Unlocking Hard to Access Research Sites: Tales of researching powerful criminal justice institutions podcast transcript

Avery Moore Kloss  00:06

Hello and welcome to CRSP talk a podcast from the Center for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. I'm Avery Moore Kloss. On this podcast we talk about two things, research on security practices obviously, and the methodologies used to collect that research. On this episode, we're going to go a little outside of that scope to talk about something that is top of mind for many researchers in this space. And that's access. When working with institutions like police agencies and correctional facilities to conduct empirical research access to both information and research participants can get well complicated. This challenge can be particularly tricky and sometimes insurmountable for criminologists who want to conduct research on criminal justice and security institutions. It's well known that organizations such as the police, corrections and security agencies can be secretive, distrustful and occasionally hostile to critical lines of inquiry. In recent years, research access has become a particularly prominent concern amongst Canadian social scientists. Some scholars also lament what they see as the near impossibility of obtaining access to Criminal Justice institutions, or the unworkable restrictions that such organizations placed upon critical scholarship. But despite challenges a large body of empirical criminological research, both quantitative and qualitative, continues to be published, both internationally and domestically. And we have the pleasure of speaking to four researchers who are involved in that publishing, all with notable success in securing access to organizations that have traditionally been seen to be closed or hostile to academic research. Here is one of those researchers.

Sandra Bucerius  01:54

Hi, my name is Sandra Bucerius. I am a professor for sociology and criminology at the University of Alberta and I lead the Center for Criminological Research at U of A. I also lead the University of Alberta Prison Project, which is, I think, the largest qualitative and mixed methods study on Canadian prisons and life in Canadian prisons.

Avery Moore Kloss  02:22

Dr. Sandra Bucerius’s project the University of Alberta Prison Project was given an incredible amount of access, arguably more than any other study on criminal justice institutions in this country.

Sandra Bucerius 02:36

We have currently collected data in six provincial and federal prisons. I cannot name the province in which we are collecting the provincial data. But as for the federal prisons, they are all located in Alberta and the provincial prisons are also located in Western Canada. We have currently done more than 800 interviews with incarcerated people and also over 170 interviews with staff. And we are interested in different types of prison or different aspects of prison life. For example, the UAPP, as we call it, the University of Alberta Prison Project started out as a project in the provincial system to investigate whether prisons are spaces in which radicalization spreads and where radical prisoners find ways to recruit others for their purposes. But it quickly evolved into a project where we were also interested in people's general life experiences in prison. And as a consequence, we learned a lot about topics unrelated to radicalization, such as relationships between incarcerated people and correctional officers, docks in prisons, gangs, humor in prisons, life on segregation, but also our participants life and victimization histories, race relations, etc, etc.

Avery Moore Kloss  04:05

In Sandra's words, the University of Alberta Prison Project came together by coincidence, and that coincidence is also what led to the opening of doors in a way access came first. Sandra says she was not traditionally a prisoner punishment scholar until her appointment to the University of Alberta, when the Associate Dean of Research organized a meeting with the person in charge of the Solicitor General's office.

Sandra Bucerius 04:30

And so this person from the Solicitor General's Office asked me essentially point blank whether I would be interested in expanding my research into prisons. Now, I have to admit that I originally thought this might be somewhat of a joke, as I had heard many stories from, you know, other colleagues at other Canadian universities, but also at my own university, that research access to prisons is rather complicated in Canada. And indeed, I had also served on an a grad student committee just a couple of years prior to this, and I remembered the discussions on the committee where my colleagues just accepted it as fact that access to prison was impossible in the Canadian context. And so as someone who's who hasn't been trained in Canada, and I was rather unfamiliar with the Canadian discussions around prisons at the time, when I first got hired, I essentially simply accepted it as a fact as well that access is impossible. So when this person in that meeting made the suggestion to expand my research into the prisons, I simply stated, you know, I would like to, but it seems access is impossible in the Canadian context. And their reply was, well think about what you want to do, I can give you access.

Avery Moore Kloss  05:45

Sandra didn't act on that access until a few months after, when a student who wanted to study correctional officers asked her about gaining access. And that lead to an email back to the person from the Solicitor General's office.

Sandra Bucerius 05:59

I hit send on that email, and I walked to my classroom to start my lecture because I was teaching on that day, and wasn't even before my lecture had started, literally within five minutes of my email that this person had left me a voicemail saying, my office is very interested, call me back. And so I then started conversations with the Ministry and the research agreement that we ultimately signed was not just an agreement for my graduate student, but a large, much larger project, which then was led by me as the director of the University of the Alberta Prison Project, and Kevin Haggerty.

Avery Moore Kloss  06:39

The University of Alberta Prison Project studies prisons as a space of radicalization and attempts to capture the life experiences of prisoners. And in this case, the gatekeeper came to them.

Sandra Bucerius 06:50

So I think it's safe to say that we signed the most comprehensive research agreement in the Canadian context. And I think it was predominantly a coincidence in terms of having the right person who was interested in supporting research in that position at the time, when we were asking.

Avery Moore Kloss  07:12

Securing this amount of access with very limited barriers is not the usual story we hear from many security researchers. And it would be easy to say it's an anomaly. But for Sandra, it was a matter of being the right researcher in the right place at the right time.

Sandra Bucerius 07:29

I think criminal justice organizations and this person potentially in charge maybe was aware of the fact that I am always putting the data first. But that is speculation on my side, I actually ultimately do not know why that person was willing to give me access. I have never asked I do believe that it was to some extent anyways, luck to have the right person in the position that was able to provide us with access at the time that we ask, I should potentially say that, as we were signing this research agreement, we did not have any restrictions in terms of publishing the data that we were collecting. So that is excellent as well. And I think the general notion in Canada is that oftentimes criminal justice organizations will put restrictions on publication rights or veto rights, that was not the case for us.

Avery Moore Kloss  08:29

So what happens when access doesn't come so easy? It's well known that criminal justice organizations routinely operate with a set of assumptions about the value and risks of disseminating knowledge that are starkly at odds with standard views about academic freedom held by professors and graduate students. As a result, there can be challenges and barriers to securing research access to and working with criminal justice institutions. Sometimes, that means researchers are denied access to information and participants they seek. And other times it's a long and complicated dance between level of access and then how that access can be used. The University of Toronto's Dr. Beatrice Jauregui shared one example of her fight for access, and how access is very often layered. I'll let her introduce herself and her work

Beatrice Jauregui 09:21

My name is Beatrice Jauregui, I'm associate professor at the Center for criminology and sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. And I'm an anthropologist who studies security institutions in the main police and military institutions. I've done mostly ethnographic research with police institutions in former British colonies. Most of my fieldwork to date has been in northern India, where I've spent now almost two decades, trying to understand the worldview and everyday lives of police officers in Uttar Pradesh.

Avery Moore Kloss  10:12

For Beatrice gaining access has not been impossible, but it is challenging. She says her first experience with access came when she was doing PhD research in the early 2000s. She was trying to find people who would allow her to observe their everyday activities with police in Uttar Pradesh, it was difficult.

Beatrice Jauregui 10:30

My first challenge came with just getting research clearance from the Government of India, which almost didn't work. It was a, it was really difficult because, of course, the government doesn't want outsiders coming in, and perhaps finding out things that might be embarrassing, or make the state look bad. So it took a good year and a half. And indeed, some I think informal relationships, this was the first thing I learned was that informal relationships matter as much as if not more than having all of your ducks in a row in terms of documentation and papers and permissions and such. So I was actually initially denied research clearance at a pretty high level in the Government of India. And I actually don't know what exactly happened behind the scenes. But I know that I had some pretty influential scholars both in the US where I was doing my PhD. And also in India, I think, calling around on my behalf. And suddenly, it almost seems as if by magic. Two weeks after I received the denial of clearance, which was devastating, I thought I was going to have to you know, just completely redo my my project or start over. But only two weeks later, I received a phone call saying, okay, they've changed their mind, you now can get your research visa.

Avery Moore Kloss  12:06

Beatrice mentioned something here that I think you will notice is a theme in this discussion of access. Informal relationships matter, who you know, whose email you have, who is calling, on your behalf, are all pieces of the puzzle that often end in access. And then once you have access, relationships matter even more. The official stamp of approval from both the institution itself and a research ethics board doesn't necessarily mean you as a researcher immediately have access to the people and information you need. It's simply peeling one layer off the access onion. For Beatrice, she says once she was given clearance, and had made it to India, she had to build all new relationships to get the access she needed.

Beatrice Jauregui 12:52

You know, initially, I thought, well, I'll take a kind of top down approach, I'll go to, you know, the chief of the police in the state and, and just, you know, tell them about my project, show them my my visa and all my documents, my letters from the embassy, my clearance, and yeah, and then you know, hopefully that will, will work and I'll be able to gain access that way. And I spent about, I don't know, maybe three or four months trying that tact. I had a lot of meetings with a lot of top brass officials in air conditioned offices with big desks and a flurry of activity. And I found those not really going anywhere. They weren't really taking me very far. I mean, I was learning a lot. They were certainly valuable interactions. But, you know, what I really wanted was to just go to a kind of everyday police station and and observe the goings on there and talk to people and I was finding that, you know, I was struggling to get there. I was struggling to get that access. And eventually, after countless meetings, and, you know, not really getting anywhere i i met another scholar, a young scholar who just happened to have a family member who was a sub inspector and said, Well, you know, let me let me call up this, this family member. And he did and the next day I received an invitation to go to the station where this person actually just happened to be the station chief. And that was the beginning of my spending more than a year at really a rural police station on the outskirts of Lucknow, which is the capital of Uttar Pradesh.

Avery Moore Kloss  14:41

Beatrice's experience will sound familiar to many researchers who know that often building informal relationships can take you farther than formal requests for her U of T colleague Dr. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, that was one of the reasons he chose not to ask for official access to least forces while performing research with black police officers. Here's Akwasi.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 15:04

Hi, my name is Akwasi Owusu-Bempah. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow at Massey College. I was trained as a criminologist, my work examines mostly the intersections of race, crime and criminal justice and have a particular focus in the area of policing.

Avery Moore Kloss  15:24

Gaining access in different ways is something Akwasi says, is particularly interesting to him due to the nature of his research.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 15:32

My work often involves me trying to gain access to either individuals or forms of data, which are typically in or less accessible to researchers, so police officers to talk about sensitive issues, perhaps without the permission, or approval of their agencies and institutions, as well as disaggregated criminal justice data which the criminal justice system and criminal justice agencies often collect, but do not make public.

Avery Moore Kloss  16:00

As part of Akwasi’s PhD research, he sought to conduct interviews with Black male officers in the Greater Toronto Area, specifically Durham, York, Peel in Toronto, and the Ontario Provincial Police,

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 16:13

I was interested in how Black people and Black males in particular, perceive and experience the police. And I felt that I couldn't generate an adequate or a fulsome picture of the perceptions and experiences of Black men with the police without talking to Black male police officers in this is a group that has historically experienced marginalization within police agencies. So officers being subjected to various forms of discrimination and bias, as well as you know, hostilities at times from members of the public for being perceived as selling out. 

Avery Moore Kloss  16:49

And so Akwasi took a different approach to securing access than Sandra or Beatrice.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 16:54

Kind of high barrier to entry or number of obstacles in trying to secure approval from five different agencies, and then recruit officers and talk about something that was sensitive. So in the context of that work, I actually didn't seek approval from the institutions from whom I recruited their members, the University of Toronto, where I was studying, research ethics board agreed that providing I, you know, gave or told, potential research subjects, information, adequate information about the potential risks that they faced, in participating in the research, that I didn't need approval of their agencies to interview them, even though many of these agencies have requirements for their members to get approval to engage in work.

Avery Moore Kloss  17:40

Akwasi was able to make the case to his REB that the importance of the production of knowledge actually outweigh the need to officially request access. A request that he says he knew would hinder his ability to collect unbiased research.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 17:54

Given the politically charged nature of the subject matter, and the fact that these agencies had quite publicly, you know, denied that these problems exist, that the likelihood of me being able to access these individuals was relatively low, but the kind of potential impact of the research was was quite high. So, you know, again, the REB said, providing, you know, I had an informed consent, and I made potential research subjects fully aware of the professional and personal ramifications up to the point of, of course, you know, quite literally losing their jobs and their pensions and being ostracized from social circles.

Avery Moore Kloss  18:37

Akwasi says he was expecting more pushback than he got from the REB. The real challenge came later. We talked earlier about access being its own kind of onion. And if the first layer is gaining access to institution, the next layer is making connections with people inside the organization to try and collect interviews. In Akwasi’s case, he had to work to convince Black male officers to speak with him on sensitive subject matter without the express permission of their employer.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 19:06

I, you know, used a variety of methods to try and recruit officers, social networks, approaching them on the streets and the likes, and had, you know, fairly high levels of success with respect to the recruitment and access to those individuals. Now, when I say a fairly high level of success, I probably got nos from 50% or more of the people who I requested to interview for that research. I certainly had, you know, high levels of suspicion and skepticism, even amongst the officers that I was able to talk to, again, because I was talking about sensitive issues of or what were perceived to be sensitive issues of racial injustice in policing members of the public and as well as in their internal matters. So I had things like officers changing the locations of interviews just before we were set to meet in case they were worried about being surveilled, I had, you know, a lot of questions come in. And and people who I felt, you know, were not as forthcoming or who, you know, openly admitted that they didn't want to talk about certain issues or certain events during the course of those interviews,

Avery Moore Kloss  20:15

For Akwasi it was all about making connections, but also making the research experience meaningful for the participants.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 20:23

I was able to garner interest in the in the research by first having conversations with with individuals and potential research subjects officers that I didn't know. So you know, expressing an interest in policing generally, and people, especially officers who are sat, you know, on a paid duty assignment at a construction site or at a sports game often bored, wanting someone to talk to anyway, so I was able to strike up a pretty good conversation, you know, after expressing an interest in placing, talking about the work that I was doing, and seeing if they were interested in talking to me, but also, you know, making quite clear my knowledge about the difficulties experienced by Black officers. And I think for many individuals that I spoke to, they felt either a responsibility to tell the story of Black officers and Black people in policing. So, you know, there's a coda for blue wall of silence, difficulties, challenges and problems within policing, typically not made public by police officers. And I think it was a little different when dealing with issues of racial injustice. I think it was also quite cathartic. For many of them, the individuals involved, they hadn't necessarily had an opportunity to speak kind of broadly about their own experiences as Black police officers.

Avery Moore Kloss  21:37

In Beatrice Jauregui’s research on the police force in Uttar Pradesh, although she had been granted official access, she made similar efforts to make informal connections, to get that second layer of access to officers, despite her own barriers to this level of personal access.

Beatrice Jauregui 21:54

There are significant challenges just in terms of getting official permissions, there are also on a more, you know, on the on the ground level, challenges of being, you know, just visibly other. I'm a white woman from the US. I wanted to work in a space that was, you know, predominantly Indian men. So as you might imagine, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Beyond just the, you know, the difficulties of, you know, having everything officially approved. There was also of course, a number of issues related to, you know, my identity and how my positionality and how these, my interlocutors are my potential interlocutors, how they would see me and how they would think about me and what they would want to share with me or not, and what kinds of risks though that might impose? Yeah, that's, I think that's why in the end, I had to really draw on other kinds of relationships, you know, unofficial relationships of kinship or just other kinds of associations of trust, in order to eventually really gain the deep access that I was able to,

Avery Moore Kloss  23:25

For Beatrice, her access to officers came with what she described as, quote, fictive kinship, that had benefits and drawbacks.

Beatrice Jauregui 23:34

They would see me as, you know, a kind of daughter or niece or sister or, you know, you know, and this is very common, and not just in India, but you know, it's a way it's a way of relating, and this would mean that, you know, there were certain things that I was allowed, but they would also see me perhaps as someone that needed protecting, or, well, certainly, I could just never be one of the boys. Right. I mean, that was, that was clear. And so, you know, there were there were certain kinds of, of experiences that yeah, that I was never able to access. At the same time and again, this wasn't just because of my gender or you know, my my nationality or race or anything like that, but there are ways in which my, my very visible otherness or difference, I think, may have allowed a kind of access in terms of relationships that would not have been afforded to either someone, an Indian national or, or a male. For better or worse, perhaps, because, you know, maybe I just, I wasn't seen as a kind of like a threat or I wasn't seen as someone who had relationships with local power holders or influential people. Like sometimes I think they felt that they could speak freely with me or share things with me or or show me things that they might not have done with people that were more like them.

Avery Moore Kloss  25:15

Beatrice's ability to create space where officers felt comfortable speaking openly is something Dr. Sandra Bucerius from the University of Alberta Prison Project experienced as well. But with the added tightrope of having an interest in creating that same kind of space for prison staff, and inmates.

Sandra Bucerius 25:34

First of all, I think the most challenging thing about doing or the most challenging aspect of doing prison related research is to actually walk a line between staff who are essentially part of a system that they do not necessarily agree with either and they face lots of challenges every day, and then the incarcerated people and to struck a research team that is able to walk into a prison space without, you know, offending one or the other side. And to walk that line between those two sides on a day to day basis when we are actually in the prisons is really, really complicated. Because the problem with that is that you to easily forget that staff are also just part of an organization that they have very little say in and being rude to staff will make our research stay at a prison way more challenging.

Avery Moore Kloss  26:28

for Sandra because of the scope and size of her research. One of the tools her team used to walk that fine line was hiring the right research assistants. She said she searched for research assistants who were able to hear the stories of inmates without reacting to what they were hearing. To create that safe space Dr. Akwasi Uwusu-Bempah spoke about which can help make the research process more meaningful to interview participants.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 26:54

You will need to find research assistants who are able to meet anyone as a human being and see the human side independent of what that person may have done in terms of harm to others. We are also interviewing, you know, high profile sex offenders, for example. So you need the I need research assistants who are able to see the human side in a person independent of who it is independent of what that person may have done to others. And oftentimes conversations, you know, would lead to very, very deep conversations about victimization experiences and life experiences. And people would leave the interview saying, I have not talked about this with anyone in my life, or I haven't talked about it about this in I don't know how many years because obviously, prison life is dictated by the rules and informal rules that are often the, you know, case and shaping prison life on these units. So unfortunately, among incarcerated people, we can generalize, but many may not have deep conversations with other people while being incarcerated. And oftentimes the relationship between incarcerated people and staff are strained so they're not deep conversations happening either. So so the interviews were often the only space where people could talk about their personal lives and maybe traumatic experiences thoughts that they had in a in a very detailed manner, later on when we went to other prisons, because unfortunately, the criminal justice system is often a revolving door. So people get released, and they come back. We always went on to units where people already knew us. So when I would walk onto the unit and do my little spiel, someone would literally pipe up and say, Hey, I know them from this and that place, they're cool, you can talk to them. And so it was incarcerated people themselves who would start vouching for us which helped, particularly in the federal system, because we knew people on the units from the provincial system.

Avery Moore Kloss  29:11

For Sandra that was the third layer of the access onion, if you will, making connections, creating meaningful experiences, and then making more connections once earlier, participants felt compelled to vouch for them. To recruit correctional officers. She took a different approach.

Sandra Bucerius 29:28

It was much harder to gain access to the correctional officers who were a lot more suspicious. Potentially saw us on the side of the incarcerated people. I do. We do have an ex-correctional officer on our team, a graduate student who did most or not most but many of the interviews with the correctional officers. So there was a little bit of a natural rapport maybe, but did not interview the incarcerated populations and we sort of like divided that up so when we would interview the incarcerated populations, we wouldn't at the same time, in the same moment also interview collection officers obviously. So we divided the research team up.

Avery Moore Kloss  30:16

The ability to change tactics on the fly is something Carleton University researcher Dr. Dale Spencer says has served him well in his quest for access. Here's Dale.

Dale Spencer 30:26

Dale Spencer. I’m the faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair at Carleton University. I'm in the department of law and legal studies, I conduct research on manifold forms of violence and organizational and institutional responses to violence. My specific area in relation to criminal justice is I primarily look at the commission of and criminal justice responses to sexual violence and sex crimes. So I would say that the number one thing is flexibility. We often find ourselves in situations where we say I want to study X in the following way. So I want to be able to do interviews with every member of an organization around say, you know, sexual violence in my case, you know, I want to be able to go into a given police service and everybody in there. Well, the reality is, is that when you're within those organizations, more often than not people are extremely busy, some of which, especially in like, in my case, internet Child Exploitation units are folks that are heavily overworked. Their case loads are in insane, are are completely unreasonable. And they're completely, they're very much underfunded.

Avery Moore Kloss  31:52

Dale says whether flexibility means shortening an interview to fit into someone's schedule, or staying a few extra days to catch someone who's out of town, he will make accommodations to try and get access to more participants. For Dale, being transparent is also really important.

Dale Spencer 32:09

When you want to do research with police service organizations, you have to be somewhat open and honest about your intentions. I almost feel like I'm asking some colleagues to be more scientific in the way in which they conduct their research. Like if you're interested in racialized policing, asking the question, what are the what are the forms of racialized policing that police are engaging in is might not actually be the good starting point. But actually saying, like, I just want to understand how you respond to individuals, BIPOC individuals and begin from an open question, rather than a confirmation that there is something going on here, you can use it as a hypothesis, all of these things are possible, saying there is racialized policing, that's my working hypothesis, and allowing yourself to be open. And an almost like, revealing one's biases is important for thinking about and doing police research. The other thing is, is that you just have to be patient, you have to go through the formal processes that organizations have in place, some are reasonable, some are unreasonable. But nevertheless, you have to go through those vetting processes that are part of securing research access. And then the third thing that I would say is the most important is building relationships. You have to invest in relationships with criminal justice personnel. And I would say without getting specific names, and people, you know, doing, like playing the game of constantly communicating with individuals within that field, to make sure that they know when you're going to be doing your research, how you're going to be doing your research, and what they can expect to get back. So for example, if they want to know like a best practices report from you, at the end of this research, that's something that you not only have to promise but actually deliver on in the end. Because that builds relationships, that means that you can be a person that's trusted, they might not like the report that you give back to them, but they might not like not like the results. But at the very least you're playing you're being part of that relationship. And you're coming through on the on, on on your promises.

Avery Moore Kloss  34:41

Dr. Beatrice Jauregui has similar advice for researchers, she says doggedness pays off.

Beatrice Jauregui 34:46

Accept every invitation and be persistent to a degree that might feel unreasonable at times. But, you know, these things really do take time and, and patience. And so even if you don't gain the access that you're seeking right away, that doesn't mean the project is over. Or you know that you won't be able to address the questions that you have. But you just need to find an alternate route. Because there are all kinds of possible portals there, there are so many possibilities. So you just need to keep asking yourself questions, and then keep trying and see what happens.

Avery Moore Kloss  35:41

For Dr. Sandra Bucerius, her advice for gaining access is really simple. Just ask.

Sandra Bucerius 35:48

I really do believe that you should always ask and not just simply accept it as a fact that access is impossible. I'm not Canadian, I have not been trained in Canada. And so I was very unfamiliar with sort of like the ins and outs of criminal justice organizations in the Canadian context. My accent that you hear is German. So in Germany, there's a general understanding that the taxpayer has a right to study the organizations that we are essentially funding as taxpayers. So there isn't even the access question isn't as much on the table as in the Canadian context. And so I think I also approached some of my projects in a rather naive way in the sense that if and when I wanted to have access to data, whether that is with police organizations or prison organizations, I asked, and I have never made the experience that access was restricted.

Avery Moore Kloss  36:52

At the end of the day, the question of access is really about the production of knowledge, something that Sandra says can be conveyed to criminal justice organizations in the right way. She says once early in her career, she signed a research agreement that said the data needed to be passed by the organization before she was allowed to publish it.

Sandra Bucerius 37:11

Subsequently, I actually had conversations with that police organization about how that is a rather complicated restriction for academics and hinders, you know, academic freedom and can potentially lead to the fact that other researchers may not accept the findings as much. Because, you know, we might think that the researchers will have to change findings or that certain findings are being vetoed, etc. So, it is also not in the interest of the criminal justice organizations themselves to have those restrictions in writing, because the the findings can always be challenged by others. So anyway, anyway, long story short, that police organization actually took that restriction out of future agreements.

Avery Moore Kloss  37:59

This idea that the production of knowledge without barriers to access benefits both the researchers and the organization is an important one. And so we thought we would leave you this episode with thoughts from our four guests on how access shapes the production of knowledge. First step, Dr. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah.

Akwasi Owusu-Bempah 38:18

I often say that we have a lack of the state in the Canadian context. Like we have information from across the country and across justice institutions, documenting racial disparities. Some of what it does, especially given the fact that we have relatively little racially disaggregated data across social institutions is allow for a kind of nuanced understanding of how race socio economic status, geography and the likes fully influence rates of contact with the justice system and treatment and experiences within the system. From my perspective, it leads to an over reliance on American knowledge and American data and the American situation to understand what is happening here in Canada. And for a long time and I think this is part of the reason that this information was not made publicly available generally by by justice agencies is it's meant that like in the absence of strong quantitative data, strong, consistent quantitative data, documenting racial disparities, and that would be useful for uncovering racial biases that the justice system has not had to deal with, or address the overrepresentation of especially Black and Indigenous people in justice outcomes. And I think that, you know, work on the system and asking those questions are important. And I think in order to fully understand how the system operates, how it works, we need to engage with with those actors, like I'll say that. I spent a period of time during my undergrad between my masters and my PhD and a lot since becoming a professor working directly you know, with justice agencies, I work for the provincial ministry that oversees policing and corrections in the province. I continue to work directly with members of police and courts and correctional agencies. And I've learned an enormous amount from working in and working with those agencies. And I've learned things that there's absolutely no way that I would have learned or been able to uncover, including, you know, what type of data exists and where it is, without engaging in that work.

Sandra Bucerius 40:31

I am really trying to advance empirically informed research on criminological issues in Canada. And so I mean, as as you know, much criminological research in Canada is often driven by ideological or political critiques or provides theoretical contribution. And my objective is different. I want to develop critical empirical insights into Canada's criminal justice system into the organizations themselves, those who work there as well as those who work in the system, and those who encounter the system and make experiences that are shaped by their indigeneity, or their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, social economic status, and so and so on. So my focus really is on doing theoretically informed empirical research to essentially create databases that allow me and my team to inform the policy changes that benefit marginalized groups and key stakeholders. If I don't have access, I'm not going to be able to do empirical research and create databases that will essentially inform policy changes. And as I said before, I think if we really want to change criminal justice organizations, yes, we can do outside activist type work. But a police chief or, you know, Theresa Tam, to whom we presented some of our findings, was Canada's chief medical officer, they will not listen to a political rant or my activisty type opinions, they will only ask for data that can back up my claims, if I don't have the data, they will not have time for me. And so I as a researcher want to have the data to actually inform policy changes. 

Dale Spencer 42:29

Writing about people's labor process. And showing them what they do, can often make those people stutter in particular ways and have to rethink how they do their jobs. So for example, I remember giving presentations to police officers that were in the audience, and them saying this completely meets up with how I carry out my job, but I never thought of it that way. I never saw the implications of my work in those terms. So you make them rethink the way in which they're doing their jobs. You make them rethink maybe some bad tendencies, like victim blaming, that or that happened amongst some officers. The style in which you present that critique matters for and you're given a credence by virtue of having conversations with them first, before you make this kind of critique from the outside. 

Beatrice Jauregui 43:24

Well, I think we can gain knowledge, both through gaining access, but also through not gaining access, whatever that might mean, in a particular context. So certainly, you know, say you you have a certain research question, you know, you you know, who you want to talk to, you know, the kinds of things you want to observe or you think you do. And, you know, you you do all your homework and you you do the needful as they say in India, and then oh, great, okay, you've gotten some access, as I said, which, you know, it's an ongoing process. So yeah, I guess you can, you know, you can learn some things, but I think it is important to remember that we can also gain knowledge when doors are shut in our face, or, I mean, access itself is, is always already partial and incomplete and uncompromised. I do this work because I think there's just still so much more to know and that if we are going to have you know, well informed and hopefully truly transformative, you know, debates and not just debates but action around reshaping security institutions and policies. We need to build good knowledge about it. And we can't do that. Unless, you know, we, we take seriously the need to actually interact with people who are, it is people who make up these institutions, right. So we just there's so much more to know. And so I'm doing my best to make at least a small contribution to help us really explain and understand things in a way that will promote positive and progressive social transformation.

Avery Moore Kloss  45:51

We would like to thank our guests today for their incredible insights and for sharing their take on the importance of access with us. Dr. Sandra Bucerius is a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Alberta and she leads the Center for criminological research at U of A. She also leads the University of Alberta Prison Project which is the largest qualitative and mixed methods study on Canadian prisons and life in Canadian prisons. Dr. Beatrice Jauregui is an associate professor at the Center for criminology and social-legal Studies at the University of Toronto. She is an anthropologist who studies police and military institutions. Dr. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, and a senior fellow at Massey College. He's trained as a criminologist and his work examines the intersections of race, crime and criminal justice. And Dr. Dale Spencer is the faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence chair at Carleton University, and is an associate professor in the Department of law and legal studies. He conducts research on manifold forms of violence and organizational and Institutional Responses to violence. You can find the links to any studies or reviews we referenced in the show notes for this episode. For more information about the work we do with the Center for Research on security practices, please visit our website at CRSP dot online. Thank you for listening to CRSP talk. We'll be back again soon with more research to uncover. I'm Avery Moore Kloss.