The Abstract submission for the European Society of Criminology conference held from 13th to 16th September 2017 in Cardiff, Wales has opened, and a specific call for papers might be of interest to carceral geographers.

Ellie Bates, Coordinator of the ESC 2017 Space, Place and Crime Panels Organizing Committee (on behalf of Wouter Steenbeek, Marre Lammers and Christophe Vandeviver of the Space, Place and Crime ESC Working Group http://www.space-place-crime.eu/) have published following CFP.

The Space, Place and Crime ESC Working Group would like to start organizing coordinated Space, Place and Crime panels for this year’s conference, following last year’s highly successful full day of excellent and interesting Crime and Place panels in Münster.

Similar to last year in Münster, they welcome suggestions for both, full panels, or individual papers, that focus on space, place and crime research.

The call is open to everyone, whether or not you are a member of the Space, Place and Crime working group (yet). The organisers warmly welcome papers on any aspect of research into Space, Place and Crime including both theoretical, and empirical research; and both quantitative, and qualitative methods.

If you are interested in presenting on a Space, Place and Crime panel at ESC 2017 they require the following:

For individual papers:

Please send your name, school/organization affiliation, title of presentation, and a presentation abstract (200 words), as well as the name, e-mail addresses and affiliations of any co-authors. Their task will then be to sort individual contributions and propose well-structured panels to the Cardiff organizers.

For full panels:

Panels can feature up to 4 papers. Please send the title of a proposed panel session and a 200 word abstract describing the panel plus full details for each of the individual papers proposed to be included within the panel [Lead presenter name, school/organization affiliation, title of presentation, and a presentation abstract (200 words), as well as the name, e-mail addresses and affiliations of any co-authors].

Please note all submissions must be in English, the official language of EUROCRIM 2017. All presentations based on accepted abstract submissions must be made in English.

As stated above, the ESC submission deadline is 15 June 2017, in order to arrange panels well in advance, the organisers are asking for submissions no later than Friday 12 May 2017.

Please send all submissions and/or questions to Ellie Bates (ellie.bates@ed.ac.uk).

The organisers hope to reply no later than 7 June 2017, 1 week before the ESC submission deadline. Please note that the final decision on acceptance of panels and papers lies with the Cardiff organizing committee.

The conference website can be found here:

https://www.eurocrim2017.com/

For any UK carceral geographers not attending the AAG2017 next week, this conference looks like a great opportunity:

Liverpool Hope University is hosting a British Society of Criminology one day conference on Low level sanctions on Wednesday 5th April, at Hope Park Campus.

Speakers include: Prof. George Mair, (Liverpool Hope), Prof. Martin Wasik (Keele), Prof. Sir Anthony Bottoms (Cambridge), Dr Adam Snow (Liverpool Hope), Dr Natalia Vibla (Liverpool Hope), Dr Sara Grace (Salford University) and Dr John Bache (Magistrates Association).

This conference is a joint venture between the British Society of Criminology and the Social Sciences Department at Liverpool Hope University. The aim of this conference is to interrogate how low level sentences (those imposed by the courts) and penalties (out of court disposals, including cautions and community resolutions, imposed by a range of enforcement agencies) are used to deal with criminality in a proportionate manner. It will examine the extent, meaning, messages and purposes of the low level sentence, and penalty, by drawing on nascent research and practitioner knowledge to provide a holistic understanding of the impact of low level sentences on criminal justice policy.

This conference will bring together academics, post graduates and practitioners in the field of sentencing and community justice. It aims to provide insight into the applicability of sentencing theory to low level offences and ask critical questions about the purposes, experiences and trends of low level sentences and penalties.

This is a FREE event. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Dr Adam Snow (snowa@hope.ac.uk) for catering purposes and evening wine reception.

The recent opening of HMP Berwyn, the UK’s newest prison, was heralded by two fascinating news reports. In the first, the Welsh Daily Post reported that ‘Anarchists claim they sabotaged the foundations of Wrexham’s new prison making it “structurally unsound”’. The attacks, claimed on the anonymous ‘325’ blog, allegedly took place in 2015; “a strong acidic powder was poured into the excavations of the groundfloor slabs of two of the prison’s houseblocks. This has made two of these buildings structurally unsound – their foundations will eventually crumble and the buildings could collapse over time”. The UK Ministry of Justice denied the claims, saying “There is absolutely no evidence to suggest the foundations of any building at the prison have been tampered with.” In the second news report, journalists reflected on the ‘unique environment’ of HMP Berwyn, describing its colourful nature, the presence of wall art and inspirational messages, and the philosophy of the institution, explained by Governor Russ Trent as an integral part of the rehabilitative ethos of the prison.

For carceral geographers, these pieces, which both focus, albeit in starkly different ways, on the built environment and its propensity to enable challenge to the assumed function of imprisonment, stimulate reflection on the significance of spaces of incarceration.

The prison ‘fabric’ frequently comes under attack from the ‘inside’, via disturbances and riots, including those which have happened over the past few months in the UK, targeting the materiality of the building. At HMP Birmingham in late 2016, for example, an estimated £2m of damage was done to the fabric of the prison buildings by prisoners aggrieved at conditions and staffing levels. But attacks on the fabric of a prison from the ‘outside’ are less common. Anarchists posting on the 325 blog claimed that their alleged attacks on the foundation slabs of the prison were “dedicated to every human being that has died in the prison system at the hands of the State” and part of their wider “opposition to all mega prisons being built and the continuing growth of the prison-industrial complex”. In apparently targeting the fabric of the buildings in addition to protesting outside of them, such actions draw attention to the propensity of the built environment to crystallise and express punitive philosophy.

But arguably the built environment of HMP Berwyn is itself attempting to destabilise ideas about what prison is ‘for’ and what it can ‘do’.  With Justice Secretary Liz Truss enshrining ministerial duty to rehabilitate prisons into UK law for the first time, HMP Berwyn seems to be attempting, (within the context of a building commissioned and designed some time ago), to enhance the rehabilitative potential of the prison’s built environment, and the ways in which it is to be managed by a staffing group selected with the rehabilitative ethos in mind.

A recent paper emerging out of an ongoing project considers the processes of procurement, commissioning, tendering, project management and bureaucratisation – termed ‘architectural assembly’ – that shape (what will become) carceral spaces.  In focusing on what happens before a building takes physical form, albeit overlooking such anarchistic ‘attacks’ on incomplete buildings, it draws attention to the to the ‘inhabitation’ of buildings: an awareness of the situated and everyday practices through which a building is used. Thus seen, buildings are sites in which a myriad of users and things come into contact in numerous, complex, planned, spontaneous and unexpected ways; encounters are embodied and multi-sensory; and resonant of the power structures that exist both within and outwith the building.

Concern for the ‘inhabitation’ of prison buildings, therefore, may lead us to consider direct ‘attacks’ on their materiality – from both the ‘inside’ and, less conventionally, the ‘outside’, but also their ongoing modification, and the everyday interactions which take place spatially within them. Arguably both may serve to challenge and ‘destabilise’ the prison; or at least, our ideas about its functional purpose.

There is a funded PhD opportunity for a suitable candidate to undertake research at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, under the supervision of Dr. Yiwen Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) and Prof. Barry Godfrey (University of Liverpool, UK).The title of the proposed project is: The Reuse of Decommissioned Prisons in the Heritage Industry: Comparative Research in China and UK (化遗产产业中关于退役监狱的再利用─中国和英国案例比较研究）

Further details, including eligibility requirements, are available here http://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/assets/files/admissions/phd-projects/upd/RDF-16-01-22.pdf

The proposed project takes a comparative approach to examine ethical, commercial, and academic issues in the re-use of former prisons by the heritage industry. It focuses on transformation and trans-institutionalization of defunct prisons and considers prison reuse from an interdisciplinary perspective – history, criminology and architecture. In particular, it raises questions on how tourism sector’s commodification of heritage may have reshaped our accepted norms for the present use of the past; and how contemporary societies’ perception of prisons – and subsequently discernments of historical prisoners and crimes – may have been re-conceptualized by the new use. Investigation into different societies’ attitudes toward the reuse of prison structures and sites will further broaden our understanding about cultural nuances in perception and variance in ability to transcend the stigma of the past use. The research findings will provide a guide for heritage-experts as to how buildings once used for punishment and incarceration can now be re-purposed for the leisure and education sector, bringing new understandings to the public about their architectural and social pasts.

For further information, and to make enquiries, please follow the link above.