The American prison apparatus is larger today than ever before. The Pew Center on the States reported in February 2008 that more than one in 100 American adults live behind bars. However, few are scrutinizing the everyday experiences of the 2.3 million people in American prisons and jails. Scholars who want to do ethnographic fieldwork in prisons face a long row of hurdles, including suspicious wardens and human-subjects committees that can take many months to approve applications. In interviews, prison scholars offered thoughts about how to balance public need for information about prisons with the protection of prisoners' safety and dignity. Would-be prison researchers today must simultaneously apply to a state or federal department of corrections and also to their own university's institutional review board. The process can take a year or more, and even then, in some states, local prison wardens have the right to veto the permission granted by the state bureaucracy. A former commissioner of corrections in New York City says that his perception is that prison officials are significantly less open to researchers than they were two decades ago, a combination of legitimate security and liability concerns, accompanied by a political sense that nothing good can come of it. One solution, some say, is to talk to prison officials about how scholarly research can help solve practical problems in their facilities, and to frame prison studies in ways that administrators will find useful. While understanding the reluctance of prison officials to welcome scholars ("If you're at 110 percent of capacity and you're short-staffed," acknowledges one scholar, "you're operating in a perpetual crisis mode.") But if the public is to understand the lives of the millions of Americans living inside that crisis, more open relationships between scholars and prison officials may need to be re-established.