs still brawl with, cut, and shoot at their enemies, many of whom are in rival gay gangs, but also might dance competitively, "dress up" in women's clothes to sell sex, and voice deeply held affection for their fellow gang members. Or take an example ofmasculine identity construction that was discussed in depth herein: participants were not just fighting over being called a faggot because it was disrespectful, but also because being insulted by another person for his sexual orientation, a core aspect of his identity, was an offense too egregious to ignore. But also, "fagging out," or acting in aggressive and flamboyant ways simultaneously, effectively turns homophobic harassment on its head. The presence of gay gangs, the proud and public avowal of gay identity through violent retaliation, and "fagging out" all take nearly one hundred years of criminological research and theorizing through the wringer. And indeed, how else but through qualitative and interpretive methods would these complex processes have been uncovered? [ encourage all scholars, whether or not they are members ofthe population of study, to be prepared to confront their own assumptions, to question whether disciplinary "truths" are self-evident, to embrace diversity, and to seek out participants' indigenous meanings in rich detail.

Acknowledgements This study was supported in part by two awards from the University atAlbany's Initiatives for Women. I sincerely thank Jody Miller and Wilson R. Palacios for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Works Cited Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code ofthe Street: Decency. Violence. and the Moral Life ofthe Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Ball, Matthew. 2014a. "Queer Criminology, Critique, and the 'Art of Not Being Governed. '" Critical Criminology 22: 21-34. Ball, Matthew. 2014b. "What's Queer about Queer Criminology?" Pp. 531-555 in Dana Peterson and Vanessa R. Panfil (eds.), Handbook ofLGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. New York: Springer. Ball, Matthew, and Burkhard Scherer. 2011. "Introduction: Queering Paradigms, Interrogating Agendas." Pp. 1-10 in Burkhard Scherer and Matthew Ball (eds.), Queering Paradigms JJ: Interrogating Agendas. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Ball, Matthew, Carrie L. Buist, and Jordan Blair Woods. 2014. "Introduction to the Special Issue on Queer/ing Criminology: New Directions and Frameworks." Critical Criminology 22: 1--4.

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Blumer, Herbert. 1986. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Browne, Kath, and Catherine J. Nash, eds. 2010. Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Collier, Richard. 1998. Masculinities, Crime, and Criminology: Men, Heterosexuality, and the Criminal(ised) Other. London, UK: Sage. Comstock, Gary David. 1991. Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men. New York: Columbia University Press. Copes, Heith, and Andy Hochstetler. 2006. '''Why I'll Talk': Offenders' Motives for Participating in Qualitative Research." Pp. 19-28 in Paul Cromwell (ed.), In Their Own Words: Criminals on Crime, 4th ed. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Dwyer, Angela. 2014. '''We're Not Like These Weird Feather Boa-Covered AIDSSpreading Monsters': How LGBTYoung People and Service Providers Think Riskiness Informs LGBT Youth-Police Interactions." Critical Criminology 22: 65-79. Edin, Kathryn, and Maria Kefalas. 2005. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Esbensen, Finn-Aage. 2003. Evaluation of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G. R. E.A. T) Program in the United States, 1995-1999. 2nd ICPSR version. Ann Arbor, MY: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Ferrell, Jeff, and Clinton R. Sanders. 1995. "Towards a Cultural Criminology." Pp. 297-326 in Jeff Ferrell and Clinton R. Sanders (eds.), Cultural Criminology. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Lynda Johnston, and Gordon Waitt. 2010. "Queer(ing) Communication in Research Relationships: A Conversation about Subjectivities, Methodologies and Ethics." Pp. 97-112 in Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash (eds.),

Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Groombridge, Nic. 1999. "Perverse Criminologies: The Closet of Doctor Lombroso." Social & Legal Studies 8: 531-548. Hagedorn, John M. 1998. "Frat Boys, Bossmen, Studs, and Gentlemen: A Typology of Gang Masculinities." Pp. 152-167 in Lee H. Bowker (ed.), Masculinities and Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Herek, Gregory M. 2009. "Hate Crimes and Stigma-Related Experiences Among Sexual Minority Adults in the United States: Prevalence Estimates from aN ational Probability Sample." Journal ofInterpersonal Violence 24: 54-74. Herek, Gregory M., and Kevin T. Berrill, eds. 1992. Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. 1995. The Active Interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Island, David, and Patrick Letellier. 1991. Men Who Beat the Men Who Love Them: Battered Gay Men and Domestic Violence. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press. Jones, Nikki. 2010. Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Lindegaard, Marie Rosenkrantz, Jody Miller, and Danielle M. Reynald. 2013. 'Transitory Mobility, Cultural Heterogeneity, and Victimization RiskAmong Young Men of Color: Insights from an Ethnographic Study in Cape Town, South Africa." Criminology 51: 967-1008.

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Lofland, John, David Snow, Leon Anderson, and Lyn H. Lofland. 2006. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, 401 ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson. Messerschmidt, James W. 1993. Masculinities and Crime: Critique andReconceptualization of Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Messerschmidt, James W. 1997. Crime as Structured Action: Gender, Race, Class, and Crime in the Making. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Messinger, Adam M. 2014. "Marking 35 Years of Research on Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons and New Directions." Pp. 65-85 in D. Peterson and V. R. Panfil (eds.), Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. New York: Springer. Miller, Jody. 2001. One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Jody. 2002. 'The Strengths and Limits of 'Doing Gender' for Understanding Street Crime." Theoretical Criminology 6: 433--460. Miller, Jody. 2008. Getting Played: African-American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence. New York: New York University Press. Miller, Walter B. 1958. "Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency." Journal of Social Issues 14 (3): 5-19. Ohio Revised Code. 2007. "Criminal Gang Definitions." § 2923.41. Panfi I, Vanessa R. 20 14a. "Better Left Unsaid? The Role of Agency in Queer Criminological Research." Critical Criminology 22: 99-111. Panfil, Vanessa R 2014b. "Gay Gang- and Crime-Involved Men's Experiences with Homophobic Bullying and Harassment in Schools." Journal of Crime and Justice 37: 79-103. Panfil, Vanessa R 2014c. "'I Will Fight You Like I'm Straight': Gay Gang- and CrimeInvolved Men's Participation in Violence." Pp. 121-145 in Dana Peterson and Vanessa R Panfil (eds.), Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. New York: Springer. Panfil, Vanessa R., and Dana Peterson. 2014. "Hardly Queer, or Very Queer Indeed? Concluding Thoughts about the Handbook ofLGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice." Pp. 557-561 in Dana Peterson and Vanessa R Panfil (eds.), Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. New York: Springer. Panfil, Vanessa R, and Dana Peterson. (Forthcoming.) "Gender, Sexuality, and Gangs: Re-Envisioning Diversity." In Scott Decker and David Pyrooz (eds.), Handbook of Gangs. New York: John Wiley. Panfil, Vanessa Rand Jody Miller. 2015. "Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Qualitative Methods." Pp. 32--48 in Heith Copes and J. Mitchell Miller (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Criminology. New York: Routledge. Peterson, Dana, and Vanessa R. Panfil, eds. 2014. Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. New York: Springer. Renzetti, Claire M. 1992. Violent Betrayal: Partner Abuse in Lesbian Relationships. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Scherer, Burkhard, and Matthew Ball, eds. 2011. Queering Paradigms II: Interrogating Agendas. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Thrasher, Frederic M. 1927/2000. The Gang: A Study of1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago, TL: New Chicago School Press. Tomsen, Stephen. 1997. "Was Lombroso a Queer? Criminology, Criminal Justice and the Heterosexual Imaginary." Pp. 33--45 in Gail Mason and Stephen Tomsen, Homophobic Violence. Sydney, NSW: Hawkins. Totten, Mark. 2012. "Gays in the Gang." Journal of Gang Research 19 (2): 1-24.

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Part IV Comparative Social Organization of Place and Crime

10 Qualitative Research in Comparative Context: Understanding Crime and Politics in Brazilian Shantytowns Enrique Desmond Arias

Criminology as we understand it today has emerged from the particular concerns of scholars living and working, for the most part, in Western Europe and the former British colonies of mainland North America and the South Pacific. These core countries usually have powerful central and regional governments that maintain well-funded police forces. They also almost always have, in urban areas, well-developed street plans, regularized neighborhoods and regularized housing for all social classes, though there are, of course, exceptions. The governments of these countries, especially with the advent of high-quality and accessible computing and geo-referencing over the past two generations, often utilize micro-level quantitative data to understand their populations and to help implement policies across a range of areas including criminal justice. Contemporary academic criminology reflects the empirical experiences ofthese countries. While there is some degree of methodological pluralism in the field, the large amount of quantitative data available in these countries has facilitated a move in the field toward more quantitatively oriented studies at the expense of the type of qualitative work that dominated the field in its origins. The academic study of criminal justice today, however, stands at a crossroads. While the field has focused on North America and Western Europe since its inception, the last decade has seen a growing interest among both faculty and students in the study of crime in countries in other world regions including Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Increasing interest in terrorism and drug trafficking, often emanating from these world regions, has accelerated this process. While we can

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learn a great deal by applying existing criminal justice theories and techniques derived from and appropriate to experiences in the core regions mentioned above, studying this broad set of countries requires that scholars contemplate very different local conditions, types of institutions, and availability and reliability of quantitative criminal justice data. Political and social life in Africa, Asia, LatinAmerica, and portions of Eastern Europe are at times very different from those in criminology's core countries. At the most basic levels, maps of cities may be inaccurate, and non-state actors may mediate access to some parts of many urban areas. Governments may not have good sources of localized demographic or commercial data, to say nothing ofthe much more contested information needed for many types of criminal justice studies. Addressing this variability requires different methodological approaches. Effective use of qualitative methods can help scholars understand a more multifaceted urban and institutional terrain and gain access to spaces critical for research. Qualitative methods can also aid in disentangling complex causal relationships and help build comparisons across very different types of neighborhoods, cities, and countries. This article, organized in three sections, draws on my own experiences conducting research in gang-controlled areas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and can provide insights into the utility of qualitative methods for the study of criminal justice in a variety of countries. The first section discusses the very different context of criminal justice research in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The second lays out some of the key theoretical concerns these differences raise for the development of criminological scholarship. The third, longer section discusses the role of qualitative methods in gaining access to data, analyzing data, and developing good comparisons across varied cases.

Differing ContextslDifferent Methods Criminology has principally evolved in a geographic context where scholars could take certain key variables for granted. A cursory examination of two leading publications in the field, Criminology and the British Journal o/Criminology, shows a marked regional bias even at a moment when the field of criminology has, perhaps, achieved its greatest international diversity. In the six issues released from the beginning of 2012 to mid-20 13, I Criminology published only one research article out of forty-one that focused principally outside the core areas of Western Europe, North America, and Australia. That article focused on Israel, which, while it brings some important national diversity to the topics published in the journal, is a country that has a great deal in common institutionally with Western Europe. The British Journal o{Criminology, a publication with a wider comparative mission, published eighty-eight articles during the same period. Twenty-two of these articles focused on countries outside the core regions that gave rise to modern criminology. This is a remarkable difference and reflects the different academic communities within criminology that the two journals speak

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to and draw on. Even in this context however, three-quarters ofthe articles still focus on core countries. Among the twenty-two articles focused on non-core countries, nine articles focus on China or Hong Kong, along with one on Israel. The Chinese government has, in recent years, begun to make available the type of data that facilitates quantitative criminological analysis. Despite that caveat, though, the journal has also published articles on Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, Nigeria, and Afghanistan over the past two years. This reflects substantially more (though still limited) diversity, with very few articles focusing on countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that may have significant state capacity issues, especially in the area of public data collection. When we move from Western Europe, North America, and Australia to countries like Brazil, Nigeria, or Afghanistan, criminology begins to look at countries that necessitate different data-gathering and analysis strategies than those that predominate in contemporary criminology. Countries across these regions have governments that are not cast in the traditional Weberian mold. States often do not effectively control territory or maintain a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence the way that states are generally expected to in the countries that are the core focus of criminal justice research. In these countries, as I have written elsewhere, governments maintain control of key elements of the institutional state, but violence itself is diffused out of state security forces and into the hands of various non-state actors (Arias 20 I 0). State officials often devote considerable time to managing and manipulating different non-state actors to advance various political projects. Beyond this, governments themselves may have only loose control of different elements of the state's security forces, whose members may be engaged in various political and economic activities not directly related to the orders of the central state administration. These processes, of course, vary across different countries and world regions. What I have described here may sound like the classic conditions of what some would call a "failed state." These conditions reflect varying constructions and deployments of state and social power and operate in different shapes, degrees, and scales across many different countries. Understanding politics, law enforcement, and crime necessitates understanding how these different forces are deployed. In Latin America, a region where states generally have more capacity than those that operate in much of Africa, violence often diffuses into the hands of criminal actors. In some Brazilian cities, armed gangs dominate shantytowns and use their power to help elect preferred candidates to office and have even succeeded over the years in shutting down business in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's two major cities, with populations often million and six million respectively (see, for example, Holston 2009; Penglase 2005). In Guatemala and other countries, powerful criminal syndicates are deeply connected to state structures (Astorga 2000; Brands 2010; Cruz 2011; Hernandez 2010: 33; Koonings and Kruijt 2007: 17-21; McIlwaine and Moser 2007: 131; Rozema 2002: 65-69; Valencia 2007). Recent Mexican elections have been marred by

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criminal/political violence as gangs have sought to affect the election of state and local officials (Cawley 2013). The presence of criminal bands governing certain areas within states, and the role of corrupt networks connecting the state to these actors, poses serious challenges to criminal justice researchers. At the broadest level, these conditions raise serious questions regarding the reliability of security services and the data they produce. In particular spaces, armed groups and violent networks are understandably concerned with all sorts of investigations being conducted in areas they control. Scholars may have to ask permission of these groups to work in the places they dominate, but even with some local understanding of what they are doing, many types of scholarly research may encounter unusual problems. For example, as part ofa block count lied prior to establishing a survey frame, armed gang members stopped my research assistants and me at various points, creating substantial difficulties in building lists of residences needed for probabilistic sampling. In one particular location where many gang members lived, local residents expressed concern that state actors could use an inventory of homes we were creating for sampling purposes in order to locate gang members. Beyond these immediate questions of state structure and practice, the experience of urban life differs markedly from country to country. Whereas cities such as Paris were rebuilt in the nineteenth century with an eye toward the state exercising control of space (Scott 1999), and whereas most shantytowns in the United States were eradicated as part of New Deal-era building projects (Perkins 2007: 27), unregulated shantytowns still often account for a substantial portion ofthe growth of metropolises in developing countries (see Neuwirth 2004). The streets in these resident-constructed areas often do not appear on city maps. Due to irregular construction and the fires, floods, and landslides that can disproportionately affect these areas, the human, social, and urban geography of these areas may change rapidly. As part of my own research on one Rio shantytown, I developed maps to guide research assistants around a particularly complicated region of the community that had suffered a fire. Issues with basic mapping, pervasive poverty, and state structure are often accompanied by problems with the state and other agencies gathering reliable demographic and socioeconomic data. This can create further difficulties in building the types of complex data sets that can be used in a wide array of social scientific studies. Scholars working in this area have to dedicate substantial amounts of effort to gathering and refining datasets that will support their research. In measuring homicides, sometimes bodies are not present to document a murder. Less organized communities and those with less government monitoring are more likely to generate unrecorded crimes (on the general challenges of cross-national analysis of homicides, see LaFree 1999). Mediabased datasets, an increasingly common tool for making comparisons across spaces around the globe, are more effective in measuring problems in large cities and in core areas of those cities than in isolated and poorly mapped areas

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that reporters may have trouble gaining access to (on media-based datasets, see, for example, LaFree and Dugan 2007). All of these conditions suggest that employing a diverse array of methods, including ethnography and qualitative social network analysis, may offer criminologists important leverage as the field diversifies and as scholars begin to more thoroughly examine some ofthe criminaljustice issues inAsia, Africa, and Latin America that could play an important role in the development of the field in the decades to come. Understanding the important methodological tools for conducting this sort of research and how its insights may enrich the core criminological debates, however, requires a brief detour through the theoretical foundations of the study of collective violence and civil conflict. Criminological Politics I am a political scientist with a deep scholarly interest in criminal activities and have spent the past decade at an institution with a heavy criminal justice focus. The past twenty years have seen an explosion of crime in Latin America that has increasingly become a central driver of policy making and politics in many countries. These empirical conditions have, concomitantly, led to an increase in scholarship on the topic. As more young researchers have developed dissertations in this area, publications on crime in Latin America have augmented dramatically. One major Latin American studies journal has published one article each issue on crime in recent years, and university presses are publishing a considerable number of manuscripts and edited volumes in the area as well. Very few, if any, of these pieces come from classically trained criminologists. Rather, most authors have training in anthropology, political science, and sectors of sociology aligned with urban studies and social movements. Unfortunately, virtually none ofthese scholars publish in criminology journals, criminologists rarely cite their work, and their work, at times, only tangentially engages the criminology literature. These academics, myself included, approach the challenges facing their region of study with a different eye than criminologists might. The field of comparative politics within political science has long been built around developing knowledge of other countries and building comparisons between countries. Scholars coming out of this tradition devote a sizable portion of their work to understanding how political systems, institutions, and processes differ from one country and one region to another. The field has long had an acute sense of how different types of institutional structures generate various types of outcomes in their engagement with the broad array of societies they govern. Though the field, like many others in the social sciences, has developed sophisticated statistical methods, scholars have long had to contend with the fact that they are seeking to make difficult comparisons often between very different systems, and so they have built complex theoretical constructs to understand differences and to compare a limited number-there are only so many countries in the world-of dissimilar cases.

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At the heart of this comparative sensibility is the need to understand the varying nature of institutions across different world regions. This involves appreciating the nature of state power and how it is deployed across different contexts. There is a long literature on state power that seeks to categorize governments in terms of their capacity to carry out policies and their autonomy from social forces to conceptualize policies and governance beyond the interests of particular groups (Evans 1995; Migdal 1988). In places where states have low capacity or autonomy from social groups, you have what some may call a classic "failed state," where governance functions devolve into unregulated social competition. A high-capacity/high-autonomy state reflects a government that can effectively develop and carry out policies. In conditions of high capacity but low autonomy, states can implement policies but are beholden to the social forces that dominate them. Low-capacity but high-autonomy states can effectively develop policies but have little ability to implement those policies. While this is an extremely schematic model, it provides an example of how political scientists think broadly about different types of state function. This model, and more complex ones that have followed, offers an important device for thinking, in the context of criminal justice, about the different types of state institutions that exist in different world regions, how they vary from the institutions typically found in North America or Western Europe, and the effect that they have on criminal justice practices and problems. This model, along with other theories, helps comparative political scientists think across regional conditions when comparing seemingly dissimilar situations. Scholars engaged in international research often need to learn a great deal about the places they are studying and to think about how comparisons between places will be organized so that they can build theories. Of particular importance to comparative political scientists are meso-level theories than help scholars not to understand the general or universal experience of human life or the global economic system but the experiences of particular countries, regions within those countries, and relationships between them. All of this is particularly important in the context of criminal justice research in many countries where armed actors establish control over neighborhoods or cities, creating wide levels of subnational variation. Understanding how to do this work involves extremely careful local-level research that builds on a long history of ethnographic and qualitative methods developed in the United States (see, for example, Liebow 2003; Whyte 1993). Such methods are often applied toward an understanding of poverty and gangs but do not appear to dominate criminal justice scholarship in the United States today. One key theoretical challenge researchers face as they move beyond the traditional focus of criminaljustice study is encountering different institutional contexts. Understanding different contexts and conducting research in those contexts requires new theoretical models and methodological strategies. The use of qualitative methods is essential to fully engaging in these different

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environments, applying existing criminological models to these places, and then using this new data to transform prevailing models through the analysis of places that operate in these different institutional and social contexts. The next section discusses my experience conducting research in Brazil and the utility of qualitative methods in developing an understanding of criminological phenomena in these locales.

The Practical Role of Qualitative Research and Ethnography in Controlling for Violence Since 1996 [ have conducted several waves of research on the structure, organization, and politics of Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns. These generally self-built communities, often originating from land invasions, face a host of challenges including access to potable water, good sanitation, and the delivery of electricity (for an excellent discussion of the challenges facing Rio's favelas, see Perelman 2011). Built without zoning or oversight, some of these areas developed into labyrinths that do not appear on official maps, though the local government has made some progress on this in recent years. Transportation, education, and public health are also often slow to come to these disadvantaged areas that grew according to popular needs rather than the plans of underfunded government entities. Perhaps the deepest problem faced by these communities is basic public safety. Rio de Janeiro's police developed from the nineteenth century onward largely as a tool to repress, initially, urban slaves and poor and working-class non-whites (Holloway 1993). The force has grown over the past two centuries and has often sought to repress the popular classes by harassing ambulant vendors, arresting suspected vagrants, and seeking to stop the practice of capoeira, a rhythmic, group-based Afro-Brazilian martial art. In the years since the explosion of the drug trade in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, the police have used a tremendous amount of violence in the largely non-white shantytowns that are principal sources of housing for Rio's poor and working class and that serve as bases for powerful drug-dealing gangs (Human Rights Watch 2009; on the emergence of Rio's drug trade and its impact on favelas, see Leeds 1996). Lacking effective public safety or even a generally positive relationship between the less well-off and the police, criminal groups, including drug gangs, often control access to these communities and play certain dispute resolution roles in these areas (Arias 2006). All of these issues create substantial difficulties in conducting even limited qualitative interviews, to say nothing of more extended ethnographies or different types of systematic quantitative scholarship. These problems begin with access. In many ways, favela areas are closed communities. While in recent years the government has adopted a "pacification" policy that restricts open-air drug markets, in many favelas today, and in many more when [ began my research in the 1990s, heavily armed drug dealers stationed near the entrances of these communities would ask individuals

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about their business when entering. Moving past these drug sale points, known in Brazil as bocas de fumo ("mouths of smoke"), a visitor might encounter other gang- or police-run checkpoints (on the complexities of researching the clandestine in Latin America, see Auyero 2007). The police would often stop and search me for contraband, perhaps in an effort to extort a bribe, and they would often also ask about my business in the community. Once past these checkpoints and in the company of residents, there was always the risk of gunfire breaking out between gang members and police or rival gangs, which could make it difficult to leave. Undertaking research in these areas required developing close relationships with individuals and organizations in the community. My initial contacts in most favelas, and very often the key to conducting any type of academic research, were contacts with the local AssociGl;iio de Moradores (AM), or residents' association. The leaders of these organizations were closely tied to the local criminal gang but also had considerable legitimacy among much of the rest of the population. These organizations also served as key interlocutors between the community and a variety of outside organizations, including the state. My ability to explain to local dealers and police alike that I was going to visit with leaders of this organization smoothed over interactions and allowed me to work in the favela. Conducting research in these areas also required developing a subtle understanding of local geographies of power. In this context, the key to appreciating crime and politics involved unpacking a series of semi-clandestine exchange relationships and projections of power by police, the drug gang, and other local leaders operating in representative organizations or NGOs. Apprehending these relationships went beyond where and why particular crimes were occurring. In this context of real and ongoing violence, as well as localized efforts to guard basic information about communal life, it was essential to understand the different relationships of power and exchanges that occurred. How did the police engage both violently and nonviolently with the drug gang? What role did the drug gang play in the community, beyond simply moving narcotics? Finally, where did these two sets of armed actors fit into the community's more public set of power holders, the NGOs and associative groups that sought to represent the area to politicians, state institutions, and the powerful local (at times, national and international) civic actors? As I will make clear in the coming pages, qualitative methods were essential to understanding these dynamics. Some of the key elements of writing about organized-crime-dominated communities in Brazil are understanding the cultural norms that govern discussions of power and violence in these areas and gaining access to the broader local networks that operate in them. My research in Rio began with a series of semi-structured oral history interviews focused on older residents that sought to contextualize the existing violent conditions in the locale's broader trajectory. These interviews enabled me to engage with key residents in ways that did not naturalize the current violence facing the community, and its associated political

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structures, but sought to understand the community's experience in its historical context beyond current conflicts affecting it. From a methodological perspective, this helped to build relationships in the community that further situated me in the area. These interviews helped me to appreciate the community in more nuanced ways, providing me with a picture of the roots of existing social and political structures and the connections between particular individuals, which contributed to understanding the current political and crime context. Beyond that, these oral histories helped layout some of the issues that older residents considered important. This provided me with a basis for thinking through what issues I needed to bring up during later interviews with both older and younger residents. These oral history interviews let me engage directly with a population that was affected by current local violence, but often in less direct ways than the youth. The interviews also provided them with, often, more space to discuss their experiences with current and past violence in the area. Finally, these interviews sometimes led to additional contacts that I later interviewed. Beyond providing a solid historical grounding for my research, the oral history interviews also enabled me to broach the subject of violence and crime without discussing actual ongoing criminal activities. Thus, in my work in Rio de Janeiro, I learned a great deal about the vigilante groups that had, in many cases, preceded the rise of drug gang power in poor communities. In Kingston, Jamaica, where I conducted research more recently, I spoke at length about the political history of existing gangs without discussing either current gang activity or their actual political connections. In some cases, this discussion of historic violence spilled over into a discussion of contemporary violence. In other cases, it simply offered a good way to write about one community's history and helped me to develop a nuanced context for understanding current violence. In the context of the interview, a good discussion of history with an older resident, as I recall occurred on at least one occasion, can also allay fears that I am a reporter simply looking for salacious gossip to fill the next day's paper, thus helping to build credibility not just with that particular resident but also, through word of mouth, with their personal network. My general presence in the favela, even while carrying out a set of interviews that may have had only indirect relevance to the central research questions I was studying, enabled me to learn more about the different types of political relationships in the community and, in particular, the NGOs that operated there. With this information, and a rapidly growing list of contacts, I then interviewed a set oflocal political and civic leaders regarding life in the community. Many of these interviews were quite sensitive as a result ofthe contacts those individuals had with gang members as well as the implicit threat against people who speak about criminal activities, violating what is known as the Lei do Silencio ("law of silence"). While many individuals were ultimately willing to speak at length about local violence-related issues, it was essential to approach these conversations in ways that respected the norms and sensitivities of the interviewees.

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These conversations principally focused on the conditions of political and civic leadership and the challenges facing the community. In general, I found it was better to allow interview subjects to initiate discussions of crime, violence, and the local drug trade rather than to raise those questions myself. Even if individuals were willing to discuss such issues, they often found my asking such questions indelicate, and there was a real risk that pushing these questions could shut down otherwise productive interviews. In general, interviewees were much more likely to discuss police violence than drug violence. Once the question of violence had been broached, however, it was possible to delicately push forward on these issues, asking questions that followed the lines and language the interviewee used to address these issues. Some interviewees would open up further, but others would not. In situations where the conversation advanced on these issues, it was necessary to proceed with a high degree of caution, since asking certain questions could shut down the interview or, worse, create a situation where the interviewee could feel exposed by the intense questioning and communicate those concerns with others. As much as it was important to ask questions delicately, it was also important to know when not to ask questions and instead to allow people to talk through the issues they have raised on their own terms. While the central variable guiding research may have to do with crime, the police, or other types of violence, understanding those issues usually involves having a deep understanding of other, non-crime issues as well. Crime is part of a wider social, political, and economic context-all important components in moving forward broader conversations about life in crime-affected communities. Even when interviewees were unwilling to talk about violence, a discussion of broader social issues was important to defining the problems faced by the community and in understanding how crime fit into those issues. These discussions also often yielded information or insights that did not appear to be directly related to crime but that later, after further research, became more clearly important to the focused subject of research. These responses also helped to sharpen questions and my dialogue with later interviewees. Discussions of land tenure, for example, sometimes provided interesting information regarding criminal groups or those aligned with them. One of the more challenging issues facing the types of communities that I study is the irregular and often illegal nature of local land tenure (on poor communities and land tenure in Brazil, see Holston 2009). This issue has played a driving role in many of these communities' histories, as they have grown from a set of isolated shacks on unwanted land to neighborhoods of twenty thousand or more located on well-sought-after land. Discussions of land tenure could help in grounding a community's history in individual cases and could also yield further discussions of the roles of different types of criminal actors in local political life. In one neighborhood, local residents accused a criminally connected power broker of parceling land in a forest reserve above the community for personal enrichment. In another case, residents discussed with me their occupation of some condemned

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buildings near their neighborhood as a big ongoing party that never really led to anything. An older man who had retired from active criminal life explained to me that the armed group dominating the community had actually incited the occupation of these buildings in order to advance a parallel set of negotiations that the armed group and its political contacts were conducting with state officials. Another important element in interviewing people about criminal activities is understanding the pauses and silences of interviewees. Even for a predominantly qualitative researcher with a strong ethnographic sensibility, it is extremely difficult to record a silence for later writing or to express a silence in a paper. Nevertheless, understanding these pauses and shifts in conversation can provide researchers with important information regarding the tensions in their dialogue with their interviewee and within the community. While in certain interviews it is important to drop a certain issue or to come back to it later in that same conversation, it is critical to remember these silences and, as appropriate, to find ways of understanding the reasons for these silences and their connection to violence. This knowledge can help the researcher structure future interviews and can help to inform data analysis. Silences are often difficult to perceive and to interpret, though they clearly exist. One such silence occurred when I interviewed a senior community leader in 2005 in a neighborhood where [ had worked in the [990s. Assuming [ knew what he was referring to, he lapsed into a set of coded explanations about "people" and "the guy" who was running things in the community. Since [ had been away for a while, [ was not really certain what he was talking about, so [ pushed him on what "guy" he was talking about. He opened his eyes wide and said something to the effect of "The boss, but come on, don't make me say it. You should know this." On other occasions working in Brazil, Colombia, and Jamaica, I have at times gained some knowledge about criminal activities and then asked individuals indirectly about those issues by citing not a particular criminal act, but instead a more public event associated with criminality, such as a party that criminals might have subsidized. Asked about this type of issue, some individuals take the opportunity to talk about the role of organized criminals in their neighborhood. Other individuals awkwardly fall silent for a couple of seconds while they consider their answer and then say something along the lines of "[ don't know anything about that." While this provides no direct evidence or detail, the awkward pause offers some additional confirmation of criminal involvement in the event. [t also suggests that there may be additional sensitive information about the event that I may not be aware of, and it provides some evidence of the limits of what a researcher can ask. Sometimes silences are not silent at all but actual statements in conversation. In 2008 I was researching criminal involvement in local municipal elections. One day I went to a march that the allegedly criminally aligned candidate was organizing in the community. When [ arrived, [ said hello to the candidate, whom [ knew from a previous meeting where [ had explained to him my work in the

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community. I stood in the crowd and waited for the march to begin, but within a few minutes, two campaign workers came and told me that I could not come on the march, since the community was different where they were going, and I might feel uncomfortable. After discussing this with them for a few minutes, I gave up and left. Later that day, I met a friend who lived in the community, and I explained to him what had happened. He said the march likely would have gone through an area used by drug dealers to host parties, and likely there would have been many armed men there. It would have been an interesting event to see but also possibly uncomfortable and dangerous. Thus, the conversation with the campaign workers was a verbal effort to generate a visible silence that might have left many uncomfortable and possibly put me in danger. Beyond silences, many of the conversations I had were heavily coded, with residents using obscure nicknames and slang to refer to the violent and to violence. Understanding interviewees often involved knowing the different relevant coded references used in a particular community. At times, I needed clarification, but seeking this also had to be undertaken with some care, since directly naming a particular individual or practice might enter into the realm ofa taboo topic, even if both the interviewee and I knew exactly what we were talking about.

Ethnography and Participant Observation A second important element of my research involved participant observation. In every community I worked in for my first project, I developed a working relationship with the local Associa9GO de Moradores (AM), or residents' association. I built a rapport early on with these organizations' leaders and spent a good deal of time simply observing comings and goings from these organizations. These observations, the contacts I built there, and the ongoing conversations with individuals doing business at these sites helped me to understand a great deal about the politics of the community and the role of criminal actors in the area. One of the first things I learned in each of the three areas where I worked was that the leader of the AM was often closely tied to the head of the local drug gang. Observing this person's interactions with residents and the requests they made of him helped immensely in understanding local dynamics. When the AM president was closely tied to local traffickers, individuals frequently came to speak to him regarding issues related to criminal activities and violence. This included such things as asking for help with a relative who was in police custody, asking for small amounts of funds from the traffickers for a funeral or party, or addressing police violence. The AM president was often expected to act as a conduit between the gang and other residents. The AM itself often played an important role in dealing with the elements of these issues that needed to be addressed in public forums. For example, if the drug gang were to host a party in the community, the AM would register the event with local authorities to avoid efforts by police to shut down the event, which could lead to confrontations between police and criminals during the event.

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The political and criminological significance of these events often was not immediately obvious. Rather, participant observation, along with a thick analysis of the interviews and interactions, a close and detailed examination of an interaction that seeks to provide a nuanced context through which to interpret data (on thick description, see Geertz 1973), as described above, was critical to understanding the significance ofthese activities. While many initial mentions of these events seemed to have little significance, eventually some furtive discussion often emerged, with individuals using locally coded terms to refer to the linl