["Area, Volume 58, Issue 3, September 2026. ", "\nShort Abstract\nThis article is oriented within the logic of the decolonial framework to examine prison entry, ethical considerations and emotional vulnerability, using Ghana as a case study. The study highlights how the African ethos of communalism and shared identity, which I called Ti jaa bonyeni, can serve as a resource for mitigating the challenges inherent in prison research, including ethical considerations, entry and emotions. The reflections I present here from a postcolonial context hold significance to the growing calls to rethink and decolonise prison research.\n\nABSTRACT\nThis reflexive article examines prison research—ethics, entry and emotions—within a postcolonial context. Based on my experiences and reflections from conducting fieldwork in Ghana's only maximum‐ and medium‐security prisons, I demonstrate how ethical considerations and international intervention create multiple silences among prison officers in prison governance in a postcolonial context. This impedes knowledge creation in Ghana's prison spaces. Ultimately, institutional practices, compliance with international standards and regulations, and ethical considerations in research have a cascading effect of reproducing and sustaining the power dynamics they seek to address. These external interventions, along with my positionalities and fieldwork negotiations, are contextualised within the broader politics of decolonial thinking. Within this context, I argue that researchers' lived experiences and background could serve as a resource for navigating prison power relations and empowering incarcerated people to share their stories with researchers. The reflections I present here from a postcolonial context hold significance to the growing calls to rethink and decolonise prison research.\n"]