It's not ‘just’ a cup of tea: Mistakes, reflexivity, and insider prison research

This note examines the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting ethnographic research in prison settings from a staff-insider position: that of a researcher simultaneously employed by a prison service while conducting research within it. Drawing on fieldwork in an English prison before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it explores the tensions of being employed by the England and Wales Prison and Probation Service while striving to maintain critical research distance. The note develops a matrix of positionality structured around two axes – institutional relationship and reflexive orientation – to argue that critical distance is not conferred by institutional position but achieved through sustained reflexive practice. Without such practice, proximity to the field risks a form of doxosophy in which structural inequalities are obscured by institutionalised ways of seeing. Through reflexive engagement with mistakes, including the symbolic power of making tea, the paper demonstrates how such moments of failure generate methodological insight, enabling a shift from insider-in-proximity towards insider-at-a-distance. In doing so, it contributes a contemporary, reflexive account of staff-insider prison research that resists reproducing institutional logics and produces a more critical understanding of imprisonment and the injustices it sustains.