Nathan Monk

Published	13/03/2002
Type	Article
Author(s)	Dr Jennifer Fleetwood
Corresponding Authors	Dr Jennifer Fleetwood, Lecturer in Criminology, University of Leicester
DOA
DOI

Prisons in Ecuador represent a globalised field. In this fieldwork confessional I outline my place within this field (characterised by global inequalities), and describe the ways in which I gained entry to the community of foreign nationals. In particular, I focus on the construction of being foreign as a specific membership category, as well as the role of narrative and storytelling in bridging international and social divides, fostering a shared sense of community, and the role of visitors as listeners for inmates’ stories. This narrative practice made researching drug trafficking possible, however such stories require careful interpretation to avoid misinterpretation.

Introduction
Before I was an ethnographer, I was a backpacker. In 2002, I spent two months in Ecuador learning Spanish and ‘travelling’, like many other middle-class, white British kids. During a month long stay in Quito, I heard I could visit Brits imprisoned for drug trafficking. With little deliberation, I noted down the instructions and the following Wednesday set off for the men’s prison with my passport, the name of the inmate I would visit, and a carrier bag of cigarettes, chocolate, and toilet paper (these being the things I thought a prisoner from home might like).
Garcia Moreno prison is downtown, high up on the side of the valley about ten blocks from the presidential palace. The San Roque neighbourhood is poor and rarely visited by most Quiteños, let alone tourists. On a clear day, the views across the city are spectacular; small comfort for the long queue of visitors lined up outside under the baking midday sun. I had never visited a prison before, but was soon ushered through bag and body searches, jostling alongside prisoners’ friends and family members, most carrying packages (one family even carried a mattress). Guards painstakingly unpacked suitcases full of clothes and stabbed birthday cakes and tubs of food for contraband. Finally, near the main door, we handed over our identification and the name of the prisoner we were visiting was carefully entered, by hand, into a hefty ledger. Finally, our credentials checked (we were stamped on our forearms for every search), we were finally ushered inside.

Built in 1875, Garcia Moreno prison is star shaped, like London’s Pentonville. The walls are thick stone with small windows: its corridors dark and cold in contrast with the equatorial sun. We passed the kitchen where inmates stirred cauldrons of slop over massive fires, and quickly arrived in the centre of the ‘star’. Here, visitors enter the prison. There is no visit room. A short, scruffily dressed man found me in the crowd and asked who I wanted to visit: we quickly established that the man I planned to see had left and instead he took me to El Britanico, the British man. He led me up two flights of stairs, dirty with stagnant water and rubbish and along the second floor balcony to the end, banging noisily on a heavy cell door, which was locked from the inside. A small metal grate slide to the side, and two eyes frowned. ‘I’ve come to visit’, I said, holding up my bag of gifts. A moment or two later, the door clanked open. ‘I’m Paul’, he said.1*

This article offers a ‘confessional’ about how I came to undertake fieldwork with drug traffickers imprisoned in Ecuador with the aim of ‘explicitly demystifying fieldwork… by showing how the technique is practiced in the field’ (Van Maanen, 2011:73). Fieldwork for my PhD was begun during my undergraduate degree, finally published some years later (Fleetwood 2014). As the above account shows, getting into prison was remarkably straightforward. In fact fieldwork for my undergraduate dissertation was undertaken during visit days. I eventually sought formal research access, but only many years after access had been established informally.2*  Although methodological issues around formally gaining access to criminal justice institutions are important, this article is instead concerned with the sociological and cultural dynamics that enabled me to enter prisons in Ecuador as an outsider. This fieldwork, researching international drug trafficking, offers some insights into entering a global field, by examining the ways in which new categories of in/out are constituted. Drawing on field notes, I consider how entry was gained, especially storytelling as a central aspect of the culture of drug traffickers in prison and the backpackers (like me) who visited them. My account is prefaced by a review of how ethnographers have successfully gained entry into global fields that are criminal or deviant. This article is mainly concerned with how I gained entry into the men’s prison. Although my fieldwork spanned three prisons in the end, this was the first site and so represented my initial entry.

Entering global research fields
The influence of globalisation on crime and criminal justice institution is firmly established (Aas, 2013; Bowling & Sheptycki, 2011; Findlay, 1999). Yet, criminologists tend to undertake research at ‘home’, or to undertake projects bounded by the nation state. In contrast, sociologists such as Burawoy call for ethnography that engages with, and seeks to understand processes of globalisation (2000). Doing so means rethinking fieldwork, ‘combining dwelling and travelling’ to engage with fields that stretch across the globe (2000:4; see also Büscher & Urry 2009; Letherby, 2010). Rather than engaging with one place (as with traditional ethnography), Burawoy argues for fieldwork that is multi-sited, but also grounded in local history (2000), thus able to grasp the macro sociological processes that shape daily life. Rather than studying globalisation itself, Sassen offers two ways of thinking about global/globalised sites. The first is the trans-nationalised local, in other words local practices that now have a transnational or global dimension (2007). The second is the globalised sub-national (the globalised local): spaces, places and social practices profoundly re-shaped by processes of globalisation (ibid).

Such global fields arguably present particular challenges to establishing entry, yet, many of the same issues are still in play. Ethnographic researchers’ tales of ‘getting in’ are a recognisable sub-genre of the fieldwork confessional, and advice for the novice ethnographer abounds (Brewer, 2000; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). For ethnographers of crime and deviance, prior connections count for a great deal, ensuring the researcher can be trusted, or at least that he/she is not police (see for example Pearson 1993; Hobbs 1993, 2001). On the other hand, ethnographers without personal connections must typically negotiate social distance and power imbalances as a prerequisite to building trust and rapport (see for example Goffman, 2015:215). An array of relationships to the field have been typologised, from complete participant (i.e. complete member) to complete observer (Gold, 1958). Adler and Adler propose several membership roles that ethnographers can adopt (1987). What kinds of roles can global ethnographers adopt? How do ethnographers gain entry into global fields? In a globalised world, do personal connections matter?

Entering transnational fields is especially challenging for ethnographers interested in crime and deviance. Transnational crime, by its nature, happens in many places at once, stretching across the globe. An excellent example of multi-sited ethnography is Scheper-Hughes’ ethnography of organ trafficking (2004). As well as contacting and interviewing those who had donated or received organs, she also posed as an organ-buyer as a way of gaining entry to medical establishments (ibid). This methodology reflects the kinds of temporary social interactions that characterise the international organ trade, as well as Scheper-Hughes’ status as a US citizen, allowing her to adopt a membership role, albeit temporarily. Similarly, Brotherton and Barrios’ transnational ethnography of Dominican deportees (2011) draws on fieldwork undertaken in New York and the Dominican Republic. They traced Dominican deportees’ experiences of social exclusion through deportation (and in some cases their illegal return to the USA), producing rich insights into how social exclusion (via the criminal justice system) operates transnationally. Both researchers had a degree of ‘insider’ status owing to personal biography: Barrios migrated to the USA from Puerto Rico as a child and had ‘insider’ contacts in the Dominican community in New York. Brotherton (also an immigrant to the USA from the UK) also undertook ethnographic research of the legal processes that facilitate deportation while acting as an expert witness (2011: 27).

Ethnographers of crime and deviance have more commonly researched globalisation at the level of the sub-national (i.e. the globalised local). Nonetheless, the distinction between local and transnational may not be so clear-cut. Hobbs’ decades-long ethnography began as a distinctly local study of criminal sub-cultures in London’s east end (1995). Nonetheless, his ethnographic fieldwork elucidates the ways in which local and transnational crime is connected, noting that transnational crime is ‘local at all points’ (1998: 419). Likewise, ethnographic research on international drug trafficking has made ample use of local ‘hubs’ in the transnational drug trade, for example Patti and Peter Adler’s classic ethnographic of the international cocaine trade (1993). Full membership roles were not appropriate, and so they became peripheral members. They note that entry was gained via persistence, and drawing on aspects of shared values and identity. Damian Zaitch’s ethnography of Colombian traffickers in the Netherlands drew on his biography as an Argentinian. He notes: ‘Neither Dutch, nor Colombian myself, I often felt fortunate to be in the intermediate position of a “quasi-native” researcher’ (2002:13). Despite being ‘quasi-native’, he reports engaging in the kinds of activities typical of ethnographic field researchers: ‘They asked me all sorts of favours and things: juridical advice, translation of documents, housing, money, books, email and mail addresses to receive post, or jobs. I was also expected to learn salsa and to drink and smoke with them. I did most of these things and some more.’ (2002:15).

Both Adler and Zaitch undertook ethnographic fieldwork ‘at home’. Researching globalised sites abroad presents particular issues for gaining access due to global social inequalities. Hoefinger undertook fieldwork on the bar girl scene in Cambodia (local women who undertake transnational sex – sometimes – with foreign men) (2013). She carefully describes the ways in which she and her respondents’ similar ages and common participation in a shared, globalised culture, enabled rapport, although not as equals:

‘The powerful influence of my hegemonic, western culture and [respondents’] desire to emulate certain characteristics of it (the liberalness, the consumptiveness, the spending power, the fashion styles, the dance styles) speaks to the inherent (neo-) colonial nature of structural hierarchies that still dominate the foreign-local social landscape of Cambodia and in most countries of the global south… We were from the same generation and therefore we shared not only similar mutual interests in style of music, for example, but also life goals that crossed boundaries of class and race.’ (2013:55).

Ethnographic research is arguably well placed for engaging with global fields of crime and justice. What follows is my account of gaining entry into prisons in Ecuador, considering how biography and globalised hierarchies can be problems as well as resources for gaining entry.

A globalised field: hierarchies of mobility in prison in Ecuador
Travel is an ‘integral part of a ‘new world order of mobility’ (Richards & Wilson, 2004:3). Along with new technologies, it has had a profound effect on contemporary life and global social relations. In 2005, 37 per cent of prisoners in Quito were foreign nationals, mostly charged with drug offences (Gallardo & Nuñez, 2006: 9, 27).3* They came from all over South America, but especially Colombia. 12% were from outside South America (ibid), (South Africa, Thailand, North America and all corners of Europe) reflecting the globalised nature of the flow of cocaine. Globalisation has not happened everywhere, nor has it happened evenly (Ray, 2006; de Sousa Santos, 2006). Bauman argues that globalisation produces new hierarchies of mobility, describing two paradigmatic types: the ‘tourist’ and the ‘vagabond’, both consequences of postmodern consumer society (1998). While tourists (the globally mobile) travel for adventure, to consume experiences, vagabonds are compelled to travel: for work, for survival, because they have no other choice (ibid). The question of structure and agency in drug trafficking is complex (Fleetwood, 2014), nonetheless it is true that few traffickers travel due to pure desire to see and experience the world. Many, but not all, could be considered vagabonds: those compelled to travel (Bauman, 1998).

In contrast to all this global mobility, prisons are ‘factories of immobility’ (Bauman, 1998); places for managing the ‘waste’ of postmodern consumer capitalism. Prisons in Ecuador were exactly such. Prisons housed many local, Ecuadorian men known as polillas (moths). Many were vagrants prior to their incarceration and continued to be so on the inside, making a bare living, often through begging (Nuñez, 2006). Recall the man who escorted me to Paul’s cell: he spent visit days running errands for 25c a time. Prisoners received little more than a place to sleep (not a mattress, linen or an actual bed) and a daily ration of the food from the communal kitchen (but not a bowl to put it in, or a spoon to eat with). With long delays in sentencing and little prospect of education or training, Ecuadorian prisons are truly immobilising.

The polillas’ bare existence seems untouched by globalisation. Poor, ethnic minority men and women have been imprisoned for drunkenness, theft and other minor offences in Garcia Moreno prison during most of its 139-year history (Herrera 2014).4* Yet, their contemporary incarceration – like foreign national drug traffickers – must be understood through the lens of geopolitics. In the 2000s prisons in Ecuador were profoundly impacted by the so-called ‘war on drugs’ led by the USA in the region. For example, in 2005 the Ecuadorian government signed a bilateral agreement with the USA agreeing to meet targets of a 10% increase in the capture of drugs, and a 12% increase in the capture of so-called narco-traffickers (Pontón & Torres, 2007). Since Ecuadorian drug laws did not differentiate between users, dealers and traffickers, nor between drugs, such policies encouraged a ‘logic of quantification’: vast numbers of poor people were arrested and imprisoned, mainly mules, dealers and local men and women possessing very small quantities of drugs (Edwards, 2003). During the 2000s, Garcia Moreno prison operated at near double capacity. Ethnographic research documents daily life in prisons pushed to the brink by overcrowding and lack of funding (Nuñez, 2006; Pontón & Torres, 2007; Pontón, 2008).5*

In contrast to inmate-vagabonds, I was a tourist, one of those who ‘become wanderers and put the bitter sweet dreams of homesickness above the comforts of home – because they want to… or because they have been seduced by the true or imaginary pleasures of a sensation-gatherers life’ (Bauman, 1998:92). My entrance to prisons in Ecuador reflects privilege on a global scale. Even as a student, international travel was within easy reach. Part of this is historical good fortune. In the early 2000s I was in my early 20s in Blair’s Britain and being white and middle class, I could anticipate employment, and in the meantime engage in a degree of youthful hedonism and adventure on the back of my student loan. International travel was cheap and commonplace. Backpacking had moved from the realm of the ‘hippy drop out’ to the mainstream (Reilly, 2006). Travel was an enticing leisure activity with the potential to gain experiential knowledge of the world, to become more open minded, independent, in short, more ‘worldly’. These values are summed up by sociological and anthropological work on backpacker subculture (Binder et al., 2004; Welk, 2004).

My formal entry into my field site is also paved by privilege in terms of class and ethnicity. Indeed, it is a long held critique that many ethnographers of deviance research ‘down’ (Hobbs, 2001). Coming from an ‘old’ university in the global north brought credibility helping me negotiate an honorary position at a local university6* and research access to prison. Being a pale, blue-eyed global elite was also advantageous in fieldwork. Guards tended to assume I was a member of the embassy, or a missionary, both roles reflecting long-standing international involvement in Ecuador. Nonetheless, I recorded a steady stream of phone cards, pens, chocolate, cigarettes and biscuits taken by guards, either because they were ‘forbidden’ or following polite requests.7* My age and gender didn’t mark me out as a distinguished professorial type. A female prison guard once accused me of being a prostitute after she saw me hug one of my respondents (and then “confiscated” my research pass!).8* Gender, class, sexuality and generation were important, but – as will be seen – my status as a European was paramount.

Negotiating global hierarchies: identity, community and storytelling
Bauman notes synergies between ‘vagabonds’ and ‘tourists’ claiming the vagabond is the tourist’s most ardent admirer’ (1998: 94). This synergy, as alter egos and admirers, facilitated entry into the field in unexpected ways, enabling me to establish the ‘mutuality’ necessary for ethnographic fieldwork (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007: 72). Paul and Graham were my first respondents, and gatekeepers who introduced me to fellow foreigners in the men’s and women’s prisons. They often commented that they would never have spoken to me on the outside, partly since, as drug traffickers, they would not have spoken to a nosy outsider (Hobbs, 2001), but also because our paths would simply never have crossed. Underpinning this statement was a keen awareness of social distance and divisions that would have played out at ‘home’. Early on in fieldwork, I noted:

‘They are an extraordinary group of people in my life and perhaps me in theirs. Not in the sense that I am an extraordinary person, but because we are out of the ordinary to each other.’ (Fieldnote, November 2005).

Paul’s background is firmly working class; he left school early to work. After a stint in the army, he moved from job to job. His first visits to Latin America were to meet his wife’s family. While in prison, he drew, painted, carved, and his tattoos graced many bodies in Garcia Moreno. We are a generation and a class apart. We also hung out with Graham, a kid my age (mid-20s) from a North American city I knew partly through ethnography and film. Graham told me about selling drugs in school, working as a masseur in a health club, getting married in his teens and receiving packages of drugs in the mail. Our lives could not have been less alike: I worked in a haberdasher, and had played cello in the local orchestra. Although I had once been mistakenly accused of selling cannabis in school, vast social difference existed between us. But, in prison being Anglophone global northerners offered us a shared identity, which we expressed through the kinds of things we talked about, and how we ‘hung out’ together.
We all liked martial arts films and Reggaeton music; arguably part of globalised culture (like Hoefinger, 2013). Oftentimes we hung out in Paul’s cell drinking tea and eating biscuits, listening to the radio, and playing cards. At least one pleasant Saturday afternoon was spent chopping vegetables with the one blunt knife available to make a chilli. In passing time together, we sought to create a common sense of ‘home’ (even though none truly existed). Being ‘foreigners’ offered us a shared sense of identity: one that comes into being in the context of Garcia Moreno prison as a globalised field.

Constructing community: foreign nationals in prison
As a ‘foreigner’, I was accorded entry into the small group of international drug traffickers in prison, comprised mainly of English speakers from North America and Europe, as well as some honorary members from Latin America (especially those who had lived in the Anglophone north).9* Although there were many kinds of foreigners in prison (from all over Latin America, West Africa, the Middle East and even China), this group set themselves apart, not only through language, but as would be ‘tourists’, and consumers within the prison.

Ecuadorian ethnographer Nuñez notes that the introduction of relatively well-educated, well-off foreigners had a profound effect on the prison through their introduction of capital and organisation (2006). Pavilion C was mainly populated by drug traffickers and housed most of the international drug traffickers, or at least those who could afford it. Each pavilion charged inmates an entrance fee as well as regular taxes that funded all maintenance of the wing as well as bribes for guards. Pavilion C was a world apart from the other wings; noticeably cleaner and better decorated. The introduction of foreigners resulted in a thriving internal economy (funded largely by the drug trade) (Nuñez 2006). In addition to the marketization of pavilions and cells, individual cells also ran as ‘corner shops’. In the hallways, inmates paid rent on small food and drink stalls. A Russian owned kiosk functioned as the de facto headquarters of Europeans, selling lunches, including a delicious borscht, as well as tea and coffee to the foreigners who hung out there all day:

‘Ryan and I… went and sat in the patio of C, very posh, chairs ‘n tables and umbrellas too….We sat at a table with Michael [Canada] and the ‘old boy’ [UK] came by… Also the young Romanian guy Bee, Leonardo [Italy] (who is still trying to get me to sell footage of prison fights on the internet. I also met Johan, a German with several piercings on his face. Graham dropped in and out too. Santiago [Colombia] also dropped by to see what’s up. Noting the variety of nationalities represented, he declared it to be a criminal United Nations!’ (Fieldnote, October 2005).

Some foreign nationals worked within the prison. Graham spoke Spanish (and was voted by his pavilion to work in the prison administration), but many did not making it hard to find work, aside from perhaps teaching English. Some received regular financial support from family; others continued to traffic drugs. Those who could afford it were consumers within the marketised context of the prison: would-be tourists who distinguished themselves from vagabonds. As well as frequenting food kiosks (they rarely ate the slop provided by the prison), they bought a variety of goods and services: employing Ecuadorians to cook, do their laundry and even clean their cells. Foreigners were also targets for extortion within the prison, and many fell on hard times during their stay in prison: initial sympathy and donations from family members often petered out during long sentences.

Membership was automatically accorded on the basis of nationality. Whenever a new inmate arrived, inmates collaborated to connect them into existing networks. For example, Santiago was from Medellín in Colombia and owned a corner shop. Hearing that a fellow paisano had arrived, he immediately sent out a package of bread and cigarettes for him. Similarly, whenever a European arrived, fellow Europeans would try to find them a decent cell, and try to warn them about how to avoid becoming a victim of extortion. Our group of foreigners overlapped with other alliances, sometimes according to race/ethnicity, and at other times for business (including drug trafficking).

Becoming a member
As a foreign national who regularly visited, I was initially a peripheral member of the group, but became an active member (Adler & Adler, 1987). My role – as most regular visitor – brought obligations relating to the challenges faced by inmates (Adler and Adler 1987: 34). I was frequently called on to collect official paperwork or prescriptions, to contact home or the embassy or undertake any other ’emergency’ duties that needed an outside contact. Being a visitor to both men’s and women’s prisons meant that I acted as a conduit between communities of foreigners in both prisons, often delivering messages, letters and gifts.

In 2002 (before I started fieldwork), I brought a fellow backpacker and Ecuadorian, Diego, to Garcia Moreno prison. Diego and Graham hit it off right away – both having lived in the USA and being of the same generation.10* In 2005, when I returned for PhD fieldwork, Diego was back in Quito and still visiting Paul and Graham. Between August and December 2005, I spent every weekend in prison, and some Wednesday afternoons too. I rarely visited alone, often visiting with Diego and we also brought flatmates and friends along. To be clear, visits were strongly encouraged by most foreigners in prison. Although having a ‘once off’ visit might have made them vulnerable to voyeurism (and even exploitation), visits were valued as an important contact with the outside world. The stark reality was that many would otherwise have received no visits at all.

I had little difficulty persuading fellow backpackers to join me for a visit to prison. Prison visiting closely reflects the typical backpacker values – including independent adventure, travel, experience, open-mindedness, meeting other people, and a commitment to counter-culture (Bradt, 1995, in Welk, 2004:80; Matthews & Matthews, 2012). Both imprisoned traffickers and backpackers are fluid, transient, and relatively un-institutionalised groups (Welk, 2004). Both groups can be understood as either literal, or would be, tourists (according to Bauman, 1998). This shared sense of identity as part of a community of foreigners) as well as a shared values were reflected in the ways that backpackers and inmates passed the time together. On an especially busy day, around 8 of us were crammed into Paul’s cell:

‘Paul’s cell was incredibly packed and noisy. People were playing cards and smoking, chatting and passing coconut around, and gaseosa and cups of coffee and biscuits. It quickly got smelly and smoky and sweaty…’ (Fieldnote)

We crammed in, jostling for space and place in the card game, the air thick with smoke. Somebody rolled a joint and passed it around, and another cut lines of cocaine. Diego tried to translate for poor Chad (whose Spanish was developmental) over blaring reggaeton music. The scene hardly felt like prison, which was probably why inmates valued them so much.

Through long-term presence in prison, I moved from being a peripheral group member, to taking an active role in the community (Adler & Adler, 1987), especially in my role in connecting men and women to each other (as conduit) and in actively expanding the community by bringing in visitors. Although the presence of most of the visitors I brought in with me was temporary this fit with backpacker styles of interaction, typified by short, intense meetings. The following section considers my role in the foreign national community, especially in relation to storytelling.

Storytelling
Later that year, Paul’s radio was taken over by cockroaches, which changed the station at random. One found its way into Paul’s ear in a terrifying incident quickly solved by another inmate pouring warm oil in his ear. Paul is an excellent storyteller, who turned the cockroach incident into a gory story about the brutality of life in Garcia Moreno, told sometimes for fellow inmates but more often for visitors. Criminologists have long noted the importance of talk and narrative in prison (Irwin & Cressey, 1962; Copes et al., 2013; Crewe, 2005; Ugelvik, 2015). Storytelling was especially important in prisons in Ecuador as a globalised field. Inmates told stories amongst themselves to get to know each other, establish their place in the prison hierarchy, explore future drug trafficking collaboration, to make sense of imprisonment, as well as for entertainment. Visitors offered an arena for a different array of stories. Storytelling is also a key part of backpacker culture: sociologists also note that backpackers are a ‘garrulous folk’, noting the importance of adventure for telling stories, and vice versa (Elsrud, 2001; Noy, 2004; Matthews & Matthews, 2012).

Common storytelling ground: intoxication and travel
Storytelling could bridge national divides and differences between foreign nationals in prison, and foreign visitors, especially through stories about common culture, interests and experiences. As fellow travellers, a common topic was places visited – not only in Ecuador, but the whole of Latin America. Especially fun was to work out where paths might have crossed, or even to discover friends in common. Stories say something about the speakers’ identity; stories about travel positioned the speaker as someone who was adventurous, and – sometimes, worldly-wise. Stories about tattoos played a similar role; both inmates and backpackers had them and they were often revealed and admired. All recorded important life experiences, both serious and frivolous. They also told of the narrator’s life before prison: a portable record of experience and statement of identity. Backpackers and prisoners are a globally transient population; where accent and dress might mark out our class and culture, here tattoos represented a mobile marker of identity.

Stories about drug taking and intoxication were also common. This is a common kind of narrative, especially told by young people (Tutenges & Sandberg, 2013; Sandberg & Tutenges, 2015). Of course I have my own intoxication story (everyone does!), and participated in the exchange. Some stories of intoxication were highly polished, often hilarious, and there was an element of competition over who could tell the most outrageous one. Intoxication stories especially communicated shared values of living for the moment, hedonism and an appetite for adventure, as well as drug knowledge and know-how. Telling these kinds of stories was a way for visitors to demonstrate street-smartness and common ground, as a way of bridging social divides. Everyone was invested in presenting themselves as ‘cool’: backpackers often wanted to narratively distinguish themselves from ‘straight’ society, and prisoners as ordinary deviants (more below). Finally, as Tutenges and Sandberg note, telling intoxication stories is also a key part of getting intoxicated (2013). Although some backpackers came into jail with the explicit intention of buying and taking drugs, not all did. Arguably, the opportunity to take drugs in prison was as exciting as the story that could be later told about having done so!

Traffickers’ stories: Getting rich
Inmates’ stories about travelling were often about smuggling drugs. Often inmates played up to visitors’ expectations about meeting a ‘real’ trafficker, like those made famous in Rusty Young’s book Marching Powder (Young & McFadden, 2003), or in trafficker biographies such as Mr Nice (Marks, 1997) and Snowblind (Sabaag, 1997). There was a common saying in Garcia Moreno prison: trafficking drugs meant either getting rich, getting killed or going to jail. Some men had tales of getting rich and living the high life, selling to pop stars as well as near misses and narrow escapes. Trafficking narratives were sometimes realistic, but sometimes fantastic. Juan told of how he married the local cartel leader’s daughter after they ran away together into the desert when they were just 16, only to be rescued by her fathers’ henchmen. Needless to say, I loved being entertained by these stories, and no doubt respondents especially enjoyed telling them to a wide-eyed girl. Indeed, my presence was clearly an excuse to tell stories and show off:

‘Whilst hanging out in Santiago’s room [which was also a working corner shop] his friend who owns the burger stall came by and chatted. He’d been collecting debts and had a grand [a thousand dollars] in his pocket which he took out and fanned himself with [the rest of us rolled around laughing]. He also showed me his bullet holes, even where a bullet was still in…’ (Fieldnote)

Stories about being a ‘real’ trafficker also had to be balanced against the danger of being seen as a real/dangerous criminal. Researchers elsewhere report on hierarchies of crime in prison (most recently Ugelvik, 2015). As Paul often put it: ‘we’re all nice people in here, we’re just criminals’. Talking about dangerous others was a way to narratively present oneself as one of the good (bad) guys:

‘There was also a story told about the Chinese assassin who used to share with Lucho who was nicknamed Jet Li. He was rumoured to be in jail for a series of assassinations, including an entire family.’ (Fieldnote)

Thus, stories about being a successful trafficker were a way to present oneself as street smart and authentic, whilst also avoiding the stigma associated with more apparently ‘serious’ forms of offending.

Going to jail: stories about bad luck and hard times
As well as stories about ‘getting rich’, stories were also told about ‘going to jail’. Most men had a story explaining their arrest, and these were told regularly to backpackers (indeed I heard the same narratives retold regularly). Reflecting the close connections between masculinity about crime, such stories tended to neutralise the arrest, rather than the offending behaviour.11* Often pure bad luck was to blame. Juan blamed his arrest on the eruption of a volcano: since his flight was delayed, new airport staff came on shift, rather than those he had bribed to turn a blind eye to his bag. Bad luck stories made clear that the teller was not a bad trafficker, but rather a good trafficker who had some bad luck. Other such stories included incompetence of their collaborators, or even being double-crossed. More rarely, men told stories about hard times:

‘Primo showed us photos of some amazing river shrimp and chatted extensively about how much they are sold for, how much they would sell for in the US, and here in Quito, exportation costs and profit margins. He said, I’m not really a trafficker; this is my business.’ (Fieldnote)

Trafficking was a way to support Primo’s legal business when it was failing. Unfortunately he had ended up in prison (rather than getting rich), but hoped to make international contacts that might enable him to send his shrimp to Europe for a better price.

Surviving prison
Like Paul’s gory story about the cockroach in his ear, stories about hard times in prison were sometimes told to visitors. In part, this was a response to backpackers’ expectations about visiting one of the ‘most dangerous prisons’ and hearing about it first-hand. Inmates’ stories included light-hearted and even dark humour (recall Paul’s cockroach story). Paul’s repertoire of stories for visitors included showing them a photograph of himself many kilos heavier before his arrest. As well as showing off his trafficking aptitude (he explained that customs inspectors and air hostesses would never see the drugs strapped to his body, knowing it rude to stare), the same photo also illustrated the brutality of the prison regime: years of food poisoning had reduced him to a fraction of his former weight.

Stories were also told about violence in prison. During a three month long strike in 2005 no guards were present in prison. A story about the violent murder of an inmate was re-told many times:

‘They [Paul, Graham, Juan and Paco] told us one tale about a guy who had accepted a contract on a guy’s life in return for a matchbox full of crack. The guy (who was supposed to be murdered)’s friends found out, [and planned a counter attack. They] cornered [the would-be assassin] in his cell, broke in the window and set fire to his cell and threw in a canister of CS gas. He was forced out and then 15 of them stabbed him to death. Some guy went to carry out his body and he groaned so was ‘properly finished off’ after all that. According to Graham he was cut up into pieces, boiled and put down the drain. According to Paul they found his genitals in the rubbish bin.’ (Fieldnote)

Re-telling the story was perhaps a way of warding off a similar fate: being able to explain such brutality was a way to make sense of it, and to reassure oneself it could be avoided. Violence stories also demonstrated the toughness of the storytellers to survive such a place. This was especially so for backpacker audiences, and especially women:

‘Pam [Diego’s friend, a college student from north America] asked how safe [the prison] was for women [visitors]. Paul’s reply was, more or less, “God forbid anyone should so much as scratch you to steal your earrings. You’d get your stuff back before you left the prison and someone would end up in hospital, or perhaps the morgue…’ after reading this back to him [I recorded it in my notebook], he added, ‘Possibly. We don’t know how deep the spike would go in.’ He then got out his 4” sharpened spike and his sharpened spoon and demonstrated how he would use them (I was sitting opposite him and found it kind of intimidating).’ (Fieldnote)

Stories about violence could rarely incorporate victimisation. One inmate reported being tortured into making a confession, including having an electric current passed through his genitals. This story was rarely told in front of other inmates, however Diego reported having been shown the scars. As a visitor, he was an important listener (and believer) of this particular story. In the men’s prison few openly admitted to vulnerability (either in lives before imprisonment, or their current situation). Although talking about drug trafficking was extremely common in the men’s prison, being seen to talk too much, in the wrong way, or to the wrong person could result in being labelled as having a boca floja (loose tongue), with the potential for being seen as ‘fake’, or even for fatal retributions.

Thus, visitors also opened up the possibility of telling different kinds of stories, especially those which could not be voiced in the day-to-day life. Backpackers were eager listeners and consumers of these tales. They were considerably more credulous than other inmates might have been; this was not always a bad thing. Although these stories sometimes elicited gifts from visitors, the main purpose in telling them seemed to be listened to, rather than helped (after all, what help could backpacker visitors really offer?). To tell one’s story to a visitor was also to have existed, to leave some trace on the world. Some foreign nationals received no visits from home during long sentences of six to 12 years. One foreign national inmate explained: ‘you’ve got to be visited; you’ve got to be heard’. Isolation could be overwhelming; inmates often likened it to being buried alive.

Discussion
The process of getting in reveals much about the nature of the field site and its relationship to outsiders (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Above, I have outlined the ways that prisons in Ecuador were shaped by global geopolitics (the war on drugs in particular) and the ways that social hierarchies in prison reflected global social inequalities. As a global northerner and literally as a ‘tourist’, visiting prison reflected travel as a privilege that contrasted sharply with those stuck there, such as the polillas. As a foreign national, I was quickly accorded a peripheral membership role, which over time developed into an active membership role (Adler & Adler, 1987), at least in relation to foreign national prisoner community (although not actual drug trafficking – to be clear). Whereas class and gender might have set me apart in other contexts, here being a western, Anglophone foreigner came into being as a category of membership.

Storytelling was a common social practice shared by both backpackers and prisoners who comprised a community of foreign nationals in prison in Ecuador. This community was made in/through storytelling practices, including storytelling about travel, tattoos and intoxication. Having visitors opened up space for inmates to tell stories about themselves, and drug trafficking that could not have been otherwise told- these included stories about getting rich and living the fast life as drug traffickers, but also about hard times in trafficking and in prison, including stories about violence. Visitors, myself included, played an important role as listeners (often quite credulous ones!).

Unlike other backpacker foreign visitors whose presence was usually temporary, I played a role in extending the community, and, through extended presence, I became part of the mythology of prison life. I was often around when things happened, and so was able to participate in the shared telling, and re-telling of events. One day, an inmate was assassinated shortly after I arrived. As I climbed the stairs I met Graham, stopping him for a cigarette and chat. The assassin had been right behind me on the stairs. Graham had been on his way to visit the murdered man and later attributed me with saving his life by delaying him. This was the most dramatic instance of becoming part of the mythology of prison life. I was often (falsely) attributed with having started backpacker prison tourism. I first visited as a backpacker in 2002, and so the practice was well established by then (although visits were probably less frequent). Nonetheless, I updated information already available and did bring in visits, so perhaps there is some truth in the myth.

I was also required to tell stories about myself as researcher, and as someone who would ultimately tell respondents’ stories. Respondents wanted to know who I was, what kind of stories I would tell about them, and what was in it for me. Of course, my responses were all, inevitably, narrative in nature. Storytelling was also a useful way to establish myself as someone distinct from other visitors. Where some visitors tried to prove their street cred by showing off their drug knowledge, displaying my ignorance was a way to present myself as a researcher (rather than pleasure-seeker).
All of this storytelling, or ‘narrative practice’ (Gubrium & Holstein, 1998), made researching drug trafficking possible. Nonetheless, these narrative practices in prison shaped the data in important ways: structuring what could, and could not be said. These were not ephemera, but central to interpretation and analysis. To quote C. Wright Mills:

‘The language of situations as given must be considered a valuable portion of the data to be interpreted and related to their conditions. To simplify these vocabularies of motive into a socially abstracted terminology is to destroy the legitimate use of motive in the explanation of social actions.’ (Wright Mills, 1940: 913).

Ethnographic fieldwork is uniquely placed to be able to appreciate the narrative practices that shape the field (and thus data) so profoundly. Gubrium and Holstein refer to this as narrative ethnography (2008). Narrative ethnography brings into focus the role of storytelling in social life (drawing on ethnomethodology), and is ideally placed to understand the ‘language’ of situations. In this context especially, drawing on interview data alone would have ignored the particular narrative forms common in prison, and to risk misinterpreting the subsequent interview data produced. Ethnographic presence in prison revealed the importance of storytelling as a form of social action in this context (Sandberg, 2010), and even the role of stories in motivating actions (Presser, 2009).

For backpackers, visiting prison was a way to produce adventure narratives (Noy, 2004). Many accounts can be found in many of the blogs online about prison visiting (Fleetwood & Turner, 2017). Their online stories about prison visiting describe daring, transformation and risk-taking. Paul (and others) were aware of this – they played up to stereotypes, telling stories about the prison and themselves. The stories told by prisoners to each other had an extremely important role in prison life, including securing reputations, including a reputation for violence and skill at drug trafficking. Lastly, the account presented here is a particular genre of research story: a fieldwork ‘confessional’ (Van Maanen, 2011). Like inmates, and prison visitors, my venture into prison was undertaken with the aim of writing about it afterwards. One could ask to what extent my behaviour as a fieldworker was motivated and sustained by the many fieldwork confessionals I read with such enthusiasm. That, however, is a question for another day.

Conclusion
Tales of entering the field abound in ethnographic research. Here, I have offered a discussion of my entry into a globalised field, and how I ‘carved out’ a role for myself as fellow foreigner, listener and storyteller. Here, listening to, and recording stories were not merely about data collection, but were integral for my entry into the field. Prisons in Ecuador were marked by global hierarchies of mobility, in which storytelling was a way for foreign nationals to construct themselves as a distinct community in prison (of which I was granted membership). As an ‘active member’ (Adler & Adler, 1987), I also played a role in widening this community by bringing in backpackers, who played a lively – if transient – role in the community. Foreign national visitors were especially valued by inmates since they offered a forum for telling different kinds of stories than those which could be told to foreign national inmates. This was especially true with regards to hard luck, and hard life stories. Visitors were keen consumers of such stories, and were also highly credulous. All of this storytelling was rich territory for me, as a researcher, hoping to elicit and record a variety of stories about imprisonment, but especially about drug trafficking. As Hammersley and Atkinson note, the processes of ‘getting in’ say much about the field (2007). Here understanding the role of storytelling in facilitating my access to the field also revealed the importance of narrative practices in prison. Ethnographic fieldwork is well placed to understand and appreciate the meaning and importance of storytelling in prison. Whilst Van Maanen (2011) and Adler and Adler (2008) note the ways in which ethnographic texts are structured by genre, this paper also throws light on the importance of storytelling in the field, particularly as a means of entering the field.

1* Of course, all names have been changed to protect respondents. Identifying details have also been removed.

2* I acknowledge the Programa de Estudios de la Ciudad, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) sede Quito, Ecuador for hosting me and negotiating research access during fieldwork in 2006. I acknowledge the Dirección Nacional de Rehabilitación Social, Ecuador for formally granting me access as a researcher. In 2014, Garcia Moreno prison (and the other prisons in which I undertook fieldwork) closed for good, replaced by US style high security jails in which visitors spend limited time with family in a public visit room. The porosity of Ecuadorian prisons (before 2014) allowed families to meet regularly, talk at length, eat and even sleep together. It also enabled me to adventure into prison as a backpacker tourist, bring my friends and eventually undertake fieldwork (before I was granted official access). The reader may rightly conclude that I abused this privilege for my own purposes. The closure of the jail (and de facto end of backpacker prison visiting) allows me to write frankly about prison tourism. I hope this confessional account does not bring embarrassment to those (past or present) involved in running prisons in Ecuador.

3* The national average was 9.3 per cent (Gallardo & Nuñez, 2006:9). Prisons in Quito held a much higher average due to the proximity of the international airport.

4* Garcia Moreno closed for good in 2014.

5* See also the documentary ‘El Comite’ (Herrera, 2005).

6* See footnote 2.

7* I should state explicitly that I was never asked for, nor did I ever pay a bribe to enter prison.

8* Fortunately I quickly applied for a replacement which was quickly granted.

9* The men’s and women’s prisons each housed groups of foreign nationals which were quite well connected. Wives and girlfriends in the women’s prison could apply to visit their partners every Thursday. Many had also met while detained, or were connected through criminal cases.

10* In later years, Diego would help Graham gain parole by giving him a work placement. Graham learned to cook professionally – a career he still pursues.11 Similarly, Topalli reports that non-arrested drug dealers, car-jackers and robbers narratively seek to neutralize being good, rather than being bad (2005).

11* Similarly, Topalli reports that non-arrested drug dealers, car-jackers and robbers narratively seek to neutralize being good, rather than being bad (2005).

 

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Published	15/06/2016
Type	Article
Author(s)	Christine Preiser
Corresponding Authors	Christine Preiser, PhD candidate, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law
DOA
DOI

Conducting research on nightclub bouncers involves fieldwork with actors who have limited interest in having the details of their work become visible to third parties. Conversely, it is the specific interest of ethnography to make the invisible visible. Thus, the research process is a constant negotiation of two potentially conflicting logics of (in)visibility. Furthermore, it is shaped by potential risks and the requirements of ethical codes. Focussing on the study of an inexperienced researcher ‘entering the field’, this article provides insights into the themes of ‘risks’ and ‘(in)visibility’ and shows how the two were interconnected throughout the whole process of the project, from fieldwork through to writing and publishing. It also shows how the researcher became an overt, but discreet participant observer whose fieldnotes contained intended and unintended blanks. The article suggests that ethnographic data always stays incomplete as the researcher partakes in a balancing act regarding what is revealed and what remains hidden. Intentional blanks help to confirm the researcher’s trustworthiness in the eyes of the research subjects, and so are vital in making such research possible in the first place.

Introduction
What should you do if your code of ethics requires you to keep your participants from unforeseen consequences due to your research,18* while public and academic discourse tell you that your field – nightclub bouncers – is a field full of risks? Similarly, what is the correct approach when important publications within that and related fields suggest that you must put yourself at risk in order to gain valuable insights (Ferrell & Hamm, 1998; Calvey, 2000; Westmarland, 2000; Winlow et al., 2001; Marks, 2004), while others remind you to take your own risks into account (Scarce, 1994) and exercise caution? In such circumstances the task at hand becomes one of negotiating various interests and the logics of the work – on site, at the desk, and in publications.

My doctoral research involved 60 nights of participant observation with bouncers working at three nightclubs in two German cities. I experienced the action-packed side of the night-time economy – and the boredom of endless hours outside these places of amusement. I wrote 500 pages of fieldnotes. Yet arguably the tensions inherent in the work are at their starkest now, as I reflect on the experience of my research subjects and seek to reap the fruits of my labour through the process of publishing. Two antagonistic logics have to be balanced during this process. On the one hand are the interests of the bouncers who allowed me to access to their night shifts but sometimes found themselves conflicting with the law and, so, understandably wished to stay invisible. On the other hand, it is the logic of ethnography to make the invisible visible, and to reveal what is otherwise hidden. It is the nature of our system of research ethics to reduce potential harm for research participants as much as possible – a tool, a filter or a logic gate which helps us negotiate these antagonistic logics. The result of this negotiation is therefore an inevitably partial representation that focuses on some aspects of experience whilst leaving others out; in other words, we are left with a balance of (in)visibility.

This article aims to provide a series of insights into the process involved in creating this balance. Although there is a vivid body of literature on doing ethnography (e.g. Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983; Ferrell & Hamm, 1998; Pawluch et al., 2005; Fetterman, 1989) and on writing ethnographic works (e.g. Clifford & Marcus, 1986; van Maanen, 1988; Emerson et al., 2011), the literature tends to be particularly silent on the interplay between the field under study and the collected data that provide the basis for further analysis and the final representation of the subjects of the ethnography. Thus, the ethnographic process of making the invisible visible tends to stay largely invisible itself. In what follows, the focus will be on the actual process of doing research, and the piece will seek to communicate concrete aspects of my own ethnographic practice. Three sections will follow. In the first, the focus will be on the themes of ‘risks’ and ‘(in)visibility’, and how they are interconnected throughout the entire research process, from the initial forays into fieldwork right through to the publication of results. It will be argued that the interplay between risk and (in)visibility hinges on two basic prerequisites: the need for discretion and the need for trust. The second section will explore how the dimensions of openness, discretion and participation are interconnected at the actual physical site of the ethnography. The final section will show how some of the tensions apparent in the field are recreated and played out within the fieldnotes that are taken. Fieldnotes are often used as illustrative depictions of research, but it is important to ask what is absent from them, and why. Ultimately, the article will show how an individual ‘entering the field’ of research dealt with the challenge of balancing a number of competing logics in the process of ethnography. Furthermore, it will suggest that ethnographic data by its very nature is incomplete, but that in certain cases it is actually desirable for this to be the case. This is because participants will only agree to take part in such studies and develop the trust in the researcher necessary for a successful project if they know that not everything will be revealed. Ultimately, the central balancing act in research of this nature concerns what is revealed and what remains hidden.

Becoming familiar with the logics of the field
At the outset of the research, I was inspired by the literature on methodology and the night-time economy, and a particular set of ethnographic studies that had greatly enthused me (e.g. Simon, 1991; Barley, 2000; Wacquant, 2004; Fassin, 2013). I also had the advice of my supervisors and the code of ethics of the German Association of Sociology to heed. I took the early decision to conduct overt participant observations. This was rooted in pragmatism, as there are only a small number of nightclubs of a very particular type that employ female bouncers, which would have limited my chances of success had I decided to research covertly.19* Employment of a different nature (such as in Rivera, 2010) in nightclubs would have been at the cost of social and spatial proximity to the bouncers. The decision to research overtly also had an ethical dimension, since the code of ethics under which I worked requires explicit informed consent if possible.

Some researchers have stressed that carrying out participant observations when embedded within bouncer communities is a risky endeavour (Calvey, 2000; Winlow et al., 2001; Monaghan, 2002; Sanders, 2005; Rigakos, 2008). Meanwhile others seem barely concerned at all with this issue (Rivera, 2010; Søgaard, 2013; van Liempt & van Aalst, 2016). Despite this difference, the research draws attention to an archetypal bouncer: a 20-45 year old male, hailing from various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, with a certain penchant towards using violence which they are given the opportunity to do through their occupation. The prominence of violence in the existing literature is enough to make one quite intimidated.

The manner in which researchers have legitimated their decision to engage in covert participant observations (Calvey, 2000; Winlow et al., 2001; Monaghan, 2002) is perfectly coherent, and yet I have always wondered how these researchers came to the basic assumption that bouncers were a group that would be inaccessible with overt participant observations. With the sense that my way into the field would yield initial insights into its basic logics (Breidenstein et al., 2013) I decided to challenge this assumption. In short, I simply knocked at the doors of three nightclubs and was not rejected at any. Initially, I picked a random nightclub on a random night to have a try. As it turned out, the first bouncer I talked to was not only the head bouncer but also a sociologist.20* Three months later I began my participant observations at that nightclub. I gained access to the second and third nightclubs through bouncers who connected me to the respective teams with a positive recommendation. What was particularly surprising was that I was permitted access to the second nightclub, as I knew that some of the bouncers working at that venue were also local gang members. Even in this case, and despite the perceived risks of the work, it still proved readily possible to gain informed consent in all three nightclubs.

Each of the nightclubs were quite different from one other, but during preliminary discussions and negotiations regarding the research the potential risks were of paramount concern in all three venues. Of particular concern was my risk of receiving an injury and their risk of being held accountable for it. In addition, the venues and the bouncers were concerned that my data might be used against them by third parties, mainly the police. Together, we clarified that they would not be held accountable for my risks and we agreed that I would be prohibited from taking pictures, making videos or tape-recording anything. This went for all three teams, who were all happy for me to take pseudonymised fieldnotes.

Despite this basic agreement, each of the teams had quite different approaches in dealing with their risks with regards to the research. The bouncers in nightclub #1 requested an official letter of informed consent. I offered the same to the bouncers of nightclub #2 and #3 – they laughed fairly hard at me. It was more relevant for them that somebody they trusted vouched for me. Each club employed its own methods of acknowledging risk and ensuring that I was not tempted to cross certain boundaries. For example, the head bouncer of nightclub #2 told me several ‘best of’ stories that sent a very clear – although never explicitly addressed – message during our first personal encounter: ‘We also beat up women, if necessary’. Meanwhile, the bouncers in nightclub #3 had an internal discussion after several night shifts on setting up an approval system of sorts in order to check whether every team member was okay with my presence.

Thus, my route(s) into the field immediately revealed two of its basic logics: Bouncers are familiar with working in plain view of hundreds of revellers (and potential witnesses). But they are simultaneously aware of the fact that some parts of their routine work are potentially of interest to the police, which can have negative consequences. As a result of this, bouncers are extremely keen to remain invisible as individuals whilst executing those parts of their job that might lead to collisions with legal regulations and authorities. Bouncers have a set of tactics designed to minimise the chances of such collisions, such as changing clothes, performing certain activities in dark corners, or quickly disappearing from scenes, which have been described in other studies on bouncers (Lister et al., 2000; Monaghan, 2004) and were also encountered in the course of my own research. I was allowed to ‘look over their shoulders’ and see those aspects of the job that they hide on the condition that I also used cover-up tactics to hide their identities. Simultaneously, my way into the field revealed the importance of trust(worthiness), which was assured hrough both the official consent letters, internal techniques of testing and the demands of gate-keepers such as the head bouncers.

Becoming an overt but discreet participant observer
It quickly became clear that in the process of negotiating (in)visibility, the dimensions of openness, discretion and participation were extremely important and interconnected at the actual physical site of the ethnography. This section will deal with each in turn.

I saw openness – and transparency – as being vital to the success of the project from the outset and I aimed to ensure that my research process engendered these traits as much as possible. To each bouncer I worked with on site, I explained who I was, how I would collect data, how I would pseudonymise the data, and assured them that they would be allowed to read my fieldnotes to check the pseudonymisation. Some were interested in this information whilst others were not, although I always told them anyway. What did seem to spark more interest was when I told the bouncers that it was not my purpose to evaluate the quality of their work. This can be understood in the context of a public discourse on bouncers in Germany that is focused on violence, (organised) crime and discrimination against particular revellers. Most bouncers found my general research interest in social order and space rather abstract and rather “boooring”, but they seemed to value the fact that I was attempting to look beyond the popular subjects such as violence and the selection practices at the entrance to the venue. I kept the bouncers informed of the dissemination of my work such as my participation in workshops, colloquia and conferences, as well as of my progress with articles and my blog in order to give them a sense of my work on their work.

On the other hand, the fact that I was collecting data through fieldnotes alone reduced the possibility of the bouncers being able to actually see when I was collecting data and what kind of data was being gathered. Nevertheless, there seemed to be a general agreement amongst the bouncers that I too was at work – somewhat – during our mutual nightshifts, although there were some blithe jokes such as “We know that you aren’t writing a book. You just enjoy hanging out with us.” Sometimes bouncers were irritated by the amount of time it would take until “the book” would be published, or they confused my fieldnotes with “the book”. The comments of those who read my fieldnotes ranged from “You’re…creepy. How can you remember all this stuff?” to “200 pages?! So you actually did work the whole time.” In moments like these, it became apparent that to most of the bouncers the very notion of ‘research’ remained vague and somewhat abstract, despite my efforts at remaining as open as possible about the process. Yet my openness regarding my role and my fieldnotes – crucially, what they would not contain – was essential in the construction of trust.

Discretion also proved to be of great importance and the subject of a balancing act of sorts. I realised very quickly that there are subtle nuances in the manner that stories are related, depending on the space and the company in which they are told. The following section from my fieldnotes illustrates this:

Mille [bouncer] says, I’ll have an appointment with the cops soon, because of this incident when that guy threw a bottle. Edu [bouncer] looks at him without understanding, I don’t know what you mean. People threw so many bottles at us last year, which one are you talking about? Mille tells him some details, Edu answers, oh yeah… the incident when you smashed up that guy? Mille darts a disgruntled glance at him, of course I did not do that. When Mille tells me about the incident in a dialogue later that night, he confirms that he knocked a guy over. I get the impression that these things are not supposed to be told in public. [X-RAY, night #12]21*

What is important about this in the present context is the difference between a public version of the story in which the bouncer in question “did not do that”, and a privately told version in which the detail that had been denied before is reintegrated into the story. So, the story depends on who is asking whom in the presence or absence of whom. Silences and absences are vital here. This happens mostly in the context of stories that contain potentially incriminating information from a legal perspective. Furthermore, there are topics that bouncers avoided discussing even when asked directly. Both of these traits can be interpreted as a matter of discretion and of keeping their control over stories. This is also mirrored in the experiences of other participant observers when they tried to conduct interviews with their research participants (Simon, 1991; Marks, 2004).

This tendency to discretion forced me to adapt, and I tried to ask questions without giving bouncers the feeling of being interviewed, to observe people without staring, to listen carefully while sometimes looking in another direction, to delay until a more private moment to ask questions. In many cases I simply waited for people to talk about situations by themselves and then asked them inconspicuous questions in order to keep them talking. Simply put, I tried to be as discreet as possible and adjusted my methods to a field in which discretion plays an important role. As we will see in the next section, this sense of discretion fed into the fieldnotes themselves. Nevertheless, while I communicated very openly about the general process of my research, I veiled the moments of doing research. This meant that during my overt participant observations there were undeniably moments in which my own visibility as a researcher was reduced. Once again, I was involved in a balancing act of sorts.

The process of participation itself also raised issues. The bouncers did not know what being a participant and hosting a participant observer would entail, and I did not know what being a participant observer would entail, so we had to find out through practice. Three teams, three times. I stood next to them while they carried out their work, tried to follow them as much as possible, chatted with them, asked questions, felt tired, cold, hungry, and bored with them. Participation also meant to become familiar with each other. It was the quiet, subtle shift from “Will you come back next weekend?” to “Where were you last weekend?” It meant that bouncers got used to having me around and I learnt to find a good position to observe from without blocking the way. It also meant to become a node in the web of relationships on site. Of course, building relationships is not a single-sided process (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983). Research participants are observing, too, especially when observations are an important part of their business. Bouncers also got to know me, be it on a professional level – How are her reactions in certain situations? Is she trustworthy? – or on a personal level. It was fundamental to the success of the project to make myself visible, to give personal insights, to share thoughts, and to accept mistakes and jokes at my expense. The bouncers’ comments about me and aspects of my life were sometimes closer to the truth than I would have liked and they clearly showed that I was not the only observer on site. Becoming a trusted part of the network of relationships also required me to keep my distance in some moments, to stay behind a little in heated situations so that nobody would need to take care of my safety. I also distanced myself if bouncers wanted me to take a position in internal conflicts. And I firmly refused to give information in some cases: Two teams worked in the same city and they asked questions about each other, so I told them that I would not be able to answer their questions due to data protection. All of this was fundamental to my role on site.

However, the fact that I had clearly communicated the purpose of my research and positioned myself as somebody with a somewhat detached professional interest provided me with some advantages. Whereas the few female bouncers I met during my research had to struggle in the predominantly male teams (see also O’Brien et al., 2008), I enjoyed the privilege of fools, the privilege of not needing to fit in as a colleague (Marks, 2004). I kept Barley’s (2000) ironical pragmatism in mind; the researcher would most likely be seen as an eccentric coot, and I expected to and accepted that I would feel embarrassed, clumsy or ‘uncool’ on a regular basis (which I did). I did not aim to establish a particular role but rather to simply establish myself as trustworthy. Taking this approach helped me to relax and become the “trusted outsider” (Bucerius, 2013). And, unlike in Bucerius’ case, my gender was hardly made a subject of discussion, especially in the all-male teams.22* I tended to be addressed as an observer at work. Sometimes this was in the sense of an extra pair of eyes that might provide additional information, sometimes it was in the sense of an extra pair of ears that could be fed with all the stories everybody else on site was tired of hearing, and sometimes it was in the sense of providing an external perspective on one’s work.

In hindsight, one of the most difficult situations occurred when the question was raised by some bouncers in nightclub #3 as to whether I had the potential to be an indiscreet and thus harmful observer. I had already spent several nightshifts with some bouncers at that nightclub and had showed up for another night. Unfortunately, no bouncer on that particular shift knew me in person, even though some had already heard of me. This caused some confusion, so one of the bouncers asked me to name him all of his colleagues who I had already met in person. Then he left the entrance area, whipping his cell phone out. Shortly afterwards:

Demir [bouncer] comes back and says loudly, she’s alright. He grins at me, sorry, but I had to counter-check this, not that you’re a cop in civvies. He goes back on his position and seems to receive a message shortly after, reads it, nods again and turns around to me with a grin, JC [bouncer] says hello to you. No offence, but you could be a cop or someone from the press. His phone will ring several times in the course of the night and it will always be bouncers who know me already. When Jan [bouncer] is on the phone, he just says, the issue is over, Jan! Thanks! and hangs up. He explains to me, I rang everybody you named. [X-RAY, night #4]

It probably took only a few minutes until Demir came back, but they seemed endless to me. I felt deeply uncomfortable and embarrassed and tried to console myself with gallows humour: “Well… deal with it. At least this is interesting data that came into being right now…” Then, in a stroke of bad luck, it was reported that a female agent’s cover had been blown in another city and the case gained some media coverage. Despite this development and the events of [night #4], the team decided to accept me as a participant observer. Still, this resulted in weeks of comments and jokes about me as “cop in civvies” which were meant to tease me but also to remind me that although I was the observer, I was also being closely observed. I emphasized several times that I would leave immediately if somebody ever felt uncomfortable with me, ensuring that the ball was in their court, but nobody took me up on the offer. So, I laid down my arms and dealt with the jokes.

The fact that several other members of the team had already spent quite an amount of time with me and had come to trust me certainly helped as I could rely on those relationships that had been built during the nights before. I also considered my openness and the strength of my relationships with the teams as a crucial part of my self-protection. I was sure that my network outside the field would not be helpful in the case of threat, but that there were always bouncers on site who would put in a good word for me. Furthermore, I assumed that those bouncers who might have the potential to become a threat would either not agree to take part in the first place, or that they were less likely to become a threat if they had been given the opportunity to consent to being part of the research project. As my analysis has shown (Preiser, 2016), the feeling of being tricked is one of the main factors in bouncers turning to threat and violence, so my openness was an appropriate choice to help prevent this feeling.

About blanks in fieldnotes
Writing is always a process that involves decisions on what to include and exclude (Clifford, 1990; Marks, 2004) and protecting research participants is – among other things (van Maanen, 1988; Emerson et al., 2011) – one of the main factors that shape such decisions in this type of work. The main concern of the bouncers was that my fieldnotes could fall into the hands of the police or others who could do them harm of some sort, so I used this concern as a ‘vanishing point’ of sorts while writing the fieldnotes. Consequently, I pseudonymised all places and persons immediately while writing and did not include information that was a part of criminal proceedings, whether settled or ongoing. The quoted episode in the above section is an example of this. Whilst including an outline of the incident in my fieldnotes, I excluded all details regarding the forthcoming criminal proceedings as well as any details that might have affected the process and outcome of those proceedings. I wanted to avoid the possibility that somebody may be able to decode my pseudonymisation. Thus, I deliberately left blanks in my fieldnotes to minimize the risk for the research participants, which itself is an acknowledgement that simply partaking in this research carried an element of risk for the bouncers.

The following two episodes also contain blanks:

Arthur [bouncer] and I stay for quite a while outside in front of the door and talk about ideas for the future, our biographies, concepts of lifestyles, gender equality and having children. [DYSTOPIA, night #9]

Mille, Edu [bouncers] and I are sitting around the mushroom heater, Nando [bouncer] is leaning against the counter, his arms folded on the counter, his chin on his arms. Mille and I had been talking about books for a while, then the conversation switched to relationships and became pretty private because of a question Edu had asked Mille. We talk in the circle – mainly Mille and me, spiked with comments of the other two bouncers – about relationships, experiences, failure, and expectations. The till is closed in the meantime and Edu sits behind the counter, but the conversation is not disturbed by this interruption. We talk about an hour like this, sometimes guests leave, or two, three new guests arrive, that’s it. Finally, the conversation returns to jocularity. [X-RAY, evening #20]

The fieldnotes in both examples provide details on the protagonists involved, the spatial positions of the protagonists, the context of what is happening simultaneously (in the second example), the fact that nothing else seems to attract the bouncers’ and the researcher’s attention at this point, and the topics the protagonists are talking about. It is also possible to gather something about the nature of the relationships between the protagonists as they are involved in conversation about intimate subjects. Yet at the same time, the fieldnotes stay silent on the details of the conversations and the personal opinions and experiences of the persons involved. These conversations are both part of building relationships and manifestations of those relationships. Publications on bouncers have tended to focus on the action-packed aspects of their nightly routines (e.g. Winlow et al., 2001; Monaghan, 2002; Hobbs et al., 2003; Calvey, 2008; O’Brien et al., 2008; Preiser, 2016), but a lot of hours “working the door” have the distinction of being uneventful and boring (Sanders, 2005), such as in the two episodes above. It is these hours that leave room for extended, sometimes very intimate conversations, either between the research participants or between research participants and the researcher (Marks, 2004).

Over time, I learned much about each team. This was not only regarding their routines and working practices, but also some potentially sensitive details about indictable incidents, personal information, job-related information, informal work hierarchies and conflicts within the team, and information from other spheres of life; love, family, sorrows, hobbies and problems at the daytime job (see also Marks, 2004). The fieldnotes aimed to show the relationships and the topics that were covered in conversation, while at the same time handling the private information with which I had been entrusted, in a sensitive manner. Thus, the fieldnotes are highly detailed on some aspects of the fieldwork, whilst remaining vague on others. While the blanks in the episode quoted in the previous section exist to protect persons as legal subjects, the above two episodes are redacted to protect people’s privacy more broadly. In addition, the blanks are also there to be recognized by the bouncers, to further establish my trustworthiness even after the fieldwork on site and to show that their credit of trust was justified. On occasion this led to confusion: One bouncer who had read my fieldnotes offered to fill in some of the intended blanks until I explained their purpose.

There are also blanks of another type within the fieldnotes as the next example shows:

I had been roaming with Erik [bouncer] in front of the door, we stayed outside for a short time and then I follow him back inside. Simon [bouncer] paces up and down in front of the counter. I exchange a smile with Pete [bouncer] and am distracted for a moment. As I turn back, Erik is gone, he’s in front of the 361° [neighbouring nightclub] where a jam has formed and two men have been brought down to the floor. One of them is lying on his belly and is held down by one of the 361°’s bouncers, the other one is lying on the side, while another 361° bouncer has one knee on his side. [DYSTOPIA, night #10]

This episode shows how quickly situations can seemingly change from the routine and normal to red alert. However, this is always from the point of view of the observer, who has a necessarily partial view of matters. The speed of the incident in this example could have been a real phenomenon, or it could simply have been that the observer had failed to notice that something was going on until it had boiled over. Thus, the fieldnotes depict a reading of the incident, but not the reading of the incident. In many regards they remain frustratingly vague. The researcher (even having being witness to the incident) and the readers of any subsequent publications are left with many open questions based on the lack of information: Who are the two men? How and when did Erik take notice of the incident? When and why did the incident start? Who brought the two men down to the floor and how? Does Erik even know much more than the observer? On the other hand, the fieldnotes provide fairly detailed information: the number and spatial positions of the main protagonists, the imbalance in control and power between the protagonists, the potential cooperation between the bouncers of two different nightclubs.

Of course, it is inevitable that a single observer cannot capture every detail, and that their perspective is necessarily a partial one. This inevitability was however exacerbated by the conditions on site and the fluid and often simultaneous nature of events and number of protagonists involved. In many cases I joined an encounter after it had already begun because I had followed another bouncer somewhere else. I could not clearly hear what was being said because of the noisy environment. Other people blocked my line of sight or attracted my attention. Persons disappeared from the scene and came back. After some time I realized that bouncers dealt with the same problems. This became apparent when bouncers needed to orient within the venue, discussed incidents afterwards, and exchanged ideas and interpretations of how and why a situation had started and who was implicated. Thus, my own difficulties mirrored those of the field I was studying, even though many of the bouncers were definitely better than me at making sense of the jumbled environment.

Thus, unlike the earlier episodes referred to, the blanks in the previous episode are unintended, and result in large measure from essential features of the fieldsite as well as the partial perspective of a researcher working alone. This means that certain things remained invisible in the fieldnotes because I simply could not do better. I realized in the course of writing that my memory was unconsciously trying to fill in blanks and it was challenging to leave them as they were. However, the passing of time was an important factor in making the data more complete (Schatzmann & Strauss, 1973), as similar situations would repeat, resulting in similar reactions, even though each incident was unique in its details. Additionally, some situations had an aftermath, be it in actions or in discourse. Time made it possible to depict situations and their course.

Conclusion
It is clear that participant observation is shaped in a constant interplay with the environment of the field under study, an interplay that starts with the first assumptions and first interactions with potential research participants and continues on through to the publication of results. Previous work from various countries (e.g. Calvey, 2000; Winlow et al., 2001; Monaghan, 2002; Hobbs et al., 2003; O’Brien et al., 2008; Rigakos, 2008; Søgaard, 2014; van Liempt & van Aalst, 2016) has shown that a range of quite different approaches to participant observation with bouncers are available. Since I chose to conduct overt participant observation for practical and ethical reasons, the first task was to find out whether this was feasible and under what conditions. To my surprise, many bouncers were happy to let me take part in their professional lives and also opened up on a personal level in the course of time. However, they disapproved of any kind of digital recording, be it photographs, videos or audio recording, and were only comfortable with allowing pseudonymised fieldnotes. In other words, bouncers did not want to be clearly identifiable as individual persons (which would be possible with digital recordings), because this could potentially have consequences in the event that they became legal persons. As a result, the sole data source for the project was fieldnotes written from the personal memories of the ethnographer.

At the same time, by adapting to the conditions of the bouncers it was possible to become part of the scene and to collect rich data. As other researchers have shown time and again, relationships of trust play a crucial role in this field (Calvey, 2000; Winlow et al., 2001; Monaghan, 2002; Hobbs et al., 2003). Those who decided to conduct covert participant observations had to negotiate how they would be trustworthy colleagues and ethical researchers, while constantly fearing the risks that accompanied their deception of their research participants. In contrast, by using openness, discretion and participation I was able to largely protect myself from some of the risks that other researchers have faced. Of course this did not save me from the risk of receiving an injury on site, but this was relatively low compared to the risks faced by those who have researched covertly. Indeed, it was part of my trustworthiness as an observer to learn and to know when to better stay behind.

Finding a role and becoming a node in the web of relationships on site was an essential facet of the research. It was just as important to safeguard some of the knowledge that went along with these relationships. This meant that I included intended blanks within my fieldnotes in order to protect research participants as legal persons. Furthermore, intended blanks helped to protect the intimate aspects of these relationships and to reassure the participants that they were not risking exploitation (Marks, 2004). Yet these blanks also brought into sharp relief some other important aspects of the work, such as the necessarily partial view of the researcher. Ultimately, the aim was to ensure that none of the research, including outputs such as this one, could contribute to any negative impacts upon the research participants.

Finally, in negotiating the rather broad requirements of the ethical code of my relevant association, an aspect inherent in all ethnographic studies was revealed: ethnographic data always needs to stay incomplete. Partly this is because the researcher cannot do better, but also because the researcher needs to leave intended blanks in order to protect privacy and ensure that, as far as possible, no harm is inflicted upon participants. A willingness to adapt to the logics of the field and to apply cover-up tactics made it possible to do overt research within it. Only a few people will be able to fill these blanks – and hopefully they will feel satisfied in their trust in me. The entire process – right through to the publication of results – is a finely tuned balancing act that involves bringing many things to light, while leaving others in the dark. That some things must remain in the dark may be seen by some as a weakness in the approach; I would argue the contrary, it is the very thing that makes research such as this possible.

*I would like to thank Dr Jaime Waters, Prof. Didier Fassin, Sheraz Khan, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and supportive comments. Den beteiligten Türstehern vielen Dank und ruhige Schicht.

18* http://www.soziologie.de/de/die-dgs/ethik/ethik-kodex.html

19* Only nightclub #1 employed female bouncers. Nightclub #2 never had a female bouncer in its more than 10 years of existence and nightclub #3 only employed female bouncers for particular events

20* Who told me months later: “I have to admit, I’m a bit jealous that I didn’t come up with the idea of writing a PhD thesis about bouncers by myself. I guess it was just too… obvious.”

21* All places and persons are pseudonymised; X-RAY and DYSTOPIA are the pseudonyms of two nightclubs.

22* A bouncer shrugged his shoulders when we were discussing this: “Come on, bouncers are not a bunch of guys that had been living on a lonely island for months. Bouncers work in nightlife, there’s plenty of women. And you were obviously not interested in us as individual men but in our work and us as a group.”

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Published	13/03/2002
Type	Article
Author(s)	Dr Jaime Waters
Corresponding Authors	Dr Jaime Waters, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Sheffield Hallam University
DOA
DOI

Inspired by Professor Yvonne Jewkes’ plenary speech at the 2013 British Society of Criminology conference, this paper focuses on the experiences of a researcher setting out on her journey into the field of criminological research. In the burgeoning tradition of autoethnography, it will tell the story of how aspects of the researcher’s own ‘biography’ affected the data collection process in a study of ‘hidden’ older illegal drug users in the UK. The research employed snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews and at the outset great difficulties were encountered which were caused, in part, by the researcher’s age, nationality, professional standing and cultural awareness. However, as the researcher’s own personal biography developed over the long duration of the study, some of these problems were alleviated. In the process something of the nature of the participants themselves was revealed, namely their reticence to be too revealing to an ‘outsider’ about their illegal pastime, the manner in which their illegal drug use took place in a specific cultural milieu, and the extent to which they saw their drug use as being an unremarkable and normal part of their life. By the conclusion of the study, a by now older, more experienced and acculturated researcher was able to see this with far greater clarity. As criminology increasingly takes account of researcher biography, the argument presented here suggests that not only can it have significant impacts upon the research process, but even over the duration of a single study developments in the biography of the researcher can alter the nature of their relationship with research subjects and contribute to a greater understanding of them.

Introduction
Encouraged by the crisis of confidence in the social sciences engendered by postmodernism, many scholars in the 1980s began to question, amongst other things, the nature of the ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ that they had supposedly ‘found’ (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 1). The impact of the researcher’s own background assumptions on the research process, which had hitherto been largely unacknowledged, was belatedly admitted, along with the possibility that so called ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) were not only impossibly difficult to construct, but actually undesirable. It was in this context that the autoethnographic approach, which ‘recognises the innumerable ways personal experience influences the research process’ (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 1), began to emerge. Autoethnography can be loosely defined as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno). […] A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography’ (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 1). It is through this combination of autobiography (retroactively and selectively writing about past experiences) and ethnography (studying the relational practices, common values and beliefs of a culture) (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 2) that the approach can contribute to the production of ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973: 10) of particular cultures and social phenomena.

When compared with other branches of the social sciences, criminology has arguably been rather reluctant to grapple with the idea that qualitative inquiry has autoethnographic dimensions, and that there are intimate links between the biographies of researchers themselves and the outcomes of the research projects that they engage in (Jewkes, 2013). For Jewkes (2011: 65), the ‘fixations of criminology’ identified by Joe Sim (2004), namely methodology, objectivity, restrained language and appropriate form, discourage any form of biographical or emotional intrusion by the researcher. As Wakeman (2014: 707) puts it, ‘the crux of the matter is this: for various reasons, and despite significant advances in recent years, many criminologists remain hesitant to include much detail of themselves, their life histories and their emotive processes in the presentation of their research findings’12* Recently however, there have been signs of a shift in this regard. For example, Phillips and Earle (2010) have candidly outlined the manner in which their own biographies, identity and memories framed their study of prisoner identities. More recently still, Wakeman, in the course of his argument for a ‘lyrical criminology’, suggests that an autoethnography which focuses upon the ‘researcher’s biographic and emotive self’ can potentially ‘significantly enhance criminology’s methodological repertoire’ (2014: 705).

In light of this nascent trend in criminological research, this article tells the story (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011: 3) of how aspects of my own personal biography impacted upon the research that I undertook for my PhD and beyond on ‘hidden’ older illegal drug users. Jewkes (2011) has discussed how academics often present their fieldwork and findings as if it has gone smoothly in a way that does a ‘disservice’ to those that follow them, for it obscures the often messy business of doing research. As the autoethnography presented here will show, the progress of this particular research project was far from serene. The next section will introduce the research project and the sampling and data collection techniques that were employed. Following this, I present the story of what happened during the fieldwork, paying particular attention to how my own biographical characteristics seemed to impact upon the sample building and data collection phases of the study. I will explore how, as time passed and some of my own biographical characteristics developed, a number of the difficulties involved in conducting the research were alleviated, at least to a degree. Ultimately, I was able to reflect on my earlier struggles in a new light and see more clearly how they helped to reveal something about the nature of those I was attempting to study (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011; Wakeman, 2014). As such, the article will go on to briefly consider some of the lessons I learned about the target population through this often testing and occasionally rather demoralising process. My experience suggests that developments in the biography of a researcher can, over time, alter the nature of their relationship with research subjects and contribute to a greater understanding of them, and that this process can occur over the duration of a single study.

The research project
The roots of the work that I have been engaged in, on and off, for well over a decade, lie in a PhD (Waters, 2009) that was started in the early years of the 21st century. The sense that inspired this work, derived from personal contacts and experience, was that there are a considerable number of older adults using illegal drugs quietly and under the radar. These people are not the ‘junkies’ of popular imagination, but what Cohen and Sas called ‘mainstream citizens’ (1994: 72) who combine their drug use with a range of other more ‘conventional’ pursuits such as work and family. At the outset of the project, I felt that such individuals’ historical experience with drugs would likely coincide with the flowering of various post-war ‘spectacular’ subcultures (Hebdige, 1979). These erstwhile hippies, punks and the like, whose drug use had begun in the 1960s and 1970s, might well have interesting tales to tell about how they had sustained their use over the long term, how they had integrated it into their lives, and how their use had changed as they grew older.
The plan was to locate and interview adults aged 40 and over who had used an illegal drug on at least one occasion in the preceding 12 months, and who were not in contact with either the criminal justice system or treatment agencies regarding their use. Such users are tremendously underrepresented in the vast majority of drugs research, where the focus tends to be upon those who are much younger, or those who are institutionalised in some way and whose use is seen as ‘problematic’. It was hoped to build a picture of these individuals’ drug use ‘careers’, explore fluctuating patterns of use over the life course and examine how drug use had interacted and continues to interact with various aspects of people’s lives such as family, health and employment. Fundamental to the research was the decision to not make contact with potential participants through criminal justice agencies or treatment centres but instead to find ‘hidden’ users. This was because such people are not only the most seldom researched, but are also most likely to have evolved ‘non-problematic’ drug-using careers alongside otherwise ‘conventional’ lifestyles. Ultimately, the aim was to discover something about the nature of hidden, ‘normal’ (Hammersley, 2005; 2011) drug use that has been sustained over the long term and combined with an otherwise conventional lifestyle, and in so doing address something of a blind spot in the drugs research field.

Snowball Sampling
Snowball sampling seemed to offer the best chance of building a sample of ‘hidden’ older users. For Noy (2008: 330), ‘a sampling procedure may be defined as snowball sampling when the researcher accesses informants through contact information that is provided by other informants. This process is, by necessity, repetitive: informants refer the researcher to other informants, who are contacted by the researcher and then refer her or him to yet other informants, and so on. Hence the evolving ‘snowball’ effect’. As Biernacki and Waldorf (1981: 141) argue, the method is well suited for a number of research purposes and is particularly applicable when the focus of study is on a sensitive issue, possibly concerning a relatively private matter, and thus requires the knowledge of insiders to locate people for study. Snowball sampling has been used with some success in the study of illegal drug users, particularly younger users (Kaplan, Korf & Sterk, 1987; Ditton & Hammersley, 1996; Griffiths et al., 1993; Avico et al., 1998; Hammersley, Khan & Ditton, 2002; Notley, 2005; Potter & Dann, 2005; Shewan & Dalgarno, 2005), although not unequivocally (Goode, 2000). It has also been used to build ‘community based’ samples of drug users (Cohen & Sas, 1994).13*

Thus, it was hoped to build a snowball from a starting point of a non-probability, convenience sample of individuals who fit the research criteria. Various initial contact points, chiefly friends and colleagues, were contacted in order to locate potential participants to start off the sampling process. In addition, information was sent out to as many people as possible to advertise the research. Colleagues also sent out ‘feelers’ to their own friends and contacts in the field of drugs research. Six to ten initial contact points from which to snowball were sought, on the assumption that this would provide a strong base to work from. Once individuals who met the criteria had been located and interviewed, the researcher asked these people if they knew of anyone else who might be willing to partake; the researcher then chased up these leads. Interviewees were not asked to ‘deliver’ subsequent participants due to a lack of resources (specifically, the lack of a ‘shop front’). In addition, due to the highly sensitive nature of the research topic, it was felt that it was more appropriate for the researcher to be the one in control of the evolving sampling chains, so that discretion could be assured. The use of ‘privileged access’ (Griffiths et al., 1993) or ‘indigenous’ (Power, 1994) interviewers was also considered, but this was not pursued due to a lack of suitable and willing candidates for the interviewer role. The lack of resources at the disposal of the project would have also rendered this option difficult; Griffiths et al. (1993), for example, recruited a team of 23 interviewers for their Department of Health funded study of heroin users, all of whom were paid. As Biernacki and Waldorf (1981: 156) suggest, a chain can be continued until it either comes to a natural end or reaches saturation point.

Used in this manner, snowball sampling ‘has proved useful in generating samples of individuals who it would be difficult, if not impossible, to access in a more conventional way’ (Griffiths et al., 1993: 1619). Despite the various problems associated with snowball sampling (inter alia, its reliance on the researcher and its labour intensive nature, the potential for distortion, issues regarding the control of referral chains, and the difficulty of accessing isolated individuals (see Waters, 2015)), it did appear to be the most appropriate sampling method for this research. This was chiefly because it had the potential to provide an effective means of building a sample of drug users without relying on institutional referrals. As outlined above, the need to avoid users engaged with treatment programmes or the criminal justice system was crucial to this research due to the differences ‘between subjects who were in contact with treatment agencies and those who were not’ (Griffiths et al., 1993: 1623).

Semi-structured ‘life story’ interviews
Once individuals had agreed to participate, they were interviewed using an in-depth semi structured ‘life story’ interview. Given the cross sectional nature of the study, and the fact that participants would be met only once, it was decided that a research instrument of this type would be the most efficient way of obtaining detailed, rich information regarding each participant’s drug use both now and in the past. The practicalities, advantages and disadvantages of using such interviews are much discussed (see e.g. Crow & Semmens, 2008) and so what follows is a brief discussion of the most pertinent issues for present purposes.

The interview was divided into two parts. The first consisted of demographic questions, using the same wording as the British Crime Survey (now the Crime Survey for England and Wales). The second part explored interviewees’ illegal drug careers, consisting of broad open-ended questions about past and present illegal drug use, and future intentions regarding drug use. The reasons behind and attitudes towards drug use were also explored. This latter part of the interview was loosely based on the ‘life story’ interviewing method (MacAdams, 1993) with some adaptations rendering it suitable for the purpose at hand. Such an approach has been used in drug research before, for instance by Hammersley and Dalgarno (2013). The semi-structured format was adopted to permit interviewees a great deal of freedom to discuss that which was of importance to them around the issue of their own drug use. It was also felt that such interviews would allow the participant greater control over what they chose to reveal about what is clearly a sensitive topic, not least due to its illegality; participants were taking a risk in speaking to me and affording them some control was one way of alleviating this risk and gaining trust. However, the interviews did actively but sensitively seek to ascertain how drug use had been incorporated into the participants’ lives at various stages.

Of course, interviews of any kind present a range of methodological difficulties. In the first place, as Maddux and Desmond suggest, the reliability of information gathered by interviews is closely linked to the ‘features of the interview itself. […] These include the place of the interview, the legal status of the subject, the feeling of the subject about giving information to the interviewer, the skill of the interviewer, and the procedure’ (1975: 93-4). Furthermore, interviews that concern an individual’s life history can be especially problematic. Indeed, it has been argued that researchers should not take voluntary self-presentations by interviewees at face value (Douglas, 1976).14* However, past research does suggest that drug users tend to provide reliable accounts of their behaviour (Ball, 1967; Maddux & Desmond, 1975; Weatherby et al., 1994; Rosenberg, 1997). The participants in this study did not at all seem to be deliberately misleading or obfuscatory, although clearly this assertion is merely based upon the researcher’s own unreliable subjective impressions and intuitions. Even if my gut feelings about the sincerity of the participants were correct, this still does little to address the issue of honest but mistaken recollections. Yet there is an even more fundamental point here. Because research participants who are discussing their own lives are not disinterested observers of those lives, there is a sense in which any self-presentation is always suggestive of the way an individual has at that moment in time come to view their own personal biography and lifecourse. This applies even to accounts which are somehow inaccurate. Life events are constantly reassessed depending upon one’s current situation; as Clausen argues, ‘the past tends to be reviewed in terms that make it congruent with present circumstances’ (1998: 196). As a result, we might argue that any self-presentation, even one which deliberately or otherwise contains errors of fact, can tell us at least something about the attitude of the participant to their history and to their present. In the end, life stories themselves are constructions, and the interviews that seek to elicit them are ‘social performances’ that can only ever result in partial accounts (Brannen, 2013).

The interview was designed to last approximately an hour; participants were giving up their time for free and so I was conscious not to take up too much of it. Most ended up taking about this amount of time, but a handful were shorter (the shortest, with a particularly reticent participant, being around 25 minutes) and many were longer (the longest clocking in at over 90 minutes). One telling sign of the duration of the project was that at the outset cassette tapes were used for the recordings as although digital devices were becoming increasingly commonplace it remained standard practice to use analogue recording machines. The switch to a far more convenient and user-friendly digital recorder was made part way through the project. Towards the end of the research process, to have remained with the tape recorder would have seemed wilfully perverse.

What happened?
At the outset of this project, when my PhD supervisor cheerily suggested I would find it easy enough to obtain 50 interviews in the data collection phase of the research, I was an inexperienced female researcher in my early twenties embarking on my first substantial fieldwork project. I had moved to the UK from my home country of Canada the previous year to undertake MA level studies and had decided to stay on to read for a PhD at the same institution. Aside from a couple of people who had also stayed on to read for a PhD, a couple of tutors and my housemates, I knew very few people in the UK. However, in what may have been a combination of ethnocentrism and plain innocence, my experiences in Canada had led me to believe there were sure to be plenty of ‘hidden’ older illegal drug users simply waiting for the opportunity to be interviewed regarding their proscribed pastime. Many of my acquaintances in my home town in western Canada, including those defined here as ‘older’, were enthusiastic and open users of illegal drugs. Cannabis in particular, though illegal, is something of a cultural norm in Canada, where it has been argued that some types of illegal drug use have become a form of ‘tolerable deviance’, technically illegal behaviour that is seldom officially challenged (Hathaway, 1997: 104). It was with this combination of youth, innocence and naiveté that I ventured out into ‘the field’.

Unfortunately, I encountered great difficulty in locating and interviewing potential participants. The first 24 months of the research were spent talking to contacts and distributing information about the research. I dropped the age limit from 50 to 40 years of age in a bid to attract more potential participants, on the basis that I had found some willing participants in their forties and justified by the fact that there is something of a ‘cliff edge’ beyond which little drugs research focusses on those aged 40 and over. This two year effort resulted in only a handful (nine) of initial interviews. Only two of these initial interviews actually led to a subsequent interview and could therefore be considered as ‘snowballs’, or at least the beginnings of snowballs. However, these subsequent interviews did not lead to any further interviews, meaning an abrupt end to the sampling chain. These eleven interviews formed the basis of my PhD (Waters, 2009).

It should be said at this point that it had quickly became quite clear that there were indeed many individuals who fulfilled the criteria for participation; illegal drug users over the age of 40 who are not in contact with the criminal justice authorities or treatment agencies regarding their use do exist, and they exist in some number. Over the entire course of the research, over 100 potential participants were identified, and some participants referred in their own interviews to others who fulfilled the criteria. Yet, in general, the interviewees were reluctant to pass on names and when they did, their friends and acquaintances were even less likely to agree to be interviewed by a stranger. Interestingly, some people were willing to be interviewed by their initial contact, but not by myself. This variant on ‘privileged access’ or ‘indigenous’ interviewing was not pursued, as noted above, due to a lack of willingness and suitability on the part of the potential interviewers, and a lack of resources on the part of the project. Ultimately, rather than utilising snowball sampling, it began to feel that the research was proceeding along the lines of what Groger et al. (1999: 830) termed ‘scrounging sampling’; a series of ‘desperate and continuing efforts, against mounting odds, to round out the collection of individuals with relevant types of experiences we know to exist but have not been able to capture’.

Such was the duration of the project that over its course, gradually my own personal circumstances began to change. In the end I was in a significantly different position to when I began. A decade on from the beginning of my PhD, and now employed as a full time academic, I was neither quite so young nor quite so Canadian. I had married a local and gained British citizenship. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this with regards to the research was that I had a larger network of colleagues, students, friends and indeed family in the UK. Although I had been awarded my PhD, I had not completely ruled out the possibility of returning to the project. I would occasionally be given the details of prospective participants, and I managed to complete two further interviews. However, these two interviews did not lead to any snowballs. Then, a student at my institution, who I came into contact with through extracurricular work unrelated to the topic of the research project, revealed that they were a member of a group campaigning for the legalisation of cannabis and knew a number of people who fit the criteria for the study. More importantly, her UK-wide group had a social media presence, something almost beyond comprehension when the study started. With this student acting as a go-between and providing a reference, I issued an advert on the groups’ social media pages, and within a few days I had 17 willing participants. I conducted interviews with these individuals within a relatively short period of time for a final sample of 30.

Why did this happen?
As the research progressed in the fitful manner described above, naturally I began to consider the reasons why this was the case. Although several things contributed to the problematic nature of the research (Waters, 2015), it did begin to seem that some of my own particulars were having an impact. Most notably, the intersecting factors of my age and nationality seemed to combine to dissuade many from partaking in the study, or at least compound the other reasons they may have had for not participating. As a PhD student I also had little professional standing or profile, and my cultural awareness of a country that I was still very much a foreigner in was decidedly limited. These factors were also often a hindrance during the interviews themselves. When I returned to the project following the completion of the PhD, progress was much smoother. Developments in my own biography seemed to contribute towards the relative success of the sample building and the process of interviewing, as the following will explore.

My age was particularly problematic when attempting to initiate the study and begin the process of sample building. When the study began, as noted above I was in my early twenties and as a result I was not part of the same peer group as the potential participants. The age gap may also have exacerbated issues of trustworthiness. Indeed, this has been raised in previous research in relation to snowball sampling (Wright et al., 1992). Potential interviewees may have been more likely to trust somebody closer to their own age, with greater experience of life and possibly even drug use. They are less likely to wish to participate in an interview conducted by somebody considerably younger than them, particularly on such a sensitive issue. However, when I returned to the study, I was in my mid-thirties and suddenly just a few years younger than the youngest potential participants. As well as being closer in age, I had managed to acquire a measure of respectability as I could point to the fact that I was a full time academic with a small but growing publication record. Indeed, the advert that I placed online contained a link to my profile on my institution’s website. This seemed to reassure potential participants that the research was being conducted for benign purposes and that I was who I claimed to be.

Several of my final group of participants told me that they had looked up some of my previous work online and had only been persuaded to participate having read it.The second aspect of my biography that seemed to cause problems in the first instance was the fact that I was a foreign national. There may well have been understandable suspicion on the part of a prospective interviewee as to why a foreigner would be interested in their engagement in an illegal activity. Furthermore, as a consequence of being a foreign national, I had no older family members or family friends living in the research area at the time. As a result access to the older age group was again limited, and I had nobody able to ‘vouch’ for me. Accessing participants through family or friends may have also increased the level of trust and confidence a potential interviewee enjoyed regarding the study. As I was limited to recruiting participants through academic contacts in the first phase of the research, the potential diversity of the sample was therefore limited as there was little variance in the seeds that I was able to utilise. As Griffiths et al. have argued in relation to academic studies of drug users, ‘middle-class drug users may be over represented in such studies as they often exist on the fringes of the research community and therefore provide roads of access into the behaviour by exploiting existing friendship networks’ (1993: 1618).15* By the end of the project, there had been significant changes in this regard. Whilst I was no longer a foreign national, having acquired British citizenship, it was the more subtle changes engendered by over a decade of life in the UK that were most significant in the process of sample building. I had built a much larger network of contacts, academic and otherwise, who were able to recommend potential participants and vouch for me. Indeed, as noted above I was able to add significantly to my sample with the help of a student. Furthermore, my Canadian accent is now much less pronounced. Friends and family back home often comment on how I sound increasingly English, and this undoubtedly helped in the initial exchanges when I was attempting to persuade an interested but cautious individual to participate, for it was one less thing to explain and one less obstacle to overcome.

The early stages of the interviews presented some significant cultural barriers that made effective conversations difficult. Here were people who had once identified as hippies, punks, ravers and so on, whose drug use had often blossomed in these subcultural movements, and who wished to talk about cultural phenomena that I, as a relatively young, middle class Canadian, had very little knowledge of. Frequently participants mentioned bands that I had never heard of, or referenced what I later discovered to be cultural staples, be they print publications, TV shows and so on. Often I failed to follow up interesting leads, as I simply had no idea what the participants were talking about. For example, one participant discussed the work he had carried out in the 1970s for the so called ‘alternative information centre’ movement, of which I had no knowledge whatsoever. He was also involved in what became Nicholas Saunders’ Alternative Guide to England and Wales, which I also had no knowledge of. Thus, a chance to find something out about the intersections of illegal drug use with this individual’s political activism was lost. Witness also this fairly typical exchange where a participant was discussing how he and his group of friends became punks in the late 1970s:

‘Participant: You’ve got to remember this was sort of ’77 and we were all into punk. So although we had dope, actually the drug of choice was speed. My mate’s older brother was the heroin addict and could get his hands on anything, so we used to just have speed to go to concerts and stuff, drinking. So actually at the time we used a lot more speed than dope, cause that was the drug we wanted.
Interviewer: How did you first get into speed?
Participant: Er, probably by reading about it in the NME and things.
Interviewer: The what?
Participant: The New Musical Express. I mean, I mean it was the sort of drug that was associated with punk music, so we wanted it.’

In addition, different slang terms for drugs were also an issue and I had to ask for clarification about exactly what substances were being discussed. This did not help in the building of rapport and trust which is vital if snowballing is to be a success. On a number of occasions I also failed to hide my incredulity that participants had smoked their cannabis with tobacco for many years, something that is almost unheard of in Canada. Yet, once again, by the end of the study, these issues were not quite so problematic. Living in the UK for over a decade, becoming steadily more immersed in the culture and au fait with local slang, and marrying an Englishman meant that aspects of life in the UK that were alien to me at the outset of the study were at least a little more familiar.

There were also more subtle issues that hindered some of the interviews in the early stages of the research. Earlier, we saw how it has been argued that interviews are ‘social performances’ that can only ever result in partial accounts (Brannen, 2013). Indeed, it has been argued that interviews are inherently collaborative (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009), or as Reismann (2008) suggests, ‘co-constructions’, and that what the interviewer brings to the table can be as important as what the interviewee says. Throughout the interviewing process, I was extremely conscious of how difficult it had been to recruit each and every participant, and how wary the participants often were of openly discussing their illegal hobby. As a result, and somewhat unconsciously, I generally started the interviews ‘gently’, not wishing to upset my participants. Yet by treading carefully in this way, in some of the interviews there was a distinct lack of energy and it was difficult to get the participants to open up. Trust was often slow to build, which obviously did not assist the process of snowballing. Upon listening to the recordings of the interviews I often seemed shy and standoffish at the beginning of interviews. Compounding this were the aforementioned cultural barriers (for instance, the use of different slang terms for the same drugs), which made trust and confidence even more difficult to build up. Yet once again, by the end of the study, these issues were far less prominent. I was older, more experienced and confident, and with a little more in common with the participants than before. No longer a PhD student embarking on my first tentative steps into research, I was now in possession of a doctorate and in reasonably secure employment. In addition, by this stage I was conducting the research purely out of intellectual curiosity. There was no funding body or sponsor to please and little pressure on the work as there had been when the interviews were conducted to form the data collection component of my PhD. With comparatively little riding on the work, the interviews seemed more like an opportunity to enjoy a conversation with an interesting individual, a release of sorts from the ‘day job’. This undoubtedly made them proceed more smoothly.16*

Autoethnographic lessons about the target population
As Wakeman has forcefully argued, ‘analytic autoethnography is not an exercise in narcissistic self-absorbed reflection. […] It is a method by which further consideration of emotions, biography and their intersections through research can enhance understandings of any given subject’. Wakeman suggests that the key question autoethnography should be directed towards is ‘what can the intersections of field experience, biography and emotions reveal about the subject under investigation’ (2014: 709). Three things about my target population are immediately apparent on the basis of my own autoethnography.

Firstly, it is clear that in a project of this nature, there are significant barriers to individuals being willing to participate even before any biographical characteristics of the researcher are taken into account. People were being asked to talk openly about something that they normally keep well hidden, and something that is illegal. Hidden illegal drug users are a potentially vulnerable group who through any disclosure of their illegal activity open themselves up to potentially serious consequences. However my own biography likely hardened these attitudes. If some reticence to participate was both expected and unremarkable, when faced with a stranger with no track record of research, much younger than them, and from a different country, this reticence often turned into a firm refusal to participate. I was told several times by fellow academics that it should be very easy to build a sample of hidden older drug users, and that they knew several who fitted the criteria. Yet time and again, such people refused to participate. One or two potential participants were actually affronted that they had been referred to me in the first place, even where the referrer had been used as the ‘go between’. The desire of hidden older drug users to remain well ‘hidden’ was very strong indeed.

Secondly, something else that became clear as the research progressed in light of my own biography was that this is a group whose drug use is intimately bound up with a wider cultural milieu, which was distinctly outside of my realm of experience. Interviewees mentioned or discussed a range of cultural products, including music, TV shows and films, and many discussed whole ‘subcultural’ movements such a hippy, northern soul, punk and acid house. The connections between these cultural forms and the participants’ illegal drug use were clearly significant but often understated and merely hinted at in passing. I lacked the shared language and understandings to probe these links as deeply as I would have wished. However, on the other hand it is debateable whether an older, native researcher would have seen this in the stark terms I was forced to. Previous research has suggested that snowball sampling has worked well in instances where the researcher is part of the group being studied (Browne, 2005; Duncan & Edwards, 1999). Yet, in this instance, being an ‘outsider’ was of value in that the assumptions and reference points of the participants were novel to me and therefore very easy to see.

Thirdly, both as I attempted to construct the sample and during the course of the interviews themselves, it became abundantly clear that illegal drug was seen as a completely routine and unremarkable part of life for my participants. Potential participants could not understand why I wished to speak to them regarding their drug use, and during interviews it soon became plain that being an illegal drug user, for the overwhelming majority of the participants, was not part of their ‘master status’ (Hughes, 1945; Lloyd, 2010). This resonated with the earlier findings of Pearson (2001), whose ethnographic work on ‘normal’ drug use featured people aged from the early thirties to the mid-fifties: ‘A crucial feature of these men’s lives (and those of their wives, partners and girlfriends) is that they did not think of themselves as ‘drug users’ – it is merely something that they do, or do not do, as an ancillary to other aspects of their lives, whether work or leisure – and who only rarely, if ever, gather together for the purpose of consuming drugs. This was not a ‘drug subculture ‘ in which drugs were a central feature of people’s lives; rather these were people for whom drug use was a peripheral but ‘normal ‘ aspect of life’ (Pearson, 2001: 173). The participants were openly incredulous that somebody would be interested in their drug use, and this incredulity was heightened because I was not part of the same peer group, but a younger, foreign researcher. They were bemused that somebody who was, to them, an ‘outsider’, would be interested in what they regarded as a pretty insignificant part of their life.

Conclusion
This article builds on the blossoming literature on autoethnography and the impact of researcher biography in criminology. It has detailed the difficulties experienced in recruiting and interviewing ‘hidden’ older illegal drug users by a younger, inexperienced, foreign researcher. The snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews utilised by the research were compromised by these facts of my own biography. Yet the difficulties that I experienced in these regards revealed something about the nature of the group under study, namely their reticence to be too revealing to an ‘outsider’ about their illegal pastime, the manner in which their illegal drug use took place in a specific cultural milieu which was figuratively and literally foreign to me, and the extent to which they saw their drug use as being an unremarkable and normal part of their life. Whilst these insights did not come about solely because of my biographical characteristics, those characteristics made it easier to detect the evidence for them. Thus, we can agree with Wakeman that ‘the relationship between the researcher and the researched [is] of significant potential regarding the ways in which we come to know our subjects’ (2014: 719). Yet that was not the whole story. The long duration of the project covered changes in my own life as I grew older and over time this subtly altered my relationship with potential research subjects. By the end of the project, I was more experienced as a researcher and an academic, I had developed a greater network of contacts and acquaintances in the UK, and I had become more culturally attuned. This not only helped me to surmount some of my earlier difficulties in the sample building and data collection phases of the research, but it also brought home to me precisely why the going had been so tough at the outset of the project, and concomitantly sharpened my appreciation of the lessons I had learned about my research subjects through my earlier difficulties. Through my early failures I had paradoxically come to know something of my research participants, a fact that I only truly realised once I had experienced a little more success. This suggests an additional dimension to criminology’s nascent relationship with autoethnography, which thus far has centred on the claim that researcher biography can significantly impact upon the research process: The impact of evolving researcher biography on research studies should also not be underestimated. The process of personal change that an individual researcher might experience – even within the bounds of a single study – may potentially shift the relationship between researcher and researched in subtle ways that can contribute to a deeper understanding of those subjects.

12* For many academics, uncomfortable in the limelight, this perfectly suits their disposition. Sparks (2002) and Jewkes (2011) have both recounted their reluctance to engage in writings that may have come across as self-absorbed or narcissistic. Of course it is also often defensible to relegate oneself to the margins; Crewe (2009: 488) was reluctant to place himself near the centre of his ethnography, ‘not because my identity was irrelevant to the study, but because my identity was not what the study was about’. Thus it is important to keep in mind that the central principle behind ‘analytic autoethnography’ is not to foreground oneself for the sake of it, but to consider how ‘emotions, biography, and their intersections through research can enhance understandings of any given subject’ (Wakeman, 2014: 709).

13* For a detailed discussion of snowball sampling and it variants, see Waters (2015).

14* To go beyond an unquestioning acceptance of what an interviewee says can in fact be vital in attempting to draw something of value from this type of research. As Hammersley and Dalgarno have suggested ‘a common misapprehension about qualitative research is that it cannot address issues of cause and effect. Qualitative research can address cause and effect, but it does so by using a structural logic in the data analysis, not by statistical or other comparisons. Part of this logic is not to accept people’s stories at face value, but to analyse them systematically by coding what is said, to identify interrelated issues and themes that were not necessarily apparent to the participants themselves’ (2013: 22).

15* Not only can this make it difficult to generalise findings, but it also tends to over–emphasise the cohesiveness of the group under study (Griffiths et al., 1993; Atkinson & Flint, 2001) whilst simultaneously overlooking isolated individuals who are not connected to networks, even where those individuals possess the desired characteristics (Van Meter, 1990).

16* In an environment where the ‘impact’ of research is foregrounded and its presentation tends to suggest rigorous, careful planning and execution, it is not only difficult to admit to weaknesses in the data collection during the early phase of the study, but it is also surprisingly difficult to relate how I continued the research study largely down to personal interest and inquisitiveness, and had no real idea where the research would lead.

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Published	15/03/2016
Type	Article
Author(s)	Paul Senior, Dave Ward, Lol Burke, Charlotte Knight, Michael Teague, Tim Chapman, Jane Dominey, Jake Phillips, Anne Worrall, Anthony Goodman
Corresponding Authors
DOA
DOI

At the ‘conversation with Paul Senior’ event in January 2016 at Kendal the group had to go back to first principles to test out a basic proposition – whether probation, however it is defined, has a place in 21st century responses to crime and any societal attempts to rehabilitate, reform, reintegrate and/or restore offenders back into communities. If we could agree the core principles of what constitutes ‘probation’ and also understand and articulate the boundary issues, would most societies driven by human rights and equality of opportunity for all its citizens inevitably seek to create some form of probation? This was the proposition. This has been seen to happen for instance in recent years in Eastern Europe where the limitations of a penal system based just on imprisonment has led to the creation of services in the community akin to probation. Or is an opposite proposition equally possible that there is nothing universal about probation and we are seeing its death knell in the UK? The changes wrought by Transforming Rehabilitation have suggested that the very future of probation is at risk. Commentators have talked about the death knell of probation (Senior, 2014); questions of legitimacy attendant upon privatisation (Deering & Feilzer, 2015); or the most radical change since it was introduced a little over a century ago (Newburn, 2013). This is the core question at the heart of this paper, is there a future for probation and, if so, what defines its essence?

Introduction
The Kendal group decided that we should seek to identify what constituted the essence of probation as a marker towards articulating what probation at its core might look like and where its boundaries with other activities lay. We were able to use the experience of the group from many years of probation engagement but also many different reflections of the probation world going back to the 1970s. We also benefited from experience that people brought from outside the world of probation, including youth work and social work. This was no consensus forum and each contributor brought their own insights and perspectives. We were reminded of an article written in the mid-1970s by David Millard, probably in Social Work Today, aspects of which were repeated in Millard (1982). Millard talked about why he thought probation existed and he said, from a sentencer’s point of view, that it existed because it occupied an area of uncertainty, that sentencers get a number of situations in which they are required to sentence and they do not quite know what to do: they could send to prison, they could put on probation, they could do other things, and probation has always flourished, as it were, in that area of uncertainty.

‘Experientially, the probation officer carries the dilemma within his role and in this way the probation order institutionalizes the moral dilemma of the court.’ (Millard, 1982:292)

We took that as our starting point and sought to identify whether we could shape the probation ideal that flourishes in that area of uncertainty, delineate what bounded it and where it linked to other systems and, thus, inductively work our way towards the essence of probation. This is the journey of this article.

Probation’s potential targets are variously called clients, probationers, offenders and, more commonly now, service users though other less helpful descriptions abound too. The world of probation operates in and around four major systems of social organisation – the correctional system, the social welfare system, the treatment system and the community. These systems exist in various formations in all western social democratic societies and many other jurisdictions – Japan, Latin America, South-east Asia and Africa. For our purposes a brief outline only is needed.

The correctional system is composed of the key law enforcement agencies. Given the centrality of prison in modern legal systems they occupy a vital holding environment in this system. The prison is serviced by the police who arrest and process those who commit offences and the courts and legal apparatus which processes and sentences them. Prisons have not always been at the centre of penal policy but in neoliberal societies they have come to occupy a key mechanism of social control and numbers incarcerated have grown rapidly over the past two decades when, paradoxically, crime itself has been reducing. The similar growth of community sanctions has not slowed the prisonisation of society, meaning that increasing numbers are subject to varying degrees of law enforcement both in and outside prison. These key agencies use a considerable proportion of the available budgets for law enforcement and justice and, before the fiscal crisis stopped this, had always grown at the behest of eager governments driven by law and order rhetoric. This is well documented (Garland, 2002).

The social welfare system is really an amalgam of a range of welfare organisations which together and in varying degrees in different societies, support individuals as they seek to carve out a life for themselves and their families in modern communities. It would include housing provision, work opportunities, benefits support, education and training and welfare support agencies some of which are provided by the voluntary and community sector and increasingly by the private sector – especially housing. The undermining of universal welfare provision over the last four decades can be linked with the emergence of a decidedly individualistic, consumer focused culture. Welfare has been under attack in neoliberal societies and provisions have been subject to cuts and higher thresholds to access in concert with austerity policies and neoliberal thinking.

The treatment system revolves around health and counselling systems for both mental and physical health issues and services for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Such services are often delivered by voluntary agencies too alongside or in addition to NHS services. Treatment systems and programmes for mental health, for drugs and alcohol and physical health problems are universal provisions to which all members of the community have, in theory, equal access. Fiscal challenges limit this universal accessibility and the lesser eligible, often deemed less deserving, struggle to get the treatment services they might need and mental health services are even less well-resourced than other aspects of the NHS, thus making access particularly challenging. Those in conflict with the law are often amongst the least deserving and hence least eligible. In addition the resources available are shrinking and this means those on the margins miss out because of a lack of provision of services or lack of money to access limited provision.

The community houses (though not always literally so) everyone who is not separated or excluded by virtue either of imprisonment, immigration centre or a secure treatment facility. A community allows its inhabitants free movement and in this sense probation approved premises with curfews are a limited form of freedom as are forms of house arrest via electronic monitoring. The community contains therefore at any one time a variety of individuals, some of whom may have been in trouble with the law, or victims of criminal offences, who may also be drawn from the offender population. Community organisations support individuals through their lives and some are dedicated to supporting particular groups, though their prevalence will vary according to the amount of funding available.

There is also informal support provided by individuals, be they family members, neighbours, work colleagues or altruistic people who may or may not be associated with more formally constituted organisations. Again, the availability of such support, much trumpeted by the neoliberal constituency, will vary according to macro or personal economic circumstances and, indeed, demographic changes. These changes, on the one hand, have created a pool of volunteers and informal carers among the increasing numbers of active retirees but, on the other, an increasingly resource demanding and politically influential ageing population, requiring support over a lengthening period of deteriorating fitness and self-sufficiency.
An example of the sort of community support service which has had a chequered history amongst the ebbs and flows of economic circumstances and social policy priorities are youth services. So, although communities seek to provide universal services, the ability of lesser eligible individuals to access them varies over time and at times of economic constraint they are likely to be at the bottom of any criteria for help. It has got harder for communities to offer support and informal supervision to people in trouble, including offenders and their families (Fitzgibbon, 2011).

The four systems can be represented thus:

Figure 1: The four major systems

Such a separation of services is a heuristic device which differentiates each system to illustrate the prime focus of their endeavours, be it law enforcement, welfare support, treatment or community integration. These systems are, in essence, separate ‘fields’ which interact and overlap – in the Bourdieusian sense (Thomson, 2012). In practice such systems overlap in their purposes and share actual space though this overlap is often difficult to manage. Consider the example of mental health services which operate in correctional services, or work opportunities for offenders, or young offenders within youth services. In practice these systems also contribute to isolating individuals who need to access multiple systems but for whom their lesser eligible status makes it problematic for them to get reasonable help.

The focus of this paper is individuals in conflict with the law who have been sentenced by the court to forms of community or, if imprisoned, post custody supervision and this is the core arena of probation. Such services used to be easy to identify as just another public service (at least from 1907 until 2014) although, of course, a number of services were provided by the voluntary sector in the mid-20th century. The capture of probation work by the public sector was not complete until the 1960s. However since 2014, through government reforms, such services are now spread over a plurality of agencies in the public, private and voluntary sectors. This plurality makes it more difficult to delineate which services support the probation ideal and which stand on or inside the thresholds of other systems.

If the diagram below was truly dynamic the overlapping elements would be seen to change over time as one of the major systems gains ascendancy. So, a law enforcement approach driven by ‘law and order rhetoric’ has become increasingly part of the probation offer with enforcement and risk management assuming greater prominence. In the 1970s community-based practices were more popular amongst probation practitioners. In the 1980s probation had more engagement in welfare rights issues and appointed workers within the agency to support this orientation as it did employment officers and accommodation officers. The overlaps with the treatment world have been particularly difficult as the two independent systems of health and criminal justice vie for supremacy. There have been examples of joint projects but the boundary issues shift constantly. The sometimes tense relationship of CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) with correctional practice in Youth Offending Teams is a case in point. The paper will return to the boundary issues below.

What the diagram seeks to do (Figure 2 below) is extract those elements which over generations have provided the core of probation practice and thus are not simply fleeting aspects of probation at the edge. These elements have always had a presence and demand a permanent place at the table of probation, effectively defining the essence of probation. A detailed exploration of each element is now warranted.

Support and enable through relational co-production (a contemporary reframing of advise, assist and befriend)
Though the words advise, assist and befriend, have an old fashioned and outdated feel to them they have been reproduced here as they represent a dimension of probation practice which has had universal appeal. Each generation will reinvent their own description of these tasks but if engagement with individuals is at the heart of the probation enterprise then such epithets surely are always there. Advise may now be replaced with terms such as guidance, counselling, support and other similar suggestions but surely at the heart of any engagement is this essential offer. This is part of the implicit contract with the service user and can be offered at many points of the supervisory engagement. It can be as simple as advice on completing applications for welfare benefits or forms of counselling which can be intense and life changing.

Assist is a word which implies that the nature of the probation engagement is a shared and enabling one. Understanding and working with the service user’s description of their problems and issues is at the heart of supporting meaningful change. Co-production of services, highlighted by desistance ideas, is at the heart of good practice (Weaver, 2016). Service users have to be ready and motivated for change and, when they are ready, probation workers must be able to enable change, create a sense of direction and do so in a pro-social and enabling manner. Such assistance can be offered along a continuum from practical help to personal therapeutic change with the core objective being to help the service user achieve internal control over their actions. Thus, working alongside the service user and supporting their change process through the accumulated knowledge and expertise that an experienced and qualified probation practitioner brings, distinguishes the probation relationship from one with a volunteer or lay person. It requires a high degree of skill to assist in ways which the service user will find acceptable.

Figure 2: The essence of probation and its boundary markers

Befriending may seem a task which can be accomplished by anyone in the community. It is true that, in itself, it can be no more than the offer of friendship. What distinguishes befriending in the professional relationship is that having a positive regard for the individual is harnessed to create meaningful change. Without a good relationship it is difficult to begin the process of change. The importance of the relationship has in recent years been regaining prominence in discussions of supervision processes. The work of the Offender Engagement Project was at the heart of this re-focusing on relationships. (Shapland et al., 2012) The centrality of a relationship is a common denominator in desistance research (Maruna & Immarigeon, 2004) which addresses the importance of this role and the shared endeavour with service users, what we term here as relational co-production. So, for many on probation, befriending is experienced in itself as a sense that someone ‘believes in them’ enough to take time to help them. The real challenge is to achieve this engagement in the context of an involuntary relationship.

Advise, assist and befriend reframed with the right language for the 21st century – support, enable and relational co-production – are together more than the sum of the parts. These are aspects of a professional relationship which is offered to the service user as a basis for help and to support pathways to desistance through improving their personal, social and economic circumstances. Relentless support that people need to stay on track and to overcome adversity and setbacks should be available. It is about enabling survival through a relationship formed by an alliance with people based upon respect, support and accountability. These skills have always been at the core of training and skills development and instill in the profession of probation the importance of education and training. This relationship should not be an exclusive one and the brokerage role within it is important. Brokerage entails recognising that aspects of change can be supported by other organisations and by other people and individual probation practitioners can use their skills to promote the engagement of others.

Bounded by values and ethics including diversity and human rights
The discussants in Kendal believed strongly that probation is a profession. Thus an essential requirement is the possession of a set of values and ethical behaviours which shape the direction of travel and determine how to make defensible decision making. It helps too in deciding boundary issues as to what is acceptable as part of professional activity. The diagrams point to overlap areas across the four organising systems and it is these boundary issues which can become ethical dilemmas. Given the complexity of what constitutes probation there are no easy answers and the focus of probation at any one time will change according to the debates of that era. Community Service for all its change of name has always been at the boundary edge with local communities which provide the unpaid work. In its early years in mid 1970s some saw it as the cutting edge of radical practice whilst others regarded it as incompatible with the core values of the service. These disputes can be seen in the last thirty years over such issues as the role of public protection, risk management and assessment, enforcement of conditions in orders, electronic monitoring, private vs. public delivery and many more.

A robust value base for the probation profession allows individuals to evaluate whether any enforced changes are consistent with that value base and can inform ethical decision making. At no time in the history of probation, as the boundaries are being extended and distorted subject to changing governmental demands, has the importance of this value base been more essential. It is instructive that the first major policy paper produced by the newly formed Probation Institute was its Code of Ethics and becoming a member of this organisation requires adherence to this set of guiding principles. In summary they are repeated below.

It is a complex area and there have been disputes over time (Williams, 1994; Cowburn et al., 2013) and ethics has rightly expanded to incorporate boundary issues over diversity, anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practices and more recently human rights. In recent years a rights-based approach (Robinson, 2011) has complemented a values orientation by providing an agenda to deal with clashes such as the rights of offenders over victims, and provides ways of accommodating differences of perspective. This challenges the idea that rights for offenders means diminishing the rights of victims – i.e. that they are mutually exclusive rights. It recognises that offenders can also be victims making a rights-based approach complex and multi-faceted. This will be particularly vital at the boundaries of the probation profession. In dealing with crime and its aftermath there are always conflicts of rights and making informed decisions demands understanding of the role and impact of competing human rights.

It is relevant to note that the newly proposed training vocational qualifications for probation officers puts as a core theme underpinning all six modules – demonstrating professional ethics, values and practices (Community Justice Learning, 2016).

Reflective practitioners
At the heart of dealing with individuals with multiple and complex problems is the capacity to interpret and understand the particular ways in which such difficulties are manifest in any one individual. To do this you can draw on the techniques, skills and knowledge which a qualification might bring but it is more than a simple match between theory and practice. The ‘messiness of practice’ is at the heart of professional practice. For routine problems, taught techniques can work but in the real world where problems may appear much more intractable and, reflecting the uniqueness of every person, never repeating the same form or instance, the capacity to learn how to intervene does not simply come from experience or the possession of a toolkit for good practice. It comes from the capacity to reflect. Donald Schon puts it thus:

‘In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing “messes” incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern.’ (Schon, 1983:42)

This capacity has to be nurtured and involves training and education to achieve a state which differentiates the reflective practitioner from those who simply carry out agreed tasks. It is often seen as a lifelong process and in this regard the need for education and development beyond the threshold of the initial qualification of probation officer is important. The downgrading and lack of attention given to post qualifying and advanced practice in probation since the millennium weakens practice competence and produces larger numbers of workers who work well with routine repeatable tasks but less so where practice is complex, multi-faceted and requires critical understanding. Some of this is reflected in unhelpful changes to basic qualifying training and in the reallocation of tasks from one grade of worker to another as currently witnessed in E3 and some CRC models of practice. Deprofessionalising the probation profession, which many have argued is a potential consequence of the recent bifurcation of probation, and the routinisation of practice, will ultimately be damaging to the achievement of high quality practice. It is arguable too that this process of deprofessionalisation has long been operative (Oldfield, 1994). This process will, in turn, reduce the ability of agencies to achieve substantive success with their service users.

Clear occupational culture
Elsewhere in this volume there is an in depth discussion of occupational culture (see Burke et al., 2016). The purpose here, in having it as part of the core aspects of probation practice, is to focus on the transformative capacity of culture. This is particularly vital at a time when new organisational arrangements are playing havoc with that practice wisdom which passes across a profession as new members become acculturalised into its work. There are three risks to the continuance of an identifiable probation culture:

• The bifurcation of organisational responsibility
• The loss of experienced, qualified staff
• The need for professional leadership.

Bifurcation into the NPS and CRCs and a plethora of Tier 2 and Tier 3 organisations (Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers are likely to be made up principally of voluntary and community sector organisations. They will be sub contracted or grant funded directly by Tier 1 providers, the CRC owners and the NPS which has split organisational responsibility for probation delivery. Each organisation has begun to develop different approaches to the task of community and post-custody supervision. Practice changes all the time but is traditionally bounded by cross-area interaction via the sharing of knowledge and, traditionally in England and Wales, by a single organisational arrangement. In the pseudo-competitive environment of present day probation, the sharing of knowledge is less likely to take place as individual agencies look to commercial advantage. This weakens the transferable knowledge which was possible in a single shared occupational environment.

The transfer of knowledge typically emerges via individual practitioners across agency settings. Researchers often pick up this knowledge transfer and aid dissemination. Research on Integrated Offender Management showed how, by the sharing of models, very similar structures were created across the country (Senior et al., 2011) and there was a vibrant knowledge exchange programme initiated by the Home Office to support such sharing (see E-learning Platform for IOM accessed at http://cjp.org.uk/iom-elearning/). As staff leave or move to new roles outside the probation world, continuity in practice is weakened. This has been particularly evident since TR as staff redundancy allied to low morale, and staff exit from this work altogether, has weakened the core of probation staff (Kirton & Guillaume, 2015) and by default weakens the knowledge exchange process. Knowledge transfer also takes place through education and training. This is potentially weakened by the splitting of organisational authority as many of the CRCs may choose to produce their own training programmes and this could instill different values, skills and knowledge.

Elsewhere in this volume a Thought Piece discusses the somewhat careless way probation has treated its professional leadership (see Senior, 2016). Once as farce (the 2001 creation of NPS mark 1) and once as tragedy (the 2015 creation of NPS mark 2) leaders have left probation en masse thus, at a stroke, losing the sort of leadership which could ensure that probation norms and values could be transferred into new arrangements. There is thus a potential void in this aspect of practice. NAPO has long had professional association credentials and first ACOP and then the PCA tried to deliver this for managers as did the PBA, then PA, for Chief Officers and lay members of Probation Service Committees and, latterly, Probation Trust Boards. But whilst there has been discussion about creating a probation body exclusively designed to maintain and deliver the profession of probation, until recently, such an organisation had not been developed. The Probation Institute (PI) is dedicated to achieve this role and came into being at a most difficult time in the history of probation (see Worrall in this edition for more discussion of the PI). Whilst its task is extremely difficult and there are pockets of opposition from across the range of probation commentators and organisations, it has the capacity and organisational independence to provide the continuity in which a probation occupational culture can survive and prosper.

Community base
Probation is essentially delivered at a local community level, whatever the organisational arrangements of the managing agency. Dealing with an individual court order takes place in the community where the service user lives and operates within the nexus of family and community relationships through which the service user engages. (Bottoms, 2008) The retreat from community to office in the 1990s was greeted with regret by many commentators. The many community based initiatives which had proliferated have been documented elsewhere (Senior, 2013) but, at the heart of good practice, was working alongside service users in ‘co-production’ and this is achieved the more probation is integrated into its local communities. Even initiatives like Integrated Offender Management draw on community engagement concepts.

The clear goal of intervention is the reintegration of offenders in the community, however defined. This suggests that a locally relevant and connected organisation can contribute to this goal. This was at the heart of the Community Safety Partnerships to which Probation became a statutory partner. At the same time, however, government change saw probation’s local connectedness run into decline. The demise of the county-based structure of Probation Trusts has meant that probation has lost opportunities for representation at local strategic and policy levels and, in reverse, it has closed off the opportunity for local involvement in the governance of the service itself. The capacity of large organisational arrangements to be relevant to community and to achieve integration is always a challenge for agencies. A National Probation Service based within NOMS/MoJ with a large divisional structure and eight CRC owners who are already amalgamating the 21 CRCs reduces reach and arguably relevance within local communities who now have no pathways for representation. Therefore a community base is essential to probation.

Established body of knowledge
It was one of the ironies of the TR consultation that an overwhelming majority of the 550 documents received during the consultation phase commented on the extensive knowledge base which was reflected in the work of the Probation Trusts. Indeed this knowledge base was summarised and released by the Ministry of Justice to support bidders for the contracts (MoJ Analytical Services, 2013). A recent boost has come from the many theories emerging from desistance research (McNeill & Weaver, 2010; Weaver & McNeill, 2010; Farrall & Calverley, 2005), the MoJ sponsored research into practice – The Offender Engagement Programme (Shapland et al., 2012) and supervisory schemes such as the Good Lives Model (Ward & Brown, 2004). These reflect a growing agreement about good practice. In specialist areas such as sex offenders, domestic violence, anger management and thinking skills etc., there are many validated programmes which have been working well with their target audiences. The ultimate paradox about the recent changes is that probation had developed a strong body of knowledge about good practice and, indeed, its then organisational structure, the Probation Trust, was well regarded and was seeking to integrate these ideas into practice. Why this was ignored is a scandal and worthy of its own analysis but is beyond the scope of this paper.

Emotionally literate practitioners
There is an article elsewhere in this volume (see Knight et al., 2016) which demonstrates how working with feelings is central to meaningful engagement with often difficult, challenging and disruptive people. They write:

‘An emotionally healthy workforce is likely to work more effectively and be more cost effective. So too, emotionally literate practice that treats offenders as humans and responds appropriately to their emotional needs is more likely to be effective.’ (Knight et al., 2016, in this issue)

For a long time this aspect of the work was accepted as central and at a time when senior probation officers acted as clinical supervisors support for this work was sought and usually given. Practice was inconsistent and did not always pay enough attention to issues of diversity and power and sometimes it was colleagues who provided this support. The Knight article points out how this has disappeared completely in modern management which focuses on meeting targets and procedures and less on supporting this difficult work. In this situation practitioners face emotional situations with only private or collegial support. Yet this is so much part of the day-to-day experience of practice that cannot be continued. If practice is routinised as if it follows simple patterns of behaviour, Probation will lose the skills to engage in the emotionally charged environment where much offending originates and where substantive change takes place.

Symbiotic relationship with the court
In the 1970s the probation officer was often regarded as a servant to the court or even an officer of the court. (Powell, 1985) Indeed the nature of the relationship was strong at an organisational level too, with magistrates forming the bulk of the Probation Committees which then also acted as the employers. With the separation of family court work to another agency, CAFCASS, (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service), the work of probation is entirely driven by criminal court disposals and the legal requirements which underpin that work. That close relationship changed as the diversity of roles probation now performs took probation into work with prisons, police, communities and health. Magistrates became only one source for membership of Probation Boards and eventually in some Boards being a magistrate was enough for disqualification (being told, by advocates in government of a quasi-market approach, that they carried a conflict of interest, being both ‘purchaser’ and ‘supplier’!). As court teams proliferated the immediate relationship between probation practitioners and the courts was weakened. Court services are now provided by the NOMS based National Probation Service and the more local CRCs have no direct engagement with the court system. Even the tasks underpinning court work have been subject to change and more are envisaged under the NPS E3 changes.

However the argument here is what is the essence of probation. All the work which Probation undertakes comes from the court setting originally, even if some comes indirectly following a prison sentence, thus we would argue the relationship is symbiotic, interdependent and reciprocal. As discussed at the outset of this paper, the courts often look to Probation to solve problems of uncertainty in the decision making process. We work with involuntary clients on court orders which mark out a key distinction characterising probation activity. So, even if an agency working with people in conflict with the law has no direct connection with the court, the work they are undertaking with that person stems from a court decision. This means that any worker working in this field has to know and understand the court and legal system in order to undertake the work. This has assumed knowledge in probation until the recent changes. The nature of that relationship between courts and probation has become increasingly strained over a long period and the TR changes adds to the potential dissonance between the two agencies but its importance to the nature of the work should not be underestimated.

Changing the ownership of probation services does not alter the nature of the relationship between the courts and probation practitioners and it remains a significant reference point in determining the essence of probation. It is a significant problem for TR that CRCs who rely on courts for their work only have a relationship with the court mediated by the NPS. It is also a problem that courts lack good understanding of CRCs and the resources they have or lack of them. The consequence of this is that despite probation being an offender-focused service working through court direction this relationship is currently extremely strained.

Boundary issues
Having identified those elements which are integral to an appreciation of the essence of probation it also helps to define their limits by the exploration of the boundary issues with the four social systems outlined at the beginning of this paper – correctional, social welfare, treatment and community. The diagram has highlighted some of those areas which engage probation but whose centrality to the essence of probation changes over time and place. A brief discussion of these boundary issues will illustrate this debate.

Correctional boundaries
It could be argued that this boundary has changed most dramatically since the beginning of the 1990s when ‘punishment in the community’ was first a political slogan and then over the next decade became an operational reality. The language of public protection, risk assessment and management and enforcement became the apparent centrepiece of probation work, as Paul Boateng famously intoned in introducing the 2000 National Standards, stating that probation is ‘…a law enforcement agency. It’s what we are. It’s what we do’ (Introduction of National Standards, 2000). This has been a challenge to an erstwhile social work trained profession that saw help, rehabilitation and reform as central goals. With the gradual acceptance of aspects of these imperatives, but partially informed by a more developed understanding of a rights-based approach which recognises the rights of victims and communities for protection, probation staff have grappled with this dimension. Electronic Monitoring at least in the UK has stayed outside the remit of public agencies like probation and police though this is not universally so across Europe (see Nellis, 2016, in this volume).

The worst excesses of this orientation can be seen in the USA and Teague talks cogently about some of these concerns in this issue (see Teague in this volume). It was instructive to see how the uncoupling of National Standards from practice in the Offender Engagement Programme stimulated a new focus on the probation relationship, on co-production with service users and on rehabilitation and the boundary was pushed back a little. This remains a contested area and marks a significant boundary dispute.

Social Welfare boundaries
Practice in the 1970s and 80s assumed the lesser eligible status of the probationer meant that they were unlikely to get their due access to welfare support. To counteract this many probation workers began to work on issues of accommodation, benefits, employability and related welfare tasks. Some workers continued to refer to the key agencies and often accompanied their service users to the DHSS to ensure they got their due amounts. Practice began to change as the public purse tightened and probation could no longer directly employ workers in these welfare areas. Three other changes also stimulated changing practices. As the New Labour obsession with targets and KPIs hit the main welfare agencies – JobCentre Plus, Supporting People, etc., they discovered they could hit their targets through focusing on offenders. The lesser eligible suddenly became very eligible due to their outsider status. Also probation had started to work in partnership and some of the services were simply transferred to the voluntary and community sector. The relationships were never easy and when budgets tightened again often the VCS agencies were the first to lose their new roles (Senior et al., 2004). Furthermore, there is a boundary issue about social welfare provision that is for everyone and provision that is special for offenders because they are deemed too risky for the universal provision.

This boundary does have a permeable status but the notion of brokerage probably captures the most used approach to access to welfare. It will be interesting to see what happens when a workfare agency such as Working Links redefines its CRC responsibilities to dovetail provision across both its rehabilitation and workfare dimensions.

Treatment boundaries
This is another tussle over boundary access driven by big players, the health and the criminal justice systems. The role of the Police and Crime Commissioners may be increasingly important as will be the Health and Well-being Boards. We can point to innovative projects where joint working produced good practices in mental health (Senior and Kinsella, 2014), drug counselling, alcohol programmes and the Health Trainers schemes (ICPR, 2011). But somehow they stand as exceptions rather than incorporated practices. We will focus on one example as illustrative. The London Probation/Together programme for Forensic Mental Health Practitioners has been working for 20 years. It draws on a mixture of funds, some health-related and some from criminal justice sources and its main purpose is to locate an advanced forensic practitioner in a probation office to do three things – advising court on sentencing, advice to probation staff and where appropriate direct intervention. The report on this project (Senior & Kinsella, 2014) highlights its continual fight for funds despite its evident success over 20 years of operation. It showcases joint working and has provided probation staff with high level support for mental health work. It has not been rolled out elsewhere and remains a peripheral resource particularly under new TR arrangements. This boundary can only be managed by dialogue, sharing of goods and mutual engagement with each other’s expertise – but it is rarely so easy in practice.

Community boundaries
It was highlighted earlier in this paper that a community base for probation is part of its essence but ways in which this boundary is maintained marks out how successful it is in achieving community reintegration for its service users. I have placed Restorative Justice (RJ) as a key boundary marker and many now would see this as fundamentally what probation represents. RJ has a long and somewhat chequered history in probation which goes back to the 1980s, though reparation and mediation were preferred terms then. At different times it has been lauded as the new way to manage probation and certainly the tenets of restoration and reintegration at its core would be part of the goal of probation interventions. However that promise has rarely been fulfilled.

In other jurisdictions such as New Zealand, the law has sought to integrate RJ thinking into legislative changes particularly for juvenile offenders and there have been similar attempts in England and Wales, again in youth justice and also in Northern Ireland. But research testing out its efficacy as a court measure has shown that it has tended to fall short. In undertaking some of that research it becomes clear that, whilst the outcomes of RJ are potentially beneficial to offenders, its core goal is not that but satisfaction for all participants particularly the victims. This makes it a key boundary issue and highlights why RJ has so far not been crucial to probation practice. Probation is an offender-focused service taking its lead from the court sentence, thus RJ travels across that boundary both ways.

As noted elsewhere in this volume ‘probation’ as a recognizable ‘brand’ retains both a cachet, in terms of the values and purposes discussed earlier, and, is a term with a tenacious hold in the public lexicon. At a community level, the organisers and members of local groups and organisations see themselves as continuing to engage with ‘probation’ – not with a CRC – to arrange the involvement of people who have transgressed the law in ‘community service’ – not ‘unpaid work’! Surveys show the public to be more favourable to rehabilitation and reintegration through community sentences than political rhetoric and tabloid media would have us believe though their overall views on penal matters remain mixed (Rao, 2015). At the community boundary there are positive indications that probation has some grasp of potential progressive purposes such as community engagement and Restorative Justice.

Discussion
There is a plethora of evidence confirming that incarceration is costly, ineffectual in reducing reoffending, and ultimately damaging to society’s cohesion (for example, Scott, 2013; Liebling & Maruna, 2011). When probation works, however, the lives of service users change for the better, the creation of future victims is prevented, and the whole community benefits (McNeill, Raynor & Trotter, 2012). It has become an essential component of our civic society and the key cornerstone of our community justice system. There is a clear danger that we tend to take for granted, understandably perhaps, given the long associations with probation of the Kendal group, the notion that probation is inherently a ‘good’ thing? The fact that we were able to spend several hours discussing what the essence was and still not come to full agreement demonstrates the difficulty of delineating the essence of probation. Probation seems to ‘suffer’ from a sense of liminality – unsure of its purpose, beholden to the institutions which it serves and vulnerable to ideologically driven reform. The increasing focus on punishment and technical control of offenders has led to ‘tough’, measurable and authoritarian approaches to work with offenders being seen as both inevitable and correct, despite their lack of any obvious indicators of success, though this assumes we understand what success is!

The argument presented in this paper is that probation operates in the empty spaces between four major social systems. The practice of probation cannot be understood as a specialist branch of correctional services, social welfare provision, health services or community provision. If it did not exist, it would be created to provide a means of balancing the need for rehabilitation and reintegration with the requirement to administer court orders and offer a level of public protection and reassurance. Inevitably the essence is marked not only by what exists within that space but also the degree to which probation overlaps each system creating boundary issues and disputes.

As life-long supporters of probation work it is tempting to assume boundary disputes are managed with a full recognition of human rights. As Canton (2009:67) has pointed out ‘community supervision can raise human rights questions of its own – and the zeal to reduce the numbers of people in prison should not mean that anything is acceptable so long as custody is avoided’. Recent research by Aebi (Aebi et al., 2015) has highlighted the fact that those countries that have the highest rates of imprisonment also have the greatest numbers on supervision and this has certainly been the case in England and Wales. Aebi’s work, therefore, opens the door to an interpretation of probation intervention as reflecting the overarching imperative of punitive crime control as much as, or even more so than, the twin drivers of social reintegration and rehabilitation. This has obvious implications for the equilibrium of the four systems outlined, in that it has bloated the ‘correctional’ at the expense of some of the other systems. However, while Aebi et al.’s work indicates that probation cannot be viewed as a simple alternative to imprisonment, it nevertheless provides evidence that those countries with the lowest incarceration rates (for example, Finland, Norway and Switzerland) are also those which make significant use of probation intervention.

This is further compounded by the people with whom probation works – those who are seen as less eligible than other more ‘deserving’ people in society who have not transgressed the norms of acceptable behaviour. In many respects, probation is ‘dirty work’ (Mawby & Worrall, 2013) but it serves a useful function in society, notwithstanding the argument that mass supervision is something to be concerned about. If it has that utility then at the heart of the essence outlined in this paper is a ‘softer’ approach involving the skills of emotional literacy (Knight, 2014) and relational co-production (Weaver, 2016) which enables service users to become co-workers in their own treatment plans – through dialogue unraveling the issues that are key to their offending and potential rehabilitation, developing their own inner controls and taking responsibility for change. The tasks that comprise probation work do not have to be undertaken by a specialist probation agency, although it is more straightforward when they are. The challenge is cementing that essence in a world of fragmented services, for-profit practice and competition driven secrecy.

Conclusion
The intention of this paper has been both to delineate what must be included in the essence of probation, drawing both on our own very varied vantage points over the past forty years and the research evidence available. It has been argued that boundaries between this ‘essence’ and the four social systems will vary over time, place and jurisdiction. There will always be disputes and debates as this defines the boundaries of probation in any community or, indeed, it poses the question whether something identifiable as probation still exists. This is clearly going to be challenging for all those who have a stake in developing effective, just and fair probation practices over the next few years.

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