Abstract
Its indispensable role in human history, takes the prison institution, ie. Environment, to which the majority society defines. Prison society is strongly stratified, which appears to be for man "outside" as incomprehensible microcosm. The paper is devoted to the possibilities and limits of the field of qualitative research in domestic prisons, from an anthropological point of view. While foreign literature on this subject is quite extensive in the Czech environment, you can talk about a certain deficit. The author evaluates the basic approaches to qualitative research in
1) case study,
2) ethnographic research,
3) grounded theory and
4) phenomenological research in Czech penology. The contribution will be supplemented by individual examples from fieldwork, some of which the author participated.