Paper short abstract

Taking stock of a three-decade experience of engaging with prison actors, and with a focus on a particular experience of interacting with a committee for prison reform, I aim to discuss the ingredients that render ethnographic accounts valuable to policy oriented publics.

Paper long abstract

Having conducted ethnographic enquiries on prisons and penal confinement in Portugal during the last three decades, I have had several occasions to engage with publics implicated in policy-definition or policy implementation at different levels. I have also interacted with a variety of institutional agents and frontline personnel acting one way or another upon what they generally define as a "social problem". Regardless of the nature or the degree of their power to intervene on that problem, these could all be considered as policy-oriented audiences, whether they were policy officials, committees for prison reform, magistrates, national or local prison directors, social workers and other actors. Their expectations in relation to prison-research and its outcomes are formed within particular frames, such as the "denunciation" of prison ills, or the production of "specific recommendations" to remedy them…. For my part, although I consider my research to have policy implications, it was not itself policy-driven or designed for policy. However, in spite of being far from matching these audiences' dominant frame of expectations, my work was surprisingly well received and did produce a particular form of impact relevant for policy.

Taking stock of this general experience of publicizing ethnographic research, and with a focus on a particular experience of interacting with a committee for prison reform, I discuss the ingredients that can render ethnographic accounts valuable and persuasive to policy oriented publics