The So-Called Prison
In the summer of 2012, after receiving a call from the manager of a non-governmental childcare organization in Iran, I became the principal investigator of a research team, which teamed up with the prison in one of the most populated cities in the Islamic Republic of Iran to run a prisonâs kindergarten. After various meetings and background checks, I received official permission to get access to the womenâs ward. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning in the hot summer of 2012, I went to the prison with a black chador and no makeup to collect data. The bus route that went straight to the prison was not always crowded with people; there was a bus stop across the street from the prison entrance. Whenever I got off the bus at the stop, other passengers looked at me strangely. Considering prisoners as âdangerousâ and âbadâ people who have to be kept inside the walls since they are not capable or deserving of living like ordinary citizens is a pervasive stereotype in Iranian society. I, as a researcher working in prison, received several puzzled comments and questions from people: How can you dare to sit and talk with prisoners? Are you scared when you talk with the murderers? How can you talk with them for six hours? Are there children inside the prison?
I remember the day when one of the incarcerated mothers wanted to give up her baby girl since the mother was on a death row. The non-governmental organization took responsibility to find a caregiver for the baby girl instead of sending her to a welfare organization. When some potential adopters heard about the baby girlâs background, they changed their minds: she was in prison and her mother was a murderer. If one suggested her as a potential baby to adopt, they took it as an offence. This reveals the very sad reality behind the life of prisoners. The ordinary citizens do not consider them as âhuman.â It gets even worse when their children are affected by imprisonment. They suffer the same pains and injuries. Most of the comments made by my interlocutors outside the prison walls were accompanied by smirks, hesitation, and wonder. Who are those prisoners? What are they doing in the prison? What are the children doing in and in connection with the prison?
Anyway, after going through different security checks, from one building to the next, one corridor to the next, and one room to another, I entered a big yard that was surrounded by multiple doors. One of those doors was the entrance of the âband-e nesvan â (womenâs ward). Whenever I knocked the door to go through the final security check, the women guard acted as if she had not seen me before, did not know me, and had no idea what I was doing there; some days, she even tried hard to not let me in. After going through all those security checks, which took approximately 20 to 30 minutes, I entered the womenâs ward. Women with colorful clothes but with the same gray color chador were in the yard. There was a store in the yard where they could buy food, fruits, clothes, and so on. I spent several months among them. I wore a black chador, which was a sign of being an âordinaryâ person in the prison, an outsider; thus, all prisoners knew I was there to conduct research. Gradually, I started to be considered a trustworthy person in the prison by prisoners and by some guards (i.e. not all of them, but at least two out of the six guards). During the very first days of interviewing, one guard was always around me and even tried to overhear the conversations between me and the inmates. However, the trust between me as a researcher and some guards was built gradually. Most often, I spent an entire day with prisoners, and could even visit other sections of the prison such as the library, social workersâ offices, and visiting rooms.
After getting familiar with some of the prisoners and listening to their painful stories, I did not feel like I was an outsider. At some of the times in the prison, I thought I was one of them, and they felt the same. They felt much more comfortable with sharing their stories. However, the guards several times warned me not to trust the prisoners at all. I was not allowed to take my phone and bag into the prison. Guards always searched me to make sure I did not have anything else but my audio recorder. I was not allowed to buy anything for anyone in the prison, even for children. One day, two sisters who were 10 and 12 and had been imprisoned for drug dealing asked me to buy a coke and fruit leather for them. They did not have money to afford such âluxuriesâ in the prison. Apparently, they were watching TV the night before and one of the inmates was drinking a coke and eating chips and fruit leather. I was not allowed to buy anything for the inmates, and the guards and social workers would not either. The guards were extremely sensitive about the information that might be collected by me from the sisters. Once, when the sisters and I were starting to talk, one guard came, interrupted us, and asked me about the topic we were talking about and the reason why I was talking with them. Although I conducted interviews with them at the end, the guards watched me carefully to prevent any contact between the prisoners and me.
It is important to keep in mind that obtaining official permission to access prison for me as a female researcher in 2012 could not have been possible without the full support of the NGO, which played a critical role in managing the kindergarten inside the womenâs division in the prison. This cooperation, which brought huge benefits for the prison as a governmental organization, provided an opportunity for me as a researcher to gain access to the prison. This, however, was not my last chance to come in contact with prisoners, as, in the summer of 2017, I traveled to Iran after years of studying and living in Canada. In 2017, even though I had several connections with NGOs, I could not access the prison. The initial group of study participants, in the summer of 2017, was recruited in different ways, each with its own limitations. To access as many subjects as possible, several requests were sent to different organizations and institutions from governmental to non-governmental. Those attempts were met with silence, so while I was waiting for a response, I sent other requests to other institutions in different locations, either in person, by phone, by email, or through gatekeepers. Different responses from different organizations were received, most of which were negative and discouraging. Most institutions, even non-governmental organizations, wrote back or called back asking for official permission from a university in Iran, and once they realized I was a female researcher who was a student in a Western country planning to do research in Iran, they did not even answer my phone calls. When communication over phone was futile, I traveled from Isfahan to different cities (446 km to Tehran, 715 km to Mazandaran, 676 km to Kerman) to consider all other opportunities. In some organizations, especially the governmental ones, I did not dare disclose the fact that I was a researcher who was studying in a Western university.1
At this point, I changed my strategy and negotiated with some judges who were trying to develop academic research regarding incarceration issues and who could grant access to prisoners. Also, access to incarcerated individuals was frequently provided through released prisoners, who informed me about inmates who were on leave and put me in contact with them, and there were some concerned officers working at prison who tried to help through providing interested prisoners with phone calls to conduct phone interviews (those phone interviews were canceled because of potential security issues that might threaten the researcher). Additionally, based on my previous contact with prisonersâ families, in 2012, I knew some local gatekeepers who had trusting relationships with released or on-leave drug-related prisoners. Gatekeepers were approached to explain the project to any interested former prisoners.
During my journey to Iran, I was warned of the potential risks of conducting research in Iran, particularly as a female student studying abroad. However, during the years of doing research on prisons in Iran, which included several visits to prison and governmental and non-governmental institutions, I did not face any serious problem with the authorities. Yes, I was reminded and warned several times both in governmental and non-governmental organizations about discussing highly sensitive topics and publishing the results; nevertheless, no explicit threat was made.
Since the topic of the research was sensitive, the critical access I had to the participants and organizations could not have been possible without struggling with the ânuance of powerâ (Skeggs, 1992, p. 14, cited by Malloch 2000). Accessing the field of study, especially prisons in Iran, is not only highly challenging, especially for sociologists and anthropologists, but also risky. Prisons as a field of study are always monitored by intelligence officers and the security apparatus, which makes researchers often reluctant to choose this topic. However, there is a popular genre of prison literature in Iran, which was started by the novel entitled Prison Scrap Papers written by Bozorg Alavi. His book depicts, through real and fictional characters and events, the daily life of prisoners locked up inside the walls and how they try to maintain their dignity, privacy, and political convictions. Several prison memoirs have been published since then, and the number significantly increased after the 1979 revolution. The memoirs have been written mostly by political and social activists who survived the prisons. Those books provide a wealth of information about the conditions of prisons in Iran before and after the revolution. Nevertheless, the dearth of scholarly work on prisons in Iranâboth in this country and in the Westâwas a major motivation behind this book. Hence, its titleâA Known Unknown2âis not simply a figure of speech. We simply do not know much about Iranian prisons while they certainly exist and their operation has a significant impact of lives of many people: prisoners, members of their families, especially children, and prison guards.
The best way to shed light on the prisonersâ life is through their own voices.3 Their stories unmask the severity of the pain they suffer in the prison. The stories also reveal the prisoners and childrenâs constant struggles to survive the intolerable conditions inside and outside the prison. There is virtually no research that addresses the dilemma of incarcerated mothers and the experiences of their children. This book presents the voices of incarcerated women and men. They are stigmatized as whores, bad parents, useless, addicts, and trash.
This study was conducted in two different settings4: governmental organizations (e.g. compulsory drug treatment camps,5 the Association for the Protection of Prisoners, Court, prisons, voluntary drug treatment cam...