Author: carceralgeography

Prisoners’ images in Russia and California from ‘Prison Photography’

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Two fascinating posts from Prison Photography caught my eye this past week.

The first is a reference to Olga Chagaoutdinova‘s collection entitled ‘The Zone/Prisoners’  which was exhibited at Far East Museum of Fine Art, Khabarovsk, Russia, in 2006. Olga’s website reveals tantalisingly about the work behind the images, other than to say: ‘“Prisoners,” begun in 2005 and continued for two years, is a series of psychological portraits taken in a women’s prison in the Russian Far East. The intent of the project was to observe human existence in a panoptic and punishing environment. Extended interviews with the prisoners allowed me to investigate the notion of personal identity, virtually extinguished under the pressure and rules of the penal system. Gender issues and the official suppression of sexuality within the penitentiary system constituted a further aspect of my study.’ But the photographs are utterly compelling, and reminded me strongly of the women interviewed for my previous research with women incarcerated in Russia.

The other is a more contemporary piece which draws attention to an extraordinary 20 year ban on prisoners’ access to their own images in solitary confinement in California. Prisoners were banned from access to portrait images of themselves, despite the importance to families of tangible images of their loved ones – because photographs were apparently seen as potential ‘calling cards’ —” circulated by prison gang leaders — both to advise other members that they’re still in charge and to pass on orders.” The ban was eventually lifted in 2011, and in the article on which the post is based, the author Michael Montgomery quotes Sean Kernan, the former Under-Secretary of the CDCR “I think we were wrong, and I think (that) to this day,” he said. “How right is it to have an offender who is behaving … (and) to not be able to take a photo to send to his loved ones for 20 years?” Kernan directed prison staff to ease the restrictions for inmates who were free of any disciplinary violations.

As Montgomery points out, lack of access to images of themselves, a situation accentuated by the lack of mirrors in many cells, means that prisoners’ sense of identity is limited: “Some inmates complained to relatives of losing a sense of their own identity, even their own physical features. In addition to the photo ban, inmates at Pelican Bay do not have mirrors in their cells. “My brother tells me that sometimes he forgets how he looks. He doesn’t remember how he looks,” said Sylvia Rogokos of Los Angeles. Her brother, Frank Reyna, 51, was sent to Pelican Bay in 1992.”

Whilst lifting the ban is a major step forward, particularly for the prisoners’ families [“Seeing an image of their incarcerated relative for the first time in years has sparked renewed hope and revived dormant family connections. For others, the photographs are a shocking reminder of the length of time some inmates have been held in isolation.”]there is still a question of the use of prisoners’ images beyond the prison and their families. As Pete Brooks of Prison Photography points out, ‘in light of recent art market fetishism, it would seem the primary reason anyone would want to gather prison portraits would be to repeat Harper’s Books’ $45,000 hustle and cash in on the images’ He is referring to the recent sale of a collection of California prison polaroids – the ‘anonymous and previously unheard-of collection The Los Angeles Gang and Prison Photo Archive’ with an asking price of $45,000. As the post suggests, ‘if these images deserve a $45,000 price tag, they deserve a vast amount of research to uncover the stories behind them.’

Which brings us back to Olga Chagaoutdinova’s collection, where the images are evidently underpinned by discussion of the very issues raised by the portrait ban in California.

In any case, for those interested in prison images, Prison Photography is a superb resource with informed and thoughtful commentary. Take a look.

Terrferme Conference “Confinement viewed through the prism of the social sciences: Contrasting facilities, confronting approaches”

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The programme for the Terrferme 2013 conference “Confinement viewed through the prism of the social sciences: Contrasting facilities, confronting approaches.” has been released (conference details here) and the line-up suggests that this will be a fascinating event opening a space for diverse, international discussion of confinement.

I was honoured to be invited to join the scientific committee of the conference, and to provide some comment on one of the sessions, and I look forward to seeing everyone in Pessac in October!

Registration online before 16 October 2013 at http://terrferme13.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/7

Wednesday 16 October 2013

Opening speech: Denis Retaillé (Director of the Adess Research Centre); Michel Pernod (Vice Director of the Bordeaux 3 University Scientific Council)

Screening of the film A l’ombre de la République (In the shadow of the Republique, french version with English subtitle) and debate with the film-maker Stephane Mercurio

Thursday 17 October 2013

Introduction to the Conference: Bénédicte Michalon, Djemila Zeneidi (Adess, Cnrs/Univ. Bordeaux)

Sarah Curtis (Durham University) ‘Compassionate containment’? Balancing technical safety and therapy in the design of psychiatric wards 

Le continuum carceral / The Carceral Continuum

Chair :      Olivier Milhaud (ENeC, Cnrs/Univ. Paris IV)

  • Ruth Wilson Gilmore (City University of New York) Partition: Devolution, Realignment, and Challenge
  • Emmanuel Chauvin, Marie Morelle (Prodig, Cnrs/Univ. Paris 1) Des prisons et des camps de réfugiés : des modèles d’enfermement au service de la gestion des territoires ? / Managing territories through confinement? Prisons and refugee camps in Chad and Cameroon
  • Nathalie Bernardie-Tahir (Geolab, Cnrs/Univ. de Limoges,), Camille Schmoll (GeographieCités, Cnrs/Univ. Paris 7,) Enfermer les migrants indésirables : les échelles de l’enfermement en contexte insulaire (Malte) / Enclose unwanted migrants: scales of confinement in an island context (Malta)
  • Mahuya Bandyopadhyay (Univ. of Delhi) Confinement, Control and Resistance beyond the Carceral: Exploring Prison Para Connections
  • Lucie Bony (Lavue, Cnrs/Univ. Paris 10) L’incarcération dans les trajectoires individuelles : comment le passé résidentiel agit-il sur les manières d’habiter et de cohabiter en prison? / Incarceration and biographical trajectories: how does the residential past influence the way to live and coexist in prison?

Comments and Discussion: Georg Glasze (Univ. Erlangen-Nürnberg), Olivier Milhaud (ENeC, Cnrs/Univ. Paris IV)

Espace et pouvoir / Space and Power

Chair :      Marie Morelle (Prodig, Cnrs/Univ. Paris 1)

  • Kelly Gillepsie (Univ. Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) A post-apartheid prison? / Une prison post-apartheid?
  • Barbara Bauduin (Univ. Grenoble, Centre Marc Bloch Berlin), Nicolas Fischer (Cesdip, Cnrs/Univ. Versailles – Saint Quentin en Yvelines) Retenir sans détenir : jeux et enjeux d’architecture / Detention without Punishment: Issues and debates on administrative confinement architectures
  • Marine Bobin (Lisst, Cnrs/Univ. Toulouse Le Mirail,) Construire des prisons chez les Navajos : vers une « indigénisation » de la prison / Building jails in Navajo territory: toward an “indigenous” prison?
  • Alain Morice (Urmis, Cnrs/Univ. Paris 7) Le confinement des travailleurs saisonniers étrangers en Europe: propositions pour un modèle comparative / Confining seasonal workers through accommodation: some proposals to a comparative model in the European countries

Comments and Discussion : Olivier Razac (Ecole Nationale de l’Administration Pénitentiaire, Agen)

Chair :      Camille Lancelevée (Iris, EHESS, Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)

  • Fleur Guy (Evs, Cnrs/Univ. Lyon 2,) De la porte ouverte aux barbelés, usages de la contrainte spatiale dans les foyers de placement pour adolescents / From open doors to barbed wire: the use of spatial constraints in teenage foster institutions
  • Lilian Ayete-Nyampong (Wageningen Univ.) Underlife of a total institution: Ethnography of confinement sites in Ghana for juvenile and young offenders / La vie clandestine d’une institution totale : ethnographie de lieux d’enfermement pour adolescents et jeunes délinquants au Ghana
  • Anna Schliehe (Univ. of Glasgow) Re-discovering Goffman : Contemporary carceral geography and the ‘total’ institution / Re-découvrir Goffman : la géographie carcérale contemporaine et l’institution « totale »

Comments and Discussion : André-Frédéric Hoyaux (Adess, Cnrs/Univ. Bordeaux)

Friday 18 October 2013

Pluralité des acteurs de l’enfermement et mise en tension des institutions / Institutions facing the diversity of the actors of confinement

Professionals in confinement settings

Chair :      Mathilde Darley (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)

  • Nicolas Sallée (Univ. Paris Ouest) Au bord de l’incarcération. Les éducateurs de la Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse à l’épreuve de leur intervention en centres éducatifs fermés / At the Edge of the Prison. A Study of Educational Practices in French Juvenile Closed Centres
  • Arnaud Frauenfelder (Univ. of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Genève), Eva Nada (Univ. Neuchatel), Géraldine Bugnon (Univ. Genève) « Pluridisciplinarité et ouverture sur l’extérieur » : des agents d’encadrement à l’épreuve d’une réforme d’une prison pour mineurs / “Multidisciplinarity and outward orientation”: managerial staff challenged by juvenile prison reform
  • Camille Lancelevée (Iris, EHESS Paris, Centre Marc Bloch Berlin) Quand la prison annexe l’hôpital ? La place des soins psychiatriques en milieu pénitentiaire en France / When prison encroaches upon hospital? Psychiatric care in the French prison system
  • Adelaïde Bargeau (Sage, Cnrs/Univ. de Strasbourg,) La réforme de la garde à vue : la fin du « huis clos policier » ? / The Effects of the French Police Custody Reform on Interrogation Conditions

Comments and Discussion : Gilles Chantraine (Clersé, Cnrs/Univ. Lille 1), Mathilde Darley (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)

(Dé)construire l’ordre / (De)constructing Order

Chair :      Gilles Chantraine (Clersé, Cnrs/Univ. Lille 1)

  • Yasmine Bouagga (IRIS, EHESS Paris) Le droit à la conquête des territoires d’enfermement ? Questions sur de paradoxales circulations et usages du droit dans les lieux de privation de liberté, à partir du cas de la prison / Can legal rights conquer places of confinement? Questions on paradoxal circulations and uses of law in prison
  • Benoît Eyraud (Centre Max Weber, Cnrs/Univ. Lyon2,), Livia Velpry (Univ. Paris 8) Malades difficiles et détenus souffrants : différences et similarités du rôle de l’enfermement dans le soin psychiatrique specialise / Difficult patients and suffering prisoners. The role of confinement in specialized psychiatric care
  • Fabrice Fernandez (IRIS, EHESS Paris) Humaniser la sanction ? Le traitement carcéral de l’indiscipline / Humanizing punishment? The carceral treatment of indiscipline
  • Grégory Salle (Clersé, Cnrs/Univ. Lille 1) La marchandisation de la gestion carcérale en France et en Allemagne : esquisse de généalogie compare / Can we speak of a commodification of European prison systems? France and Germany compared

Comments and Discussion : Carolina Kobelinsky (St Antony’s College, Univ. of Oxford)

Des institutions face aux transferts de normes  / Institutions and the circulation of standards

Chair :      Carolina Kobelinsky (St Antony’s College, Univ. of Oxford)

  • Helga Zichner (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig), Bettina Bruns (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig) The standards of confinement in the Western Newly Independent States (WNIS) – an aspect of the EU immigration policy in Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova / Les normes de l’enfermement dans les Nouveaux Etats Indépendants Occidentaux – Un aspect de la politique migratoire de l’UE en Biélorussie, Ukraine et Moldavie
  • Andrew M. Jefferson (Dignity – Danish Institute Against Torture, Copenhagen) Surviving Philippine Prisons – an account of entangled encounters / Survivre dans les prisons philippines : des relations entrecroisées

Comments and Discussion :  Djemila Zeneidi (Adess, Cnrs/Univ. Bordeaux)

L’enfermement à l’épreuve des inégalités. Production de l’altérité et assignations identitaires / Confinement and Inequality. Production of Otherness and Identity assignements

Chair : Tristan Bruslé (Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes, Cnrs)

  • Jérémie Gauthier (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin) Contrôler, vérifier et garder à vue. Effets sociaux des pratiques policières d’immobilisation et d’enfermement / Check, search and custody measures. Social effects of law enforcement practices
  • Elise Roche (Evs, Cnrs/Insa de Lyon,) Construire contre l’enfermement. Le village d’insertion Rom : l’hébergement au risque des logiques carcérales / Building against confinement: the case of Roma people’s shelters
  • Camille Boutron (Ifea Lima, Ird) Incarcération politique et trajectoires militantes féminines. L’espace carcéral comme enjeu de contrôle social et de mobilisation politique des femmes au Pérou (1980 – 2010) / Political incarceration and female combatant careers. Prison space as a challenge for the social control and the political mobilization of Peruvian women (1980- 2010)
  • Louise Tassin (Urmis, Cnrs/Univ. Nice) Le clandestin tunisien et le réfugié africain. Catégories et discriminations dans le centre fermé de Lampedusa (Italie) / The undocumented Tunisian and the African refugee. Categories and discriminations in the detention center of Lampedusa(Italy)
  • Aurore Mottet (Urmis, Cnrs/Univ. Nice) Rapports interethniques en situation d’enfermement : le « penser ethnique » des organisations humanitaires. / Ethnic relations in confinement: the “ethnic-thinking” of humanitarian associations
  • Guillaume Le Blanc (Univ. Bordeaux 3) Migrants indésirables / Unwanted migrants

Comments and Discussion : Andrew M. Jefferson (Dignity – Danish Institute Against Torture, Copenhagen), Tristan Bruslé (Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes, Cnrs)

Saturday 17 October 2013

Mobilités et enfermement / Mobilities and confinement

Chair : Olivier Clochard (Migrinter, Cnrs/Univ. Poitiers)

  • Lauren Martin (Univ. of Oulu, Finland) Detention and the Production of Migrant Precarity / Rétention et précarisation du migrant
  • Stéphanie Latte-Abdallah (Iremam, Cnrs/Univ. Aix-Marseille) Entre la prison. Incarcération politique, porosités et mobilités en Palestine après 2000 / Prison: in and out. Political Incarceration, porosity and mobility in Palestine after 2000
  • David Scheer (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Circulations internes en établissement pénitentiaire : à la recherche du disciplinaire manqué ? / Internal flows in prison: the quest to the missed discipline?
  • Caroline Touraut (Centre Max Weber Lyon, Ined) Trajectoires et mobilités des détenus âgés en France / Old prisoners’ constrained mobility. The case of French prisons

Comments and Discussion : Dominique Moran (Univ. of Birmingham), Olivier Clochard (Migrinter, Cnrs/Univ. Poitiers)

Lorna Rhodes (Univ. of Washington, Seattle) Thinking through the institutional interior / Penser l’intérieur de l’institution

Concluding discussion

Research Fellow position on ESRC project

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University of Birmingham

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences 8-2754esrc-logo

Research Fellow in Prison Visitation and Reoffending

Salary from £27,578 to £38,140 a year

We are looking to recruit a post-doctoral researcher to work on a cutting-edge ESRC-funded Project, Breaking the Cycle? Prison Visitation and Recidivism in the UK. This project seeks to enhance understanding of the relationship between prison visitation and reoffending in the UK, to explore the experience of prison visitation for prisoners, visitors and prison personnel, providing a new perspective on visitation, and paying particular attention to its socio-spatial context. The 2.5 year post facilitates work across the academic disciplines of geography, psychology and criminology, and the post holder will work closely with key stakeholders to integrate findings into policy development, with a view to increasing the effectiveness of visitation in assisting positive post-release outcomes. HMP Hewell will be the primary case study and the researcher will be based at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Birmingham, also working closely with the School of Psychology.

We are looking for a person with excellent qualitative research skills; preference will be given to candidates with experience of qualitative or ethnographic research within prisons, with prisoners, their friends and families, and with prison personnel. The successful candidate will also be required to undertake some quantitative research, with guidance from the investigators and project partners, and will have the opportunity to undertake training in psychological research methods as appropriate. A PhD or equivalent is essential, with candidates from criminology, geography, psychology, and social science backgrounds being considered. In addition to collecting data, the post holder will be expected to play a substantial role in determining the priorities for research, data analysis, writing and presenting findings.

For more information, please contact Dominique Moran d.moran@bham.ac.uk

New papers in carceral geography

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I’ve been away for a little while, and in the meantime there have been some fascinating papers published which may be of interest to carceral geographers:

For geographers of incarceration working with Agamben’s notion of the space of exception, Marco Antonsich’s recent paper in Area may be of interest. In his paper about the buffer zone between the two sovereign entities of the island of Cyprus, he draws “on a post-colonial reading of this Agambenian notion”, and “analyses the specifics of a ‘terrain of resistance’ deliberately located in the exception”. The paper argues that “rather than being a dispossessing condition, the exception might actually be empowering, because it offers the activists a terrain from which to contest the very norm that they are escaping.”

Karen M Morin’s new paper, published earlier this year in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, entitled “”Security here is not safe”: violence, punishment, and space in the contemporary US penitentiary” addresses the applicability of Agamben to the carceral context. The paper takes as its focus the US penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which was retrofitted in 2008 to offer the country’s first federal Special Management Unit (SMU) programme of its kind. This model SMU is designed for federal inmates from around the country identified as the most intractably troublesome, and features double-celling of inmates in tiny spaces, in 23-hour or 24-hour a day lockdown, requiring them to pass through a two-year programme of readjustment. These spatial tactics, and the philosophy of punishment underlying them, contrast with the modern reform ideals upon which the prison was designed and built in 1932. The SMU represents the latest punitive phase in American penology, one that neither simply eliminates men as in the premodern spectacle, nor creates the docile, rehabilitated bodies of the modern panopticon; rather, it is a late-modern structure that produces only fear, terror, violence, and death. This SMU represents the latest of the late-modern prisons, similar to other supermax facilities in the US but offering its own unique system of punishment as well. While the prison exists within the system of American law and jurisprudence, it also manifests features of Agamben’s lawless, camp-like space that emerges during a state of exception, exempt from outside scrutiny with inmate treatment typically beyond the scope of the law.

This paper represents part of Karen Morin’s current research focus, which she discussed in her “Carceral Space and the Usable Past” Distinguished Historical Geography Plenary Lecture, presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles, 2013. Focusing on mass incarceration trends in the U.S., her talk built on an historical geography of the carceral state. It asked what have historical geographers contributed to discussions of U.S. mass incarceration – what spaces, knowledges, and practices have caught our attention, and why? And where should we go from here? Karen argued that in order to build towards other possible non-carceral futures we need to pragmatically distinguish the “usable past.”

In early view on the website of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Anne Bonds’ new paper “Economic Development, Racialization, and Privilege: “Yes in My Backyard” Prison Politics and the Reinvention of Madras, Oregon” takes further her work on prison siting. The article draws from geographic engagements with theories of racialization and NIMBYism to explore connections between economic development and the relational construction of racial identities. In the paper, Bonds investigates the discourses of local white leadership surrounding two interconnected economic agendas crafted with the goal of remaking the central Oregon town of Madras into an upscale, white community, including (1) entrepreneurial prison development, and (2) an urban renewal project emphasizing high-income residential construction and the removal of “blighted” housing. Community leaders framed these developments as essential to changing perceptions of Madras based on its racial makeup and entrenched poverty. White officials promoted prison recruitment and upscale housing development through a normative racial framework that reaffirmed the privileged status of whites, stigmatized Latinos and Native Americans, and (re)produced unequal spaces. Through this empirical focus, she calls attention to the centrality of race in economic practices, emphasizing how racialized privilege and marginalization are reproduced through development agendas that give shape to geographies of opportunity and (dis)advantage.

Fully funded ESRC PhD studentship in Carceral Geography

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Fully funded ESRC PhD Studentship8-2754esrc-logo

The role of prison architecture and aesthetics in the relationship between prisons and host communities.

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES), University of Birmingham, UK

Supervisors: Dr Dominique Moran, Senior Lecturer in Human and Carceral Geography (GEES) and (externally) Prof. Yvonne Jewkes (Department of Criminology, University of Leicester).

Applications are invited for the above studentship commencing 1st January 2014. This is an ESRC-funded grant-linked studentship which provides a stipend of £13,726 p.a. plus tuition fees at the UK/EU rate for up to three years (full-time only). Due to funding restrictions, this studentship is open to UK and EU applicants only.

About the main project and grant-linked studentship:

The UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) have made an award for a research project entitled “‘Fear-suffused environments’ or potential to rehabilitate? Prison architecture, design and technology and the lived experience of carceral spaces”. The project investigators, Professor Yvonne Jewkes (University of Leicester, UK) and Dr Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham, UK), will be addressing two over-arching questions – how are penal aims and philosophies (that is, what prison is ‘for’) expressed in prison architecture and design, and how effective is prison architecture, design and technology (ADT) in conveying and delivering that penal purpose? The study seeks to meet its objectives by (a) studying the process of designing new prison buildings in order to understand what it is that architects are asked to deliver and how they achieve this, and (b) studying ADT’s impacts and effects on a range of end users, focusing on the experience of occupying and moving in and around prison spaces, in relation to prisoners’ quality of life and wellbeing, perceptions of penal legitimacy, compliance with the regime, prisoner-staff relations, staff work satisfaction and so on. The project will focus on two newly built UK prisons, and contrast these with two prisons in Norway and Denmark, where penal philosophies differ greatly from those in the UK.

The grant-linked studentship

The main research project asks what impact the architecture, design, and spatial organization of prisons has on the experience of imprisonment, on the behaviour of those who occupy and move through carceral spaces, and on staff-prisoner and staff-management relationships. The PhD studentship extends the reach of this question to a new and different group – members of local communities which surround prisons. It is premised on a understanding that, despite the wealth of research on local responses to proposed prison building projects, the impact of prisons on local economic development, and the “NIMBY” response, the specific impact of prison architecture and aesthetics on those who live within the immediate vicinity of prisons is not known.

Context and Research Design

The studentship will draw upon existing research within both criminology and carceral geography on prison siting and the relationships between prisons and local communities. Although this literature has tended to focus on the traditional opposition of communities to location of prisons close by, (based on local residents’ concerns that a prison may lower property values, increase levels of crime, endanger their safety through escapes, attract ‘undesirable’ elements and damage the reputation of the area), there is increasingly an alternative perspective, of the generation of ‘profit through punishment’. In more recent work, demand for the building of prisons to stimulate local economic development and employment has been identified, especially on the part of small rural towns in the United States, with a shift towards policymakers actively locating prisons in ‘lagging’ communities. This recent work has drawn attention to the lack of structural economic change in persistently poor rural places, and prison facilities’ inability to foster economy-wide change in terms of serving as an economic development initiative. However, in focusing on structural economic change associated with prison siting, it has been unable to tackle questions about the response of local communities to the aesthetic appearance of the prisons themselves, and the importance of prison architecture in the ‘acceptance’ of prison siting close to existing communities. There are grounds to suggest that the aesthetic appearance of prisons is of considerable, yet under-explored, importance for local residents.

The PhD studentship will build upon existing work by contributing to the growing international debate on prison siting using examples from the UK context, and it will complement the main project by investigating the architectural consequences of the transformations in UK prison architecture on the communities which surround prisons.

Career development

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the main project, and of the supervisory team for the PhD project, along with postgraduate training in research methods and transferable and employable skills, this PhD studentship would enable the successful candidate to build an academic and professional CV which would enable them to pursue an academic research career in a range of disciplinary areas. There would be opportunities for joint publication with the supervisory team of main project co-I and PI, as well as opportunities to develop networking skills through participation in dissemination and impact activities, and to contribute to the main project website, www.prisonspaces.com, as appropriate. At Birmingham, the successful candidate would join a thriving Postgraduate Research community in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and would be part of the Birmingham Community and Criminal Justice Group – the University’s very wide-ranging criminology scholarship network.

Eligibility

Applicants will have a good first degree in a relevant social science discipline. An MSc/MA postgraduate degree in a related field is also highly desirable. Applicants should have excellent oral and written presentation skills, and experience with qualitative research methods.

Application

The closing date for applications is 30th September 2013. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to an interview, to take place soon after the closing date for applications.

To apply, please contact Dr Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk).

New ESRC-funded research project: “‘Fear-suffused environments’ or potential to rehabilitate?”

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8-2754esrc-logoThe UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) have made an award of £728k for a research project entitled “‘Fear-suffused environments’ or potential to rehabilitate?  Prison architecture, design and technology and the lived experience of carceral spaces”. The project investigators, Professor Yvonne Jewkes (University of Leicester, UK) and Dr Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham, UK), will be addressing two over-arching questions – how are penal aims and philosophies (that is, what prison is ‘for’) expressed in prison architecture and design, and how effective is prison architecture, design and technology (ADT) in conveying and delivering that penal purpose? The study seeks to meet its objectives by (a) studying the process of designing new prison buildings in order to understand what it is that architects are asked to deliver and how they achieve this, and (b) studying ADT’s impacts and effects on a range of end users, focusing on the experience of occupying and moving in and around prison spaces, in relation to prisoners’ quality of life and wellbeing, perceptions of penal legitimacy, compliance with the regime, prisoner-staff relations, staff work satisfaction and so on. The project will focus on two newly built UK prisons, and contrast these with two prisons in Norway and Denmark, where penal philosophies differ greatly from those in the UK.

The project will provide funding for a Postdoctoral Research Assistant, based at the Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, and for a PhD studentship at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, both to start in January 2014. Ads for these two positions will be posted soon – watch this space.

New book: “Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention”

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‘Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention‘ (Ashgate, 2013) edited by Dominique Moran, Nick Gill and Deirdre Conlon.moran_gen 55 cover.QXD_mobility and agency

This book draws together the work of a new community of scholars with a growing interest in carceral geography: the geographical study of practices of imprisonment and detention. It combines work by geographers in ‘mainstream’ penal establishments that incarcerate people convicted of a crime by the prevailing legal system, with geographers’ recent work on migrant detention centres, in which refused asylum seekers, irregular migrants and some others are detained, ostensibly pending decisions on admittance or repatriation. In each of these contexts, contributions investigate the geographical location and spatialities of institutions, the nature of spaces of incarceration and detention and experiences inside them, governmentality and prisoner agency, cultural geographies of penal spaces, and mobility in the carceral context. In dialogue with emergent and topical agendas in geography around mobility, space and agency, and in relation to international policy challenges such as the (dis)functionality of imprisonment, and the search for alternatives to detention, the book draws upon and speaks back to geography, criminology and prison sociology.

The book presents original empirical research from the USA, Colombia, Russia, France, the UK, Ireland and Romania, bringing together papers initially presented for themed sessions organised at the Annual Conference of the AAG in Washington, DC, USA and the Annual Conference of the RGS-IBG in London, UK, both in 2010. Apart from the editors, contributors include Lauren L Martin, Matt Mitchelson, Olivier Milhaud, Bénédicte Michalon, Julie De Dardel, Jennifer Turner, Nancy Hiemstra and Mason McWatters, with reflective pieces from Alison Mountz and Yvonne Jewkes.  The broad conceptual focus and wide geographic net is consistent with the goals of sparking insight, dialogue and new connections across ordinarily distinct areas.

This book was published last month and launched at the 2013 Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, in a roundtable session featuring editors and contributors. It’s available for purchase via Ashgate and Amazon.

Reviews: 

‘From Nick Gill’s eye-opening discussion of the relationship between freedom and mobility, to Deirdre Conlon’s fascinating Foucauldian analysis of the hunger strike, this book offers analyses that are empirically strong and theoretically innovative. From a criminological perspective, the book manages chapter by chapter to break new ground even in a familiar territory. You should read it.’
Thomas Ugelvik, University of Oslo, Norway

‘Engaging, thought-provoking and insightful, Carceral Spaces shines a much-needed light on contemporary practices of incarceration and detention. Required reading for anyone interested in confinement and the control of ‘problematic’ populations in a globalised world.’
Alexandra Hall, University of York, UK and author of Borderwatch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control

‘Prisons and immigration detention facilities ostensibly draw sharp divisions between who is inside and who is outside, who is good and who is bad, who is included and who is excluded from society. Contributors to this important volume undermine these dualisms with rich empirical evidence and strong theoretical elaboration that advance the burgeoning field of carceral geography, and offer fresh perspectives to migration studies and criminologists’ study of “punishment and society”. Carceral Spaces gathers original research on prison regimes and immigration detention estates from an impressive array of sites. This comparative dimension illustrates the international unevenness of spatial practices of confinement. Despite their differences, all carceral regimes create and rely on carceral spaces and carceral mobilities. Indeed, close attention to the relationship between the state’s power to confine and to forcibly move people is the book’s greatest strength. Together, they challenge the idea that prison cells fully extinguish political agency and that mobility necessarily means total freedom. Instead, careful documentation and nuanced theorization of this relationship offers scholars and activists new understandings of state power. This knowledge hopefully can enable people who are confined and their allies to end carceral regimes and the harms they create’. 
Jenna Loyd, co-editor of Beyond Walls and Cages

Stopping them ‘upping sticks and moving somewhere else’ – restrictions on UK released prisoners’ mobility

/ carceralgeography

Speaking after a recent Commons evidence hearing, UK Justice Secretary Chris Grayling stated his intention to ban released prisoners from moving around the country when they leave jail to ensure they complete their rehabilitation programmes. As reported in The Guardian today, the justice secretary said tougher conditions would be imposed on released prisoners from short sentences so that they could not “move 200 miles up the road for no reason”.

The move was justified by Grayling by describing the current situation as “quite chaotic”, and implying that newly released prisoners’ mobility around the country fuels high reoffending rates. “I do not think that anybody who has come out of prison and is subject to a supervision arrangement should be free to up sticks and move somewhere else”.

Grayling’s words and his intention to restict the movement of released prisoners extend the debate over prisoner mobility and the reach of the carceral system beyond the prison walls. The theme of mobility and punishment has been prevalent within carceral geography for some time, with Nick Gill’s 2009 paper on governmental mobility and the UK asylum estate, and Dominique Moran, Laura Piacentini and Judith Pallot’s 2012 paper on disciplined, or forced mobility, in the Russian prison system.  These papers draw attention to the theorisation of mobility and power, and specifically, the consideration of mobility as an expression of power, in that the forced mobility of detained migrants and prisoners shapes the experience of confinement on the part of these groups. In a forthcoming book chapter focusing on electronic monitoring systems used to track former inmates and detainees beyond the spaces of prison, Gill further discusses mobilities operating as ‘vehicle’ to alternatively deny or deliver punishment vis-à-vis  liberty.

The suggestion by Grayling that prisoners’ mobility be restricted after release in order that they complete rehabilitation programmes echoes these arguments. On the one hand, the extension of spatial fixity beyond the prison wall suggests that the prisoner’s own home and community becomes something of a ‘transcarceral’ space of reconfinement, in which the regime of the prison takes form through a respatialised notion of the carceral. On the other, the apparently essential link between this transcarceral spatial fixity and the ‘betterment’ of rehabilitation sees spatial and social mobility in conflict one with the other. In order to realise the benefits of rehabilitation, in terms of reduced reoffending and improved social mobility, the prisoner must sacrifice physical mobility and the self-determination of location afforded to free citizens.

Although Graylings recent words were couched in concerns over how the UK’s ‘payment by results’ policy on reducing reoffending would operate in practice, his remarks over former prisoner mobility suggest that ‘punitive mobility’ and the extension of the carceral beyond the space of the prison are themes which remain pertinent to the UK context, and which merit further investigation by carceral geographers.

Bastoy Prison Island: “loss of liberty is all the punishment they suffer”

/ carceralgeography

In today’s Guardian, Erwin James visits Norway’s Bastoy prison to look at conditions branded ‘cushy’ and ‘luxurious’, but which deliver the lowest recidivism rates in Europe. The report details the conditions in which prisoners live in Bastoy (in self catering ‘pod’ communities) rather than in mass cellular accommodation, and the attitude towards punishment which prevails in Scandinavia. Even in Norway’s Skien maximum security prison, the loss of liberty is all the punishment that prisoner are intended to suffer.

This report from Bastoy reinforces the differences in penal systems with which carceral geographers are concerned, and recalls the philosophy towards the conditions of imprisonment in neighbouring Finland which is displayed in the Sentences Enforcement Act: “Punishment is a mere loss of liberty: The enforcement of sentence must be organised so that the sentence is only loss of liberty. Punishment shall be enforced so that it does not unnecessarily impede but, if possible, promotes a prisoner’s placement in society. Harms caused by imprisonment must be prevented, if possible. The circumstances in a penal institution must be organised so that they correspond to those prevailing in the rest of society. Prisoners must be treated justly and respecting their human dignity.”

What this essentially means is that Finland has for decades been decoupled from the US (and increasingly the European) tendency to politicize criminal justice policy to the extent that criminal justice becomes a political tool rather than a balanced assessment of criminal justice interventions. As Lappi-Seppälä (2002, 33) observes, in these contexts ‘the higher the level of political authority, the more simplistic the approaches advocated. The results can be seen in slogans that are compressed into two or three words, including “prison works”, “war on drugs” and “zero tolerance”’ which in turn leads politicians to ‘pander to punitive (or presumably punitive) public opinion with harsh tough-on-crime campaigns’. In Finland, prison is not considered to “work” and the solutions to social problems are not ‘sought where they cannot be found – the penal system’ (ibid 33). In Norway and Finland, then, it may be argued that prison policy is informed more by an understanding of the likely success of specific interventions for the stated aims of incarceration, than by a political imperative to respond to public opinion, or as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002, 16) has argued, to use the prison system as ‘a project of state-building’ (Moran & Keinänen, 2012).

Much of the work within the new sub-discipline of carceral geography originates in or pertains to the highly incarcerative, or ‘hypercarcerative’ contexts of the US, the UK and the Russian Federation, raising questions over the transferability of theorisations of the carceral to other less carcerative, or actively ‘de-carcerative’ settings. By drawing attention to the penal context of Scandinavia, this Guardian article underlines the need to pay particular attention to context when theorising carceral space.