Ti jaa bonyeni (We Are All One People): Methodological Reflections in Prison Research From Postcolonial Ghana

This reflexive article examines prison research—ethics, entry and emotions—within a postcolonial context. Based on my experiences and reflections from conducting fieldwork in Ghana's only maximum‐ and medium‐security prisons, I demonstrate how ethical considerations and international intervention create multiple silences among prison officers in prison governance in a postcolonial context. This impedes knowledge creation in Ghana's prison spaces. Ultimately, institutional practices, compliance with international standards and regulations, and ethical considerations in research have a cascading effect of reproducing and sustaining the power dynamics they seek to address. These external interventions, along with my positionalities and fieldwork negotiations, are contextualised within the broader politics of decolonial thinking. Within this context, I argue that researchers' lived experiences and background could serve as a resource for navigating prison power relations and empowering incarcerated people to share their stories with researchers. The reflections I present here from a postcolonial context hold significance to the growing calls to rethink and decolonise prison research.