Counting the costs of imprisonment: Researching women’s post-release deaths in Victoria
| Published date | 01 April 2011 |
| Author | Bree Carlton,Marie Segrave |
| Date | 01 April 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865810392868 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
44(1) 41–55
!The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865810392868
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Article
Counting the costs of
imprisonment: Researching
women’s post-release
deaths in Victoria
Marie Segrave and Bree Carlton
Monash University, Australia
Abstract
The prevailing body of research on post-release mortality is limited in scope, resulting in
significant gaps in knowledge of post-release survival and unnatural death. The absence of
current monitoring and research on women’s mortality rates in Victoria in combination with
recent statistics indicating the high rates of unnatural death for women released from prison
(in Victoria and elsewhere), provide key impetus for Surviving Outside, a project that sought
to combine quantitative and qualitative data on women’s post-prison survival and death. This
article documents the methodological challenges we faced in undertaking this research. Our
experience encapsulates broader challenges presented to contemporary critical criminology
and those who seek to develop independent and/or alternative research agendas to those
devised by state institutions. In documenting these challenges we provide a critical examina-
tion of the relationship between government research agendas, the production of knowledge
and the limitations associated with administrative research and reporting. We argue that
future research in this area requires a departure from traditional modes of inquiry to
enable a nuanced, comprehensive understanding of the circumstances that underpin post-
release survival and death.
Keywords
imprisonment, knowledge production, methodology, research, risk
Introduction
Six months before my release I started noting down deaths ...I have got all the names and it
was 11. There was 11 and that was in that 15-month period that I was in prison ...People
would be amazed if you told them there was only 300 women in prison in Victoria. That’s
when it becomes important ...Every [woman who is] in prison [now or who has
been] ...release[d] would know these women ...it’s a small community. I could just reel
Corresponding author:
Marie Segrave, School of Political & Social Inquiry, Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
Email: marie.segrave@monash.edu.au
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