Job Opportunities: Research in Immigration Detention

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A quick update on two job opportunities in immigration detention: these are excellent opportunities both for postdoctoral work led by outstanding scholars, and in critical areas – brief details and links are below:

Fellow of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law (Part-time) to research The Rule of Law and Immigration Detention in Europe

The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law is seeking to appoint one strong candidate to assist with research for a study on The Rule of Law and Immigration Detention in Europe. The post is part-time (equivalent to three days per week) and consists of research with no teaching duties. The post will enable the Fellow to work directly with a broad network of scholars, practitioners, judges, government officials, international institutions and others working in this field.

The aim of the study is to explore existing international, European and domestic standards regarding the use of immigration detention with a view toward producing a report and a set of Guidelines. The Guidelines will streamline existing standards and update them into a single document that takes into account domestic and international practice and case law, as well as standards derived from existing declarations, resolutions and other soft law instruments. They are intended for consultation by those people who make decisions relating to detention on a daily basis, and as a source for individuals currently in detention or facing detention proceedings to understand their rights, and any limitations thereof. The full project description is available here.

Associate Research Fellow

The University of Exeter College of Life and Environmental Sceinces is looking to appoint a Associate Research Fellow to support Dr. Nick Gill’s investigation into disparities in asylum appeal success rates at different courts around the UK. This unique ESRC funded post is available from January 2013 on an 18 month fixed term contract. The successful applicant will become part of a dynamic research team based at the University of Exeter with links to legal scholars at both Plymouth University and University College London. They will work at the University of Exeter for part of the contract period, conducting literature reviews and drafting both academic and non-academic outputs. They will also conduct a three month ethnography of an immigration court in the UK and another six month detailed observation of a different court in the UK.

The Eclipse of Prison Ethnography? Reflections on the Symposium

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I had the pleasure of attending the first day of the International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR)’s “Resisting the Eclipse: An International Symposium on Prison Ethnography” event at the Open University, and was lucky enough to hear terrific papers by eminent prison ethnographers.

The theme for the event was a response to Loïc Wacquant’s paper “The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography“, in which he expressed incredulity at the scarcity of ethnographic field studies of American jails and prisons, horrified to discover that, at a time when such examinations are most urgently needed, they appear to be disappearing under the weight of more conventional ‘correctional’ research. The response at the symposium was perhaps most strongly expressed by the lack of empty chairs in the seminar room at the OU – it was packed with people who either already engage directly in prison ethnography, or are planning to do so.

A theme emerging from the first day was of the ‘punctum’ as a point of entry into or heightened awareness of, a situation or context. In her keynote address Lorna Rhodes spoke about ethnographers in general and prison ethnographers in particular, identifying ‘punctums’ or punctuation points as a way of making known or understandable what is going on in a particular wider context. She used the example of a waste bin filled with discarded prison ID cards, each with the face of a prisoner staring out of it, as a punctum which had brought home to her the passage of time in prison and the aging of prisoners as their ID card photo remained the same. In her keynote address, Yvonne Jewkes observed that an ‘eclipse’ is a veiling or an invisibility, rather than an absence, and pointed out that prison ethnography is alive and well in contexts other than the United States, to which Wacquant referred. As a contributor to a forthcoming book in carceral geography, she drew attention to the prison scholarship going on outside of criminology. She also called for prison ethnographers to write and speak not only about their own experiences of research, but also about the sometimes unpalatable positive features of imprisonment, as a counter to a Critical Criminology discourse which tends to marginalise discussion of the humour, enlightenment, humanity and agency which can occur in prison, in what are often unrelentingly negative portrayals of prison life.

Rod Earle, Coretta Phillips, Abigail Rowe and Martyn Hammersley considered the actual experience of undertaking prison ethnography, speaking about the challenges they had faced whilst conducting research in prisons. Abigail Rowe’s experiences were particularly pertinent to the ‘punctum’ theme, as she described the numerous occasions on which she was mistaken for a prisoner whilst undertaking research in a women’s prison in the UK, and the insights this gave her into the way the prison operated when a researcher was not (thought to be) present – one small detail illuminating a wider system in uniquely useful way.

Ben Crewe and Laura Piacentini responded to their brief of ‘Writing and Reading a Prison?’ by discussing, respectively, the ways in which prison ethnography can delve deeply into prisoners’ backstories to illuminate their present of imprisonment, in that affording an audience for prisoners’ lifestories enables them to express thoughts and feelings which may often be suppressed in prison; and the integrity of prison ethnography, in terms of the prison ethnographer’s work flowing from a value system, and their work taking the form of that of an ethno-cultural specialist for their particular site, with appropriate insights into the context and consciousness in which penality exists.

Finally, Jennifer Sloan, Deborah Drake and Alison Liebling talked to their title “Thrown in or Drawn in? Sinking or Swimming in prison research and ethnography”, again drawing on their own experiences of researching inside prisons. The three speakers spanned the demographic of the researchers in the room, from Jennifer Sloan speaking as a new PhD graduate, sharing salutory lessons with the many PhD, masters and undergraduate students in the room, to Alison Liebling reflecting on returning to prisons she had researched within a decade ago, and reflecting on the changes which had taken place. Alison’s talk also recalled the ‘punctum’ theme, through her story of remaining in contact with a prisoner she interviewed some time ago, who had since been released, and whom she now knew as a free individual – drawing attention to the importance of the ‘front story’ in the same way as Ben Crewe had highlighted the ‘back story’.

All in all, a hugely successful, enlightening and positive event, with candid exchanges between people genuinely interested in, and supportive of, each other’s work. For carceral geographers, an encouragement to delve deeper into the work of criminologists and prison ethnographers, to learn from the enormous wealth of expertise and experience demonstrated by these speakers and the symposium delegates. I only wish the arrival of a new crop of undergraduates at Birmingham hadn’t prevented me from attending the second day!

reblog: Television in prison: how ‘they’ are watching ‘us’

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Television in prison: how ‘they’ are watching ‘us’

Very interesting blog post here by Jennifer Turner, a PhD student at Aberystwyth University, UK, in which she draws upon findings from her own research to draw out some of the salient issues surrounding the watching of television in prisoners’ cells; not just the controversy around prisoners receiving such a ‘privilege’, but the interpretations of watching and being watched in this context of confinement.

On the one hand, the prison institution and in this case Her Majesty’s Prison system in the UK, can regulate the channels available to particular prisoners, making this information publicly available; on the other, as Turner points out, the channels being watched by prisoners in turn provide them with a partial view of the world ‘outside’ into which they will hopefully reintegrate after release.

For me this issue recalls Paul Adams’ 1992 paper “Television as Gathering Place” in which he explored television as a ‘center of meaning and as a social context‘ supporting the concept of ‘a place without a location‘.  ‘Television‘, he argued, ‘functions as a social context, providing sensory communion and social congregation; it also functions as a center of meaning, helping a society define “us” and “them,” conferring value on persons and objects, and, possibly, supporting hegemonic social control‘.

In her blog Turner suggests that there is some mileage in further investigating this issue, and it would seem that for carceral geographers interested in the place or perhaps the placelessness of prison, the television both as a ‘window’ on the outside and a means of control and surveillance on the ‘inside’, or perhaps as a liminal space between outside and in, demands further study.

Final Call for Papers: Carceral Geography at the AAG 2013

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Final Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference 9-13 April 2013, Los Angeles, CA., USA

Carceral Geography: Debates, Developments and Directions

Organisers:

Dominique Moran, University of Birmingham, UK

Shaul Cohen, University of Oregon, USA

 “Against the backdrop of unfettered markets and enfeebled social-welfare programs, when the penal system has become a major engine of social stratification and cultural division in its own right, the field study of the prison ceases to be the province of the specialist in crime and punishment to become a window into the deepest contradictions and the darkest secrets of our age.” (Wacquant 2002, 389)

The so-called ‘punitive turn’ has brought new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Geographical engagements with incarceration have put these spaces, and experiences within them, firmly on the disciplinary map. Human geography, and specifically the evolving sub-discipline of carceral geography, have much to offer to the study of incarceration, and taking the carceral as a locus of research offers useful opportunities both to invigorate ongoing developments within human geography, and to contribute to positive social change.

Carceral geography is a new but a fast-moving and fast-developing sub-discipline. The enormous potential of spaces of incarceration for geographical enquiry was highlighted by Philo (2001) who turned a book review into an agenda-setting article germinating the ideas which have informed the development of this area of research, in terms of a critical engagement with spaces of confinement and a dialogue with the work of Foucault and Agamben. A decade after this paper was published, and with the sub-discipline proving an increasingly vibrant field, this session aims to provide a space for discussion of this scholarship, situating it in the context both of contemporary human geography and of the interdisciplinary literature from criminology and prison sociology upon which it draws, and to also explore a range of potential avenues of future research which are open to transdisciplinarity, which are both informed by and extend theoretical developments in geography, but which also, and critically, interface with contemporary debates over hyperincarceration and the punitive state.

This call is intentionally broad, but papers in this session could, for example, explore any of the following issues in a range of geographical contexts, in relation to ‘mainstream’ imprisonment, migrant detention, or both:

  • debates, directions, and developments within the field of carceral geography
  • synergies with criminology and prison sociology
  • the nature and experience of spaces of confinement, broadly conceived
  • the geography of systems of confinement
  • the nature of mobility within incarceration
  • hyperincarceration and the carceral ‘churn’
  • penal architecture and prison design
  •  ‘green’ or sustainable prisons
  • notions of the ‘carceral’ which extend beyond physical confinement, understanding the carceral as emplaced, mobile, gendered, embodied and affective
  • conceptualisations of timespace in incarceration
  • the tension between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of penal institutions
  • relationships between incarcerated persons and family and friends
  • experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals after release

Submissions:
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk) and Shaul Cohen (scohen@uoregon.edu) before 30th September 2012 **note new deadline**.

Successful submissions will be contacted by 4th October 2012 and will be expected to register and formally submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 24th 2012. Please note a range of registration fees will apply and must be paid before the formal submission of abstracts.

Prisoners in Medical Research: Consent, Incentive and the Confined Body

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Many thanks to Ebru Ustundag for alerting me to this recent paper arising from a national study led by Dr. Flora I. Matheson, a research scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital’s Centre for Research on Inner City Health, Toronto, Canada. The paper, published in the American Journal of Public Health, draws attention to the use of prisoners in Canada’s correctional system for medical and behavioural research, and in particular to the variety of policies and practices which surround the use of incentives for prisoners to take part in such research.

The paper points out that although prisoners are considered a vulnerable population in Canada, there is no specific regulation for ethical considerations for research involving prisoners, in terms of the use of incentives (anything offered to participants, monetary or otherwise, for participation in research). The authors point out the complications in offering incentives to prisoners: i.e. that for some, incentives could act as an undue inducement which could affect the voluntariness of consent; that offering incentives to nonoffenders but not to offenders could be seen as discriminatory; that some could argue that since prisoners are being ‘punished’ for breaking the law, they should not be ‘rewarded’ in any way for participation in research; and that providing incentives to offenders who meet research eligibility criteria (e.g. age, gender) but not to those who are not eligible, could create resentment within the prison environment. The paper concludes by suggesting ways forward for policy development in Canada to ensure effective and equitable engagement between researchers and the prison population, and an improved code of ethics for this population.

Whilst drawing attention to a particular issue of incentives and consent, this paper highlights in a broader sense the potential effects of confinement of the prisoner body; i.e. that confinement of the body places the body in a vulnerable position in relation to those who have a use to which it can be put. As the authors point out, ‘in history, offenders have been used in a variety of medical and behavioural studies without a properly informed consent process, often with little choice over their participation’ (Matheson et al 2012, 1438). Extreme examples, of course, include Nazi experimentation on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent, and the recent revelations that American PoWs in Japan were apparently dissected alive. The bodies of dead prisoners have commonly been utilised for dissection and anatomical research: a 2007 Japanese study into the sources of cadavers for dissection by medical students found that in the mid Edo era, the bodies of executed prisoners were used to study internal body parts. Later, unclaimed bodies, including those from prisons, were used for dissection.

The disenfranchisement of prisoners apparently extended to the use of their bodies after death; according to research conducted by Ross Jones, in 1862, when the first Australian medical school was established in Melbourne, corpses were in such short supply that the Victorian Parliament passed the Anatomy Act to legalise the collection and dissection of cadavers. At the time, the inmates of the main benevolent asylum in North Melbourne feared that after they died, their bodies would be taken, without consent and used by medical students. They set up a petition against the Act demanding their bodies not be sent to the university but their concerns were ignored. In the same year, the Electoral Act  disenfranchised any person receiving charity in a public institution, and from then on, inmates had effectively no say in the disposal of their bodies. Although many advocates agitated about this inequity and argued for institutionalised Australians to be given the same rights as other citizens, the provision wasn’t discarded in Victoria until 1975.

This gory history of live experimentation and cadaver dissection is a backdrop to contemporary debates about the embodiment of imprisonment. Criminologist Azrini Wahidin‘s work explores the embodied nature of imprisonment, considering the particular ways in which prison time is inscribed upon the ageing imprisoned body, and the ways in which prisoners seek to deploy agency to resist the carceral control of the prison. For carceral geographers, considering imprisonment in this way opens a space for conceptualising  the experience of imprisonment as inherently embodied, drawing on scholarship in feminist geography which recognises both the mutually constitutive relationship between bodies and spaces, and a variety of bodily subjectivities (e.g. Johnson 2008). Bodies are understood as sites of  ‘textual inscription’  which shapes identities and social relations as well as the conceptual and actual spaces in which bodies move. The body, always in the process of becoming through the experiences of embodiment, is corporeally inscribed by imprisonment, in that the corporeal inscriptions acquired during incarceration act to construct bodily subjectivities which can stigmatise and disadvantage prisoners both during confinement and after release.

Returning to the Canadian example, participation in medical and behavioural research to which prisoners may consent, and for which they may or may not be offered incentives, could be viewed as enabled or encouraged by the carceral prism in which prisoners’ bodies are held during confinement, and also as a form of corporeal inscription of incarceration. Thankfully ethical regulations governing research in prisons are strict, and access procedures include detailed discussion of issues of consent, incentive and dissemination of information to participants. However, the thorny methodological and ethical issue of what constitutes ‘informed consent’ in a prison context remains, whether the research in question involves potentially risky medical research, or apparently benign questionnaire survey…

Arizona is Maxed Out! Prison Siting and Prison Conditions

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Within carceral geography, the debate over prison siting has often centred around the perceived merits and demerits of location of prisons in terms of impact on crime rates, real estate values and community relations, as well as the contentious argument that prisons can act as stimuli for economic development. In Arizona, US, this debate is taking a new and critical turn, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona (ACLU AZ) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) have joined forces to demand that Arizona’s Governor Brewer cancel plans to build 500 new maximum-security prison beds in the state at a cost of $50 million.

As the ACLU point out on their website, the argument here revolves around both the diversion of funds away from essential services and towards prison building, and around the appalling record of Arizona’s existing maximum security prisons, in terms of the lack of medical and mental health care for prisoners, and the impact that confinement in isolation has on former prisoners after release.

They argue that “Arizona’s budget priorities are backwards. This year, the Arizona State Legislature passed, and Governor Brewer approved, a $50 million plan to build 500 new maximum-security prison beds. But Arizona’s prison population is not growing. In fact, it decreased last year and the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) projects zero growth in the adult prison population for the next two years.  Like other states across the country, Arizona’s budget reflects severe cuts to essential services and agencies across the board. How does Governor Brewer plan to pay for 500 new maximum-security prison beds? The current state budget takes $50 million from the mortgage crisis settlement fund that was intended to help communities devastated by foreclosures. Those millions of dollars then get moved to the state’s general fund, and suddenly, the state has $50 million for 500 new maximum-security prison beds.”

In a Community Forum of the “Arizona is Maxed Out!” Campaign ACLU Staff Attorney, James Duff Lyall will discuss and provide updates on the class-action lawsuit that has been filed against the Arizona Department of Corrections for lack of adequate medical and mental health care for prisoners, and AFSC Program Coordinator, Matthew Lowen will highlight the findings of the recently published report, “Lifetime Lockdown: How Isolation Impacts Prisoner Reentry”. The Community Forum takes place on Wednesday Sept 19th in Tucson, Arizona.

This movement in Arizona focuses attention on prison siting, but not in terms of the conventional arguments either of NIMBY-ism (e.g. Martin & Myers 2005) or of communities competing for prison location as a growth stimulus (e.g. Cherry & Kunce 2001, Glasmeier & Farrigan 2007). It recalls Anne Bonds’ argument in her 2009 paper that “representations of poverty and criminality are entangled with processes of economic restructuring and the localization of economic development and social welfare”.

In this case, Arizona’s apparent diversion of mortgage crisis settlement funds towards prison building seems to be a permutation of Bonds’ observation that “states in desperate fiscal predicaments are endeavoring to finance their ever-burgeoning prisons systems—fueled and reinforced by punitive policies—which further redirect limited resources away for social investments” (2009, 434) – although in Arizona’s case the predicted zero growth in the adult prison population begs the question why such prison building is necessary at all.

As a recent article in the Arizona Guardian points out, Governor Brewer plans to spend $124 million on new prison construction compared to about $9 million on new school construction. Assistant House Minority Leader Steve Farley observed that “Of course if you build fewer schools you’re going to have to build more prisons. We’d be a lot better off if we built more schools and gave those kids a great education so they don’t end up in prison in the first place.”

New ESRC Research Project: Breaking the Cycle? Prison Visitation and Recidivism in the UK

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The ESRC intends to fund a new research project entitled ‘Breaking the Cycle? Prison Visitation and Recidivism in the UK’, to be undertaken by carceral geographer  Dominique Moran and criminological psychologist Louise Dixon, both at the University of Birmingham, UK.

This 3-year interdisciplinary project will provide a new perspective on prison visitation and its relationship to the highly topical issue of recidivism. Macro-level statistical analysis in parallel with innovative mixed-methods research into visiting facilities will identify the nature of this relationship and its socio-spatial context, informing policy towards visitation and the design of visiting spaces, and contributing to broader debates about prisoner rehabilitation and resettlement.

In the aftermath of the 2011 UK riots, Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke described the rioters as a ‘feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream’, and blamed the riots on the ‘broken penal system – one whose record in preventing reoffending has been straightforwardly dreadful’. Reoffending or recidivism is key to the operation of the repetitive cycle of incarceration, re-entry, re-offending and re-incarceration, and represents a major policy challenge. In the UK, 75% of ex-inmates reoffend within nine years of release, and 39.3% within the first twelve months. Clarke’s solution as set out in the government’s “Breaking the Cycle” Green Paper is ‘payment by results’; a ‘radical and decentralising reform’ with ‘freedom to innovate’ new interventions, opening ‘the market to new providers from the private, voluntary and community sectors’. This project draws attention to prison visitation as an aspect of imprisonment which has already been demonstrated to improve the outcomes of released prisoners, but whose specific functionality is at present poorly understood. Through parallel methodologies, this project investigates the relationship between visitation and recidivism.

Research into recidivism finds that prison visitation is a significant factor in improving post-release outcomes; outcomes are in general much more positive for visited prisoners, and lower recidivism rates have been demonstrated across study populations and time periods. However, although the effect is widely observed, the causality is poorly understood. It is presumed that the maintenance of personal relationships and the feeling of ‘connectedness’ to home and community which may arise through visitation smooth reintegration after release, but this process has never been fully explored. The processes underlying persistent criminal careers remain a research gap, and very little is known about psychological change in relation to prison visits in terms of the psychological constructs which may mediate the relationship between visits and recidivism.

The project will generate both nuanced insights into the relationship between prison visitation and recidivism, and also critical insights into the socio-spatial context of prison visiting, to inform visitation policy and the design of more effective prison visiting spaces. It seizes an opportunity to influence policy and create impact, at a time when the the coalition government is consulting on policy reform, in particular in relation to recidivism. It represents convergence of cutting-edge debates in cognate disciplines of human geography, criminology, psychology and wider social theory, and resonates with policy development in individual prison institutions in the UK in the context of the ‘Breaking the Cycle’ initiative.

There will be a 2.5-year Post-Doctoral Research Assistant position created at the University of Birmingham in connection with this grant; post to be advertised in due course. For any further information please contact d.moran@bham.ac.uk

Call for Papers: Carceral Geography at the AAG 2013

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Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference 9-13 April 2013, Los Angeles, CA., USA

Carceral Geography: Debates, Developments and Directions

Organisers:

Dominique Moran, University of Birmingham, UK

Shaul Cohen, University of Oregon, USA

 “Against the backdrop of unfettered markets and enfeebled social-welfare programs, when the penal system has become a major engine of social stratification and cultural division in its own right, the field study of the prison ceases to be the province of the specialist in crime and punishment to become a window into the deepest contradictions and the darkest secrets of our age.” (Wacquant 2002, 389)

The so-called ‘punitive turn’ has brought new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Geographical engagements with incarceration have put these spaces, and experiences within them, firmly on the disciplinary map. Human geography, and specifically the evolving sub-discipline of carceral geography, have much to offer to the study of incarceration, and taking the carceral as a locus of research offers useful opportunities both to invigorate ongoing developments within human geography, and to contribute to positive social change.

Carceral geography is a new but a fast-moving and fast-developing sub-discipline. Although the first paper by a geographer published squarely in this field was probably the work of Dirsuweit (1999), the enormous potential of spaces of incarceration for geographical enquiry was highlighted by Philo (2001) who turned a book review into an agenda-setting article germinating the ideas which have informed the development of this area of research, in terms of a critical engagement with spaces of confinement and a dialogue with the work of Foucault and Agamben. A decade after this paper was published, and with the sub-discipline proving an increasingly vibrant field, this session aims to provide a space for discussion of this scholarship, situating it in the context both of contemporary human geography and of the interdisciplinary literature from criminology and prison sociology upon which it draws, and to also explore a range of potential avenues of future research which are open to transdisciplinarity, which are both informed by and extend theoretical developments in geography, but which also, and critically, interface with contemporary debates over hyperincarceration and the punitive state.

This call is intentionally broad, but papers in this session could, for example, explore any of the following issues in a range of geographical contexts, in relation to ‘mainstream’ imprisonment, migrant detention, or both:

  • debates, directions, and developments within the field of carceral geography
  • synergies with criminology and prison sociology
  • the nature and experience of spaces of confinement, broadly conceived
  • the geography of systems of confinement
  • the nature of mobility within incarceration
  • hyperincarceration and the carceral ‘churn’
  • penal architecture and prison design
  •  ‘green’ or sustainable prisons
  • notions of the ‘carceral’ which extend beyond physical confinement, understanding the carceral as emplaced, mobile, gendered, embodied and affective
  • conceptualisations of timespace in incarceration
  • the tension between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of penal institutions
  • relationships between incarcerated persons and family and friends
  • experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals after release

Submissions:
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Dominique Moran (d.moran@bham.ac.uk) and Shaul Cohen (scohen@uoregon.edu) before 14th September 2012.

Successful submissions will be contacted by 1st October 2012 and will be expected to register and formally submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 24th 2012. Please note a range of registration fees will apply and must be paid before the formal submission of abstracts.

Only as far away as the phone? Video visitation and prison call centres

/ carceralgeography

Two stories in the news this week pertaining to prisoners’ contact with the outside world throw up some troubling questions about the nature and purpose of contact for those incarcerated.

First, many thanks to Shaul Cohen for these links to the New York Times’ piece on ‘Video Visitation’, which details the US District of Columbia’s switch to video visitation, a growing trend in the corrections field. To proponents, the video systems provide a more convenient, safer, thriftier alternative to in-person visits, reducing the need for visitors to travel to penitentiaries, to stand in line and be searched ahead of in-person visits, and the disruption to the prison regime caused by bringing prisoners to visitation suites and ensuring the security of the institution during visits. However, as the NYT reports, critics, including prisoner advocates and corrections officers concerned with how prisoners fare once they are released, fear that the video visits allow less meaningful contact with family and could damage inmates’ morale. The report quotes Angela Davis, who after her second video visit with her son, 21, said although video visitation was much more convenient, she missed watching her son walk into the visitation room and take a seat in front of her. While he walked she would observe him to make sure he had no scratches or scars while examining his body language and gestures. “He doesn’t know that, but that’s what I’d be doing,” Ms. Davis said. “I can’t really do that if he’s just sitting there and all I see is his face. You can’t really do that on a monitor.”

Sylvia Lane, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia corrections department, claimed that the video system would double the number of visits possible each day to 400, while eliminating long queues and invasive security checks, and also lowering staff costs, saving $420,000 a year, about 64% of the $660,000 budgeted for visiting costs in 2012. She also said it would keep the jail more secure because inmates do not have to be moved around as much, and the risk of visitors smuggling contraband into jail is drastically reduced.

Although at present in-person visits typically remain an option, there is a sense in which growing familiarity with online communication such as Skype may mitigate against the negative perception of video visitation. However, a more troubling extension to this argument is made by Lt. Col. Kim Spadaro, the director of Florida’s, Broward County (which adopted a video system in 2007) Department of Detention and president of the American Jail Association:

“Either way, they’re not able to have physical contact with their family members,” she said. “They stay right in their cell, they’re on their video screen, they have their privacy, and they’re still having basically the same visit as the one they had when they’re separated by glass.” In other words, because in-person visitation is typically behind shatter-proof glass and no physical contact is possible, video visitation is ‘basically the same’ in the eyes of the establishment.

What isn’t the same, though, is the level of scrutiny of the visits themselves. As the DC corrections department information video makes clear, amongst the straightforward demonstrations of how to register for visits and book them online, the need for ID at the visitation centre and the various advantages of time and money savings for both visitors and institutions, all visits are ‘monitored and subject to recording’ (9:49). There’s no further information about the storage or use of these recordings, but one might anticipate that the knowledge that their conversations are being surveilled and filed might deter prisoners and visitors from speaking as openly as they might like to…

Video visitation raises all kinds of questions about how carceral geographers theorise visitation and visiting spaces. Although the visiting suite inside prison has been thought of as a liminal space between freedom and confinement for both prisoners and visitors (Moran 2011), video visitation casts this conceptualisation in a new light, both by denying prisoners the opportunity to meet face to face with loved ones away from their everyday carceral surroundings, and by bringing the prison, albeit in its virtual incarnation of online bookings and video screens, into new spatial contexts – the DC General Hospital in this case – with the potential to reach right into the homes of prisoners’ friends and families.

In the other story this week, The Guardian revealed the UK Ministry of Justice’s plans to support the establishment of call centres inside prisons, as part of prisoners’ work programmes. Not only could the scheme ‘lower costs and overheads’ for companies participating, but it could provide prisoners with paid work inside prison, contributing to their rehabilitation and increasing their prospects of employment after release. Quite apart from the fact that prisoners’ pay of £3 per day potentially undercuts pay rates for free workers (which MoJ defended by arguing that “All contracts with outside employers must comply with a strict code of practice which sets out that prisoners cannot be used to replace existing jobs in the community. Prisoner wages, for those in closed prisons, are set by prison governors and companies have no control over the level of payment”), there are concerns that putting call centres inside prisons would be one of the first instances of prisoners serving lengthy sentences coming into direct commercial contact with the public, and concerns about prison call centres’ compliance with data protection legislation.

Scholars have already pointed to conventional call centres’ panoptical surveillance strategies, using Foucault to theorise these regimes (e.g. Ball & Margulis 2011), but the idea of the prison acting as a site of ‘offshore outsourcing’ of call centre activity, where not only are wages very low but prisoners are also in the right time zone and have the appropriately reassuring regional accents, is intriguing. Debate over prisoners’ low wages and the effect of these on the competitiveness of firms employing free labour have been ongoing for some time, but it isn’t usually in relation to a ‘customer-facing’ commercial role such as this one. (Although Jackson (2011) notes that prisoners already work in call centres in India).

Two things seem to link video visitation in DC and the proposed prisoner call centres in the UK. Firstly the financial advantage that can be gained from deploying technology to connect prisoners and the outside world, be that either in cost savings for penitentiaries organising fewer face-to-face visits, or higher profits for commercial firms paying less for their call centre workers. Second is the nature of  contact – which in both cases is technologically mediated, monitored and recorded, and disembodied, either through video screen or telephone headset, and which arguably serves to separate the prisoner ever further from family and community.

Resisting the Eclipse: An International Symposium on Prison Ethnography

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The International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) is organising a conference on prison ethnography at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK on 18/19th September 2012. I was recently alerted to the conference by Andrew Jefferson of the Global Prisons Network, and Ben Crewe, of the Prisons Research Centre, Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, who will both be presenting, and it sounds like something that carceral geographers would find fascinating.

There’s further information here, and the full programme is available here.

Essentially, the conference responds directly to Loïc Wacquant’s 2002 warning of  ‘a curious eclipse of prison ethnography in an age of mass incarceration’. It asks whether reports of the demise of prison ethnography are exaggerated? Speakers, panels and workshops will explore what prison ethnography has got to offer in an era of mass incarceration.
Although all of the sessions look fascinating, carceral geographers might be particularly interested to hear Andrew Jefferson, Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, and Thomas Ugelvik speak about ‘Prison Spaces’.

Registration is open now, and it’s free to attend, although spaces are limited so early booking is essential.