“Prison Writing” Research and Composition Studies

“We inside have already experienced rejection by society in general, and it has not broken all of us.  If writing is important, we will create something unique and worthy, even if others do not endorse us as human beings or agree with our finished product.”  
- Charles Huckelbury, Jr., Writing As Resistance

Inmates in American prisons who choose to write are strip-searched, have visitor privileges revoked, are harassed and beaten, and are sent to solitary confinement or “the hole”.  Learning how to write in prison can even be deadly.  In his preface to Welcome to Hell: Letters & Writings From Death Row, Clive Stafford Smith grimly explains that an inmate “may struggle to help educate his friend, without realizing that society is more likely to execute a retarded person who learns to read and write” (Arriens xiii).  Yet, despite the dangers in doing so, inmates continue to write because of a need for self-expression, to remind the outside world that they still exist, or as a way to escape the realities of incarceration.  One inmate explained this need saying “I write because I can’t fly…writing is my way of sledghammering these walls” (Chevigny xiii).  Inmate writing is a controversial yet important topic of study, but little research in composition studies has occurred to explore this important site.  This article will argue the need for more research on inmate writing using methods which can describe and explain both writing contexts and content.  Doing so will expand our knowledge of prison inmate writing in its numerous locations and purposes.  Such research would also contribute to composition studies’ body of work on writing in public, non-academic settings.    
Research on prison inmate writing could proceed through two complementary methodologies, context-sensitive text analysis and critical discourse analysis.  My purpose in this article is to consider these methodologies, their methods of inquiry, and the epistemological assumptions about the nature of the knowledge they claim to construct.  Also, I will argue that these methodologies can provide unique insights into the act of writing in prison.  There are several research questions which should direct inquiry into writing in prison: How do inmates resist the dominant hegemonic prison discourse through and within their writing?  How does prison discourse deny inmate’s agency?  How do prison inmates construct resistant “outsider” identities in their textual discourses?   How do inmates’ textual act as alternate discourses to and against dominant discourses?  What forms and genres do inmates write?  How do these fit within or respond to a frame of social and ideological pressure?  While I do not intend to address these questions here, as it is outside the scope of this article, they could serve as guiding questions for future research.  Research could also question how inmates in prison-based education programs use writing to construct identities which are resistant to the oppressive prison discourse these questions can be further narrowed for more specific answers.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and context sensitive text analysis are research methodologies which would situate prison writing in a complex social, political, and cultural context.  Prison is a discourse site with multiple overlapping discourse sites which contains multiple conflicting communities.  While guards and administrators are the dominant community in the prison, inmates often resist their own marginal status by using writing to demand prison reform, increased human rights, assert their identity as human beings.  The prison discourse is unique among discourses of resistance because of the extreme dynamics of power between the conflicting communities.  No other resistant discourse community is under such total physical and communicative control as prison inmates who must struggle physically and intellectually to be heard, very often against the wishes of the dominant community.  Despite this oppression, inmates continue to write and communicate their resistance to “conditions of immiseration…which help to sustain the prisons’ current function as systems for ‘disappearing’ the human evidence of profound social problems” (Rymhs 394)  Studying inmates writing and texts can help us gain a better understanding of the prison discourse community and the inmates position within it.
Composition studies has conducted very little research or scholarship about prison inmate.  Most published research has examined the pedagogical effectiveness of teaching writing, poetry and literature to inmates as a humanistic, rehabilitative method (Maher 2004, Rutter 1982, Moffett 1985).  However, fields outside of composition studies already consider prison writing an important topic of research.  Journalism and Communications scholars have studied prison journals, publications written and published by inmates for the inmate community, as modes of expressing concerns within prisons and as examples of “outlaw” or “outsider” publications, situating prison inmate writing alongside the discourses of other socially oppressed or marginalized groups like gay and lesbian publications, underground political newspapers, and other disenfranchised social groups located outside the dominant social discourse.  Criminal justice and corrections specialists have examined prison writing as part of “unnecessary” and “ineffective” rehabilitation, or as inmate challenges to prison authority.  The field of criminal justice in particular has long resisted prison inmate writing in the name of security or victim’s rights, claiming inmates should not be allowed to profit from writing about their crimes, justifying a continual crackdown on inmates’ freedom of expression. Since prison journal editors often expose corruption within the prison system, foment resistance against capital punishment, and increase public awareness about the concerns and abuses of inmates, administrators often have political motives for corrections officials to silence inmate writing.  Finally, prison-education specialists view writing as a means to lower recidivism, a function of education and rehabilitation (Parkinson & Steurer 2004,Vacca 2004).  Prison-based education programs have served as research sites for education specialists to examine how inmates reflect on their crimes in writing and learn job-skills to increase their vocational rehabilitation. 
One obstacle to effective research in composition studies, and English studies in general, is the difficulty in defining prison writing and whether there are genres unique to prison writing, such as the prison narrative or prison poetry.  Research often focuses on literary prison writers like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and George Jackson who considered themselves, and wrote as, political prisoners.  However, research has rarely focused on writing by inmates who do not consider themselves political prisoners who write for other purposes.  For example, prison-based education courses often require inmates to write essays and letters, art classes and child-parent education groups use journal writing and drawing to maintain parent-child bonds, individual inmates choose to keep diaries or web-logs if permitted, and groups of inmates collaborate to write and publish prison journals.  Each of these situations produces writing with different forms, styles, and perspectives.  There are also less obvious and less accessible texts that do not fit conventional definitions, including tattoos (willingly received or not) and video surveillance tapes.  Non-inmate prison writing provides another important source of texts to be researched.  Guards and administrators write reports, criminal “wrap-sheets,” and personal memoirs of their time working with inmates.  Also, prison-educators respond to inmate writing with comments, providing material closely resembling academic writing which composition research has focused on to date.  These texts could still be studied as prison writing, despite being produced by writers other than inmates.
Furthermore, attempts to classify all prison writing as a “broad categorical designation for incarcerated cultural production” (Rodriguez 409) have been criticized as “a discursive gesture toward order and coherence where, for the writer, there is generally neither” (409). Imposing artificial homogeneity to all writing which shares the distinction of being produced in prison ignores “the institutionalized killing of the subject” (409).  Conceptions of prison writing as genre must be more than a literary designation; we need to acknowledge that prison writing is politicized, and inmates’ texts and authors cannot be reduced to homogeneous categories.  A genre-based understanding of prison writing should not impose “discursive captivity” upon the texts it includes by limiting how we can describe it to one category or another. This exact phenomenon has to this date relegated the study of prison writing in English to literary criticism, which has limited our understanding of the actual textual practices of inmate writers.  With this in mind, composition research could provide a fuller account and explanation of those practices without relying on static aesthetic or political formulations or categories.  We can, in short, make observations that other fields cannot which may alter or even refute previous findings.   

Obstacles to Effective Research in Prison
Composition specialists doing research within prisons will confront various institutional political and cultural obstacles previously encountered by educators and researchers from other fields. For example, “correctional officers and other staff view [educational] programming as a nuisance or a privilege of which the inmates are not worthy…This feeling often permeates the prison culture and is supported by management,” (Parkinson & Steurer 89) and prison staff resist outsiders’ efforts to assist or work with inmates.  Research which is specifically conducted for the benefit of inmates may be viewed as a form of pity or a ploy by administrators.  Since everything that officially occurs in the prison does so at the behest of the prison administration, researchers and educators are often viewed as extensions of the administrations.  Furthermore, conducting research in prisons is often difficult due to the emphasis on total control and security.  Arranging meetings with inmates can require a researcher to wait several hours and endure quotidian searches and questioning before being allowed to speak with inmates.  Also, the exchange of mail and printed materials is tightly controlled and often censored.  
Finally, inmates are frequently unwilling to cooperate with educators or researchers.  This can be because of harmful educational experiences in their past, or because inmates perceive researchers or educators as extensions of the prison authority.  The average educational level of inmates is officially estimated at a sixth grade level, which is considered functional illiteracy.  Many inmates indeed dropped out of school and are distrustful of educators, seeing them as extensions of the prison system.  This can lead to a relationship of mistrust and hostility, a significant hindrance to any critical research.  Inmates frequently feel they are being judged by researchers, making them hesitant to work or cooperate with outsiders.  Finally, prison educators often act in ways that reconstitute the prison’s power to define and control inmates, something which inmates themselves do notice.  Rodriguez points to one instance where inmates who complained about culturally insensitive course offerings were reported “to prison administrators for disciplinary action, and they were almost immediately placed in solitary confinement” (Forced 100).  Inmates’ distrust of education also reflects the fact that educated inmates are often disproportionately punished.
Despite these obstacles, research in prison can occur using a mode or modes of inquiry which “instead of focusing on purely academic or theoretical problems…starts from prevailing social problems, and thereby chooses the perspectives of those who suffer most” (van Dijk, quoted in Wodak and Meyers 1).  Researchers should demonstrate that their intentions are to help the inmates not to simply reify the authority of the prison administration.  By acknowledging that their perspective lies with the inmates, a relationship of trust can begin to develop, allowing effective, beneficial research to take place.  Research should proceed from the assumption that “the power to control discourses is seen as the power to sustain particular discursive practices with particular ideological investments in dominance over other alternative (including oppositional) practices” (Fairclough, Critical 2). 

Context-Sensitive Text Analysis
Huckin explains that “more and more researchers are drawing attention to the social dimension of writing” (“Context” 84) and that writing is being researched by composition as a contextual event, rather than a socially neutral object. Context-sensitive text analysis is a method which examines rhetorical structures and textual patterns that emerge in community texts, while considering the larger social context which influences the production of that text.  This differs from strict content analysis because, according Huckin, it attempts to account for more than the “manifest content” of texts, (“Content” 13) constructing a broader picture.  One way to study writing in prison as a contextual product is to examine textual features of an inmate’s writing and account for how those features reflect on the situational occurrences of prison-life.   Inmates’ texts “can tell us much about the communities and individuals involved and how the tensions and relations between them affect the composing process” (Huckin, “Context” 85).  These tensions and relations are frequently opaque to people not intimately connected with prison.  This method could establish themes and patterns in a specific corpus of texts which reflect those indicative or representative of the prison discourse, particularly how written texts by inmates are situated in that larger order of discourse.   
There are several epistemological assumptions which will be important to consider when using CSTA to study prison inmate writing.  The first assumption is that texts exists, the “the number of plausible interpretations is constrained by various linguistic conventions that are manifested in the texts” (Huckin, “Context” 86).  Furthermore, “communities are formed and maintained around a body of tangible, linguistically constituted texts and these texts contain observable patterns of language usage that mean certain things to the members of a given community” (86).  Analyzing inmates’ texts as community forming could allow greater insight into those the inmate community’s meaning-making practices, including non-traditional texts such as architecture, music, or a picture (Fairclough, Critical 4).  While context-sensitive text analysis could be used to examine features of these kinds of texts in prison, inmates involvement or control over architecture is minimal if any, and the disciplinary interests of composition constrain me to written language in prison, how inmates combine meaning and context in their written texts.  We can assume that inmates are part of a community organized around forms of meaning making and their texts reflect those linguistic features.   
The second assumption is that texts are an attempt by a writer to communicate meaning to readers.  Inmates who choose to write can be safely considered as having meanings they are trying to convey to readers.  This does not mean that their texts are restricted to a single meaning, or that every reader will understand.  But inmates’ texts have purpose: they are writers attempting to convey meaning to an audience.  Their texts are communicative rather than static and “a close analysis of individual texts can provide possible explanations of nonstandard usage, errors, voice, and other stylistic features” as a way to explain how texts convey meaning (Huckin, “Context” 89) particularly in inmate writing, where non-standard usage and prison slang marks their writing frequently.  By assuming that features have semantic purpose, we can begin connect those features to determined purposes and meanings in order to build greater understanding.  
Finally, inmate writers belong to multiple conflicting discourse communities and textual features of their writing reflect this conflict.  As inmates write, they represent many communities and identities that have conflicting beliefs and values.  This conflict will produce rich and strained texts where these multiple community identities often seep through in textual features.  Inmates belong to prison cliques and gangs, are identified as “lifers,” snitches, punks, or trustees.  Each word in the prison argot forms a semantic unit, with clear meanings and references.  Inmates also retain their identities from prior to incarceration, though these personal identities are often suppressed by the normative identity the prison imposes, what Foucault called the “delinquent” (251) identity.  However, inmates often struggle to resist the delinquent identity and retain their own self-identity.
There are also several methodological characteristics which would inform a study of prison inmate writing using context-sensitive text analysis.  First, this method is problem-driven rather than theory driven seeking to address a specific problem which interests the researcher rather than attempting to develop general writing theories.  As such, context-sensitive text analysis is “naturally eclectic and interdisciplinary,” mobilizing various ideas about a wide range of topics (Huckin, “Context” 89).  Studying prison writing with in this way will do little to “solve some problem in the teaching of writing” (89) but could provide an understanding of how inmates use writing to assert conflicting community identities, or their self-identities over the identity of “delinquent,” in resistance to the authority of the prison.  
Second, context-sensitive text analysis should account for the context of prison writing as much as possible (Huckin, “Context” 89) as well as non-obvious elements which informed the text during its writing.  For example, prisons often revoke inmates privileges for periods of time, meaning that writing can be interrupted for an indeterminate amount of time. Also, prison officials censor mail to and from inmates and gaps may occur as a result.  Explaining these occurrences will help account for otherwise inexplicable shifts in tone or gaps in content and can insure a reasonable interpretation of texts.  
Third, because context-sensitive text analysis of prison writing cannot account for all variables in prison or any setting, and because this method does not attempt to verify empirical hypotheses, plausible interpretations are used to assemble evidence and “make a case for a certain point of view” (Huckin “Context” 89).  Textual features of inmates writing could be collected quantitatively and then analyzed qualitatively to explain the relationship between features and context.  This approach to data analysis and interpretation allows the researcher to account for the multiple contexts which converge at prisons inductively.
Following these epistemological and methodological issues, there are generally six stages that context-sensitive text analysis proceeds through.  These stages are not always necessary and do not occur in such sequential order, but rather are “carried out in a more recursive fashion” (Huckin, “Context” 90).  The first stage is the selection of a corpus, a broad collection of texts which in some way represent the problem to be explored.  I would assert that research into inmates writing processes and contexts should begin with prison journals written and published by prison inmates.  These texts are the most accessible texts produced by inmates and are often available for subscription by subscription.  Inmates and guards frequently publish letters or essays in these magazines and would provide many types of texts from many authors, allowing researchers to account for multiple communities within the larger prison discourse.  An initial corpus comprised of these journals could consist of a single prison journal or several journals across a several years.  Other examples include collections of prison letters from one or several inmates, inmates writing from prison-based education courses, inmates’ personal essays, letters, and diaries.  Each of these corpuses may have entirely different motivations and contextual constraints which would need to be accounted for by the researcher.  
After an initial corpus has been determined, salient features and patterns in those texts which appear important need to be identified.  It is important to find “general features rather than detailed ones” (Huckin, “Context” 91) that the texts share so a broader pattern can be established.  Examples may include the use of specific lexicons, lingo or slang, topics of discourse, perhaps even organizational patterns or the rupturing of genre boundaries. Selected features should indicate a larger semantic pattern that exists within the text.  A particularly generative pattern, which is of importance for prison writers, is the use of self-referential lexicons, both those that identify them as inmates and humans.  Examples of writing found in prison anthologies frequently reflect a tension between the identity of inmate and human.  Patterns or features which demonstrate this tension would be generative for studying prison writing in context.
After general patterns or features have been identified and selected in the texts, they should be narrowed to those which are interesting to composition scholars and researchers.  Because prison is a conflicted site of social and ideological interaction, and writing from this context has not been explored by composition studies except in the area composition pedagogy, nearly any pattern will be of interest to the field of English and Composition Studies.  Research could include a study of salient patterns which occur in inmate writing during educational classes, though this example which revolves around pedagogical usefulness.  An examination of prison publications would likewise be interesting since many prison journals are started by inmates and supported by inmates.  It would of great interest to see how inmates turn to writing on their own through prison journals against the resistance of the prison administration..  
Next, the initial corpus must be narrowed using a “principled procedure” (Huckin “Context” 91) to select texts for a final “study corpus.” The final selection of texts should provide enough material for a substantial analysis of features and patterns, but also should be narrow enough to be manageable and maintain valid results.  I have already suggested that an initial corpus could consist of prison journals such as the Angolite, Shadows, or Concrete Garden.  Using a random sampling method from all prison journals during a certain year, or using essays from a single prison education class could narrow a large initial corpus to a manageable and useful study corpus.  Restricting the amount of text is intended to verify that any feature or pattern identified in the initial corpus was not “an artifact of selective attention on the part of the investigator” (91).  The feature or pattern identified in the initial corpus should be more easily identifiable within the study corpus.  
Following the selection of a study corpus to be analyzed, those patterns or features which are of research interest should be quantitatively collected and examined.  It is important to examine features of the texts which are both quantifiable and indicative of the pattern previously observed.  This is a recursive process intended to empirically catalogue features to determine whether the pattern previously noticed “still exists under these controlled circumstances” (Huckin, “Context” 92).  Returning to the consideration of lexical self-reference, features which indicate personal reference indicative of an identity other than that of inmate could be quantifiably collected and examined.  Lexical references which indicate human identity and which indicate inmate identity could be empirically collected and catalogued according to frequency of occurrence and textual relation to one another.  Furthermore, these features need to be considered in relation to the type of texts and the contexts which produced those texts.  Prison-gang references in a prison journal would be more surprising than frequent self-references which identify inmates as humans-not-criminals.  Likewise, the conflicting identities which emerge during educational writing could likely be determined by an examination of the use of lexical self-reference. 
Next, the researcher needs to explain why the pattern they have identified and empirically analyzed exists.  Huckin refers to this stage as functional-rhetorical analysis where a “plausible, if tentative, explanation” is constructed from the empirical evidence to identify how how the rhetorical feature functions.  For prison journals, this explanation should include how, for example, lexical self-reference indicates a) an alternate community identity and b) resistance to the identifying authority of the prison, c) inmates’ conflicting community identities.  Occurrences of specific lexical self-references only occur in pieces of writing which also reference prison authorities or legal authorities.  The non-deductive nature of this process is demonstrated here, as the initial assumptions which began the researcher’s path are often the ones which are formalized.  Identifying patterns such as “lexical collocation” (Huckin, “Context” 97) as an indication of self-identity is important to establish the intertextuality between different prison journals.  This intertextuality will allow different prison journals to be identified as the texts of a discourse community marked by features indicative of resistance to a larger oppressive discourse.  
Huckin notes that “the value of ethnomethodological work should not be overlooked” (“Context” 101) in context-sensitive text analysis.  Ethnographic collaboration with inmates and others connected to prison, prison education, and prison research would proved invaluable for providing a plausible explanation of prison writing, if such an explanation is to account for resistance, conflicting communities, contextual features, and attain accurate meanings.  That being said, explanations provided through this mode of inquiry are based on “plausibility rather than proof” and as such “no analysis should be considered definitive” (101).  This type of research should continue periodically and conflicting explanations should not necessarily be used as refutations of each other.  

Critical Discourse Analysis 
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) according to Michael Meyer “must not be understood as a single method but rather an approach” which uses methods and procedures from different methodologies (14) and provides a theoretical framework rather than “neutral” methods and methodologies.  Like context-sensitive text analysis, CDA assumes that “all discourses are historical and can therefore only be understood with reference to their context” (15).  Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), however, “is interested in and motivated by pressing social issues, which it hopes to better understand through discourse analysis” (van Dijk, “Principles” 252).  Its focus is the “ideological analysis of texts” within a three-dimensional framework analyzing “text, discourse practice, sociocultural practice” (Fairclough, Critical 6).  Because of this explicit focus on ideology, dominance, and texts, CDA is an excellent method of inquiry for studying prison inmate writing which “defies the disciplinary structures that attempt to suppress it” (Rymhs 563).  
Where most discourses, according to Wodak, seek to form “the individual human being as a social individual in response to available ‘representational resources,’” (Methods 6) prison discourse uses representational resources to dehumanize inmates into an anti-social powerless, silent collective.  These representational resources include ideological discursive formations (IDF) which authorize texts as part of the dominant discourse, indicated by textual features such as “vocabulary, metaphors, grammars, presuppositions and implicatures, politeness conventions, speech-exchange (turn-taking) systems, generic structure and style” (Fairclough, Critical 2).  IDFs are “naturalized implicit propositions of an ideological character are pervasive in discourse” (24) and are necessary to authorize a subject to participate in discourse, systematically analyzing features of the discourse, whether spoken or textual, can allow us to expose the ideologies which are otherwise normalized within the discourse.  Accounting for ideology at three levels of social phenomena (texts, social processes, and social structures) makes it possible to analyze dominance and resistance in that discourse in order to understand how oppressive ideologies are reproduced.  Overall, CDA will allow me to adopt a view of prison discourse, inmate writing, and resistance to ideology and how these emerge in writing.
 Critical Discourse Analysis is a transdisciplinary mode of inquiry which makes use of methods and theories to construct a “dialectical view of discourse in its relation with other (non-discoursal) elements of social life” (Fairclough, “Critical” 54).  CDA would be very productive in uncovering and critiquing ideology in the oppressive context of prison discourses by providing a clear “account of intricate relationships between text, talk, social cognition, power, society and culture” (253).  The epistemology the methodological principles guiding the construction of that knowledge, and the relationship between the researcher, the participants, in our case inmates, and the results of the research “by definition presupposes an applied ethics” (van Dijk, “Principles” 253) to which this research should fulfill.  Because CDA seeks to uncover oppression in discourse, the results of such research should benefit the participants and not be considered static or neutral knowledge.   
Furthermore, CDA is traditionally concerned with what van Dijk calls “top-down” relations of dominance (“Principles” 250).  CDA “explicitly defines and defends its own socio-political position” (van Dijk, “Multidisciplinary” 96) and has traditionally focused on how dominant discourses maintain authority and power through either direct oppression or coercive hegemony, where “power and power abuse may seem ‘jointly produced’, e.g. when dominated groups are persuaded, by whatever means, that dominance is ‘natural’ or otherwise legitimate” (van Dijk, “Principles” 250).  Prison entails both direct physical oppression and hegemony, where guards and administrators manipulate inmates to maintain control.  Using CDA to study inmates’ “’bottom-up’ relations of resistance, compliance and acceptance” (250) means unveiling how control and hegemony are perpetuated in prison discourse.  
In prison discourse, inmates constitute a discourse community and possess what CDA refers to as background knowledge, the implicit knowledge known by all discourse participants.  This background knowledge is necessary to participate in the discourse, but also implies the “backgrounded material” of ideology which “produces subjects which appear not to have been ‘subjected’ or produced…ideology endeavours to cover its own traces” (Fairclough, Critical 44).  Inmates unknowingly use ideology in their writing by calling on this background knowledge, including its assumptions and beliefs, which authorize them in the discourse.  However, inmates also engage in discursive resistance by subverting or breaking discourse conventions, including this idea of background knowledge.  
CDA also places considerable emphasis upon context, understood as “environment” or “situation” which “involve the categories such as Setting (Time, Place, etc.), Participants in various other roles, Actions, and Cognitions (aims, knowledge, opinions, etc.)” (van Dijk, “Contextual” 74).  Van Dijk also defines context “as the mental representation of the participants about the relevant properties of the social situation in which participants interact, and produce and comprehend text or talk” (75).  According to these definitions, prison inmates participate in two contexts, the setting, people, and actions surrounding prison and writing there, but also participate in a “representation” of prison, a cognitive form of context which affects individual understanding of prison.  Both definitions can lead to a useful understanding of the prison discourse context, allowing for a community definition and an individual cognitive understanding of that community definition.
Prison writing is often defined as a genre where knowledges and contexts often emerge in texts in a categorical manner.  Genre, according to Bazerman, is a “recognizable, self-reinforcing forms of communication” (“Speech” 316).  CDA would argue that the dominant ideology of discourse is actually being reproduced by genre.  Genre features are representative of naturalized ideologies required for the writer to be authorized as a discursive subject, and participate in discoursal hegemony.  Hegemony is understood as “constructing alliances, and integrating rather than simply dominating subordinate classes, through concessions or through ideological means, to win their consent” (Fairclough, Critical 76) and though prison seems to be an institution where the bodily domination of inmates is most essential, the “relationship between discourse and hegemony is a matter of the latter limiting the potential of the former” (81) is far more important for maintaining control. The boundaries of prison discourse and its attending participants and legitimate subjects are limited by their coerced or forced consent to a limiting ideology, excluding certain topics of prison life from prison discourse.  However, inmates’ writing frequently challenges hegemony by authorizing inmates as legitimate agents in a resistant discourse where topics and positions which threaten and subvert hegemony’s structures and practices can be voiced.  In this way, inmates simultaneously challenge the dominant discourse and produce their own “outsider” discourse.  
Prison writing research using CDA should attempt to provide an explanation of how oppressive ideology works within prison discourse and uses research methods most appropriate to collect evidence to support the theory posited.  This differs from context-sensitive text analysis which seeks to explain specific or general problems through textual feature analysis.  One potential explanation of the relationship between prison inmate writing and the dominant ideology is that inmates use writing as a means of maintaining previous identities, or as a way of confronting and coping with the oppressive conditions of their incarceration.  Since CDA is an inductive method of inquiry, which uses empirical evidence drawn from the discourse events to confirm or disprove its explanation, the nature of collected knowledge lends CDA more weight as a reliable mode of inquiry. 
Finally, the scope of CDA is fluid, allowing the researcher to indulge their judgment of what is important to study.  As Barton points out, “discourse analysis can investigate features of language as small and specific as aspects of sentence structure or it can investigate features of texts and contexts as large and diffuse as genres and sociocultural world views” (“Linguistic” 57).  Research could include topics as narrow as an analysis of grammatical errors or sentence level issues in prison letters or classroom texts or as broad and global as theorizing how inmate writing uses intertextual features to identify a prison writing genre and the purposes of generic subversion.  This last topic allows researchers to establish a working explanation of “prison writing” as genre within composition studies, while accounting for “naturalized” ideologies within that genre.  
	There are no set methods of collecting and analyzing data, since CDA is primarily a theoretical approach, and researchers can use research methods most useful for their interests. Methodologies such as ethnography or content analysis could provide useful data for connecting ideology and discourse.  Because of its theoretical and methodological fluidity, theoretical conception and data collection are not separate stages in CDA, occurring recursively and repeatedly throughout research.  Meyer notes that “CDA places its methodology rather in the hermeneutic than in the analytical-deductive tradition” and because of this “no clear line between data collection and analysis can be drawn” (25).  Since CDA is hermeneutic and not empirical or positivist, and since it is not an experimental research design producing descriptive generalizable results, the recursive nature of analysis and explanation does not impugn the value of this research.  Studying prison inmate writing in this way is more closely related to an analysis of political expressions of racism or anti-Semitism than traditional discourse analysis of conversation or spoken dominance.  A critical discourse analysis of prison inmate writing should account for the dominant discoursal ideology of prison the social processes involved in the production of that text which are reproduced or resisted, and  how ideology appears or is absent within the texts themselves.. 
CDA used in this manner will challenge popular accounts of the criminal justice system, recasting it as a hegemonic discourse setting which oppresses its inmates.  This is contrary to many popular conceptions of police and prisons, as defenders of the public from a “pathologically criminal underclass” (Abramsky 30).  Regardless, research which accounts for ideology, context and process will provide a greater understanding of how prison inmate writing “is both enabled and coerced by state captivity” (Rodriguez 410) and how inmates resist state oppression by writing. 

Conclusion
Research by scholars in fields other than composition studies on the writing which occurs in prisons is very productive.  They have explored the interesting connections between inmates’ thoughts and ideas and the ideological and cultural roles that intersect and often dominate inmates’ lives and participation in broader social arenas.  But composition studies can provide new ways of seeing and understanding inmates’ writing, by exploring such writing as writing, the textual features that in many ways lead to the observations of other fields of study.  This is a perspective with which no other field has yet researched writing in prisons.
The methodologies I have proposed above are appropriate for conducting composition research in prisons because they would account for the contextual influences which are reflected in inmates’ textual features.  Composition studies should explore this important site for the reasons stated above, but also because of the sheer quantity of writing that is produced by prison inmates, to say nothing of the technical and professional writing that also occurs.  The connections between writing’s context and content could be explained by composition research.

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