Counting the costs of imprisonment: Researching women’s post-release deaths in Victoria

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 examination 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.