Photo-elicitation in prison ethnography: Breaking the ice in the field and unpacking prison officers' use of force

Research papers on prisons have occasionally been illustrated with photographs. Yet rarely have visual methods been used critically in prison ethnography; image-making and images themselves have been used illustratively rather than as constitutive sites of knowledge production and, therefore, as objects to be interrogated in their own right by the researcher through, for example, participant collaboration. This paper focuses on the use of ‘photo-elicitation’ interviewing as a method for unpacking prison officers’ use of force. The discussion is based on an ethnography conducted inside an Italian custodial complex that hosts both a forensic psychiatric hospital and a prison. Prison officers, psychiatric staff and prisoners were invited to discuss a number of images produced by the researcher–in the wing where they were working and/or living–representing the use of force and violence, thereby helping the researcher to address what Joe Sim (2008: 187) calls an ‘inconvenient criminological truth’ and at the same time giving the participants a voice.