‘Coming In from the Cold’: Constructing Qualitative ‘Criminality’ in Australia’s Penal-Welfare State

Abstract

The uncertainty in’ speaking for the other’ raised by poststructuralist philosophers such as Deleuze (1976, 41) also raises the core issue of reflex- ivity in qualitative criminology research — how complicit are qualitative researchers in translating ‘lived experience’ into constructions and represen- tations of ‘the other’ (Van Maanen 1990; Clandinin and Connelly 2000). How complicit are qualitative criminologists in rationalising and legitimis- ing the subjectivities of research participants as victims, perpetrators or bystanders of crime? How ethical is the qualitative research product as a usable policy resource for knowledge building and a commoditised-like resource atomised and disembodied from its subjects in a market-based economy? The two key contemporary criminological works I rely upon to understand the political bias and influence of qualitative criminology are Howard Becker and David Garland. Becker (1963, 1967) in the early days of qualitative deviancy research alerts us to the lack of social understand- ing of deviance and the ‘blaming and labelling’ of these people and asks the researchers an ethical and political question in relation to the power- ful and the powerless as to ‘whose side are we on?’ (Cohen 2011). Garland (1985, 1990, 2002) argues, following Foucault, that ‘penal welfare practices embodied a style of “social” governance that relied upon forms of social expertise and techniques of rule that were characteristic of welfare state societies’ (Garland 2002, 49).