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“I can make about four steps forward before I touch the door” The embodiment of incarceration.

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Incarceration is the confinement of the physical body – although the imagination may travel beyond the prison cell and the prison wall, the act of imprisonment seeks to confine the body within demarcated space. But what happens to bodies treated in this way, and to the individuals who inhabit them?

Yesterday, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox marked the forty year anniversary of their solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. As Ed Pilkington notes in The Guardian, both have spent ’23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells’. Contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, “exercise” three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.

In a new documentary film, “Herman’s House“, directed by Angad Bhalla and produced by Lisa Valencia-Svensson, (to shown at the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival on April 27), Wallace both describes his imprisonment:(“Being in a cage for such an extended period of time, it has its downfalls. You may not feel it, you may not know it, you may think you’re OK, and you’re just perfunctory about it.”) and allows his imagination to traverse the prison wall to co-create an art installation featuring detailed plans of his “dream home”.

In additional recordings, he vividly evokes the effect of this corporeal confinement:

“Every time I stand up from the bed I could hit my hips on the table, it’s that close. As far as moving about – there is no movement. I suffer from arthritis that has come about because of being in the cell.”

“If I turn an about-face, I’m going to bump into something. I’m used to it, and that’s one of the bad things about it.”

Robert King, the third of the “Angola 3”, whose conviction was overturned and who was released in 2001, echoes the effects of close confinement

“I was in a six-by-nine cell for 29 years and I know what it did to me – it shunk the brain, it shrunk the individual. You become acclimatised to small distances.”

Amnesty International delivered a petition for the two men’s release from solitary to the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge on the date of the anniversary, and the 40 year anniversary has drawn greater attention to the practice of solitary confinement in the US, not least because of the severe and debilitating effects of this kind of incarceration on body and mind.

For carceral geography, the effect, or affect, of solitary confinement on the incarcerated is a direct example of the influence of space on behaviour. Space is, after all, is not just a passive backdrop to social practice; it has ‘seductive spatiality’ (Rose et al 2010, 347) and ‘ambient power’ (Allen 2006, 445)  to affect how those encountering it act, both consciously and subconsciously. Contemporary human geography’s concern for the corporeal and the embodied resonates with the work of criminologist Azrini Wahidin, and her work on the corporeal effects of imprisonment, with prisoners’ bodies remade and reinscribed in the penal context.

Carceral geography has the opportunity to deploy geographies of affect, emotion and embodiment to enhance understandings of the effects of solitary confinement, and to do so in a way which contributes to efforts to make positive social and political change.

Abandoned or converted prisons – transient carceral landscapes

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Joliet prison, owned by the state of Illinois, US, closed in 2002, and although it has since been used as a filmset by TV and movie crews, it lacks a long term future plan.  With a large bill for renovation, and no immediate source of funding, as Bob Okon writes, there will be ‘no fast redevelopment’ at Joliet.

Joliet is an example of the dilemma facing those involved in dealing with prison buildings once they reach the end of their penal function, and the conversion, adaptation or destruction of these sites is often a contentious and highly politicised process. Geographers researching memory and landscape have investigated some of these sites.

Carolyn Strange and Michaela Kempa’s work on Alcatraz, for example, identifies this defunct prison, now converted into a museum and heritage site, as a popular tourist experience, and they consider the nature of  ‘dark tourism’ at Alcatraz  in terms of memory management. In contrast, Brian Graham and Sara McDowell focus on Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland, one of the key heritage sites of the Northern Ireland conflict/Troubles, and site of contestation between various stakeholders in the peace process. Concluding that only one stakeholder group has a ‘clearly defined sense of the heritage value of the Maze and an understanding as to how the site might be appropriated and exploited as an iconic place for remembering, contestation and resistance’, they anticipate the problematic future of the site (initially cleared, to be the site of an EU-funded Peace Building and Conflict Resolution facility but more recently sold to the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society to accommodate an agricultural show and centre of excellence).

The commercial exploitation of former prisons is widespread, either deploying the prison’s own heritage, as in the case of Patarei prison in Tallinn, Estonia, or Kilmainham jail in Dublin, Ireland, or converting it for profitable use, as in the case of the Malmaison hotel in Oxford, UK or Katajanokka hotel in Helsinki, Finland.

Relatively little geographical scholarship has tracked such conversions, although Chin-Ee Ong, Claudio Minca and James Sidaway’s forthcoming paper at the RGS-IBG this July will do so. The Empire and its Hotel: The Changing Biopolitics of Hotel Lloyd, Amsterdam, The Netherlands traces the early days of the hotel’s beginnings as a node for housing immigrants,  to its ‘carceral’ phase as an adult prison and juvenile detention centre, to its contemporary use as a hotel and cultural embassy for a mobile travelling society. The authors interrogate the discursive and spatial practices for producing disciplined subjects and bodies in the refugees, prisoners and, in a ‘punitive turn’, the disciplining of contemporary tourists and modern-day tourism workers.


Arizona’s ‘inhumane’ isolation: Amnesty Report

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The extreme isolation regime used in special prisons in the US state of Arizona is cruel and dehumanises inmates, according to Amnesty International, as it released a new report accusing the state authorities of failing to care for the basic physical and mental health of these isolated prisoners.

The report, Cruel isolation: Amnesty International’s Concerns about Conditions in Arizona Maximum Security Prisons, describes how over 2,000 prisoners are confined for months or years in conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation:

“More than 2,900 prisoners are held in Arizona’s highest security maximum custody facilities, the majority in the SMUs at ASPC-Eyman. Most are confined alone in windowless cells for 22 to 24 hours a day in conditions of reduced sensory stimulation, with little access to natural light and no work, educational or rehabilitation programs. Prisoners exercise alone in small, enclosed yards and, apart from a minority who have a cell-mate, have no association with other prisoners. Many prisoners spend years in such conditions; some serve out their sentences in solitary confinement before being released directly into the community.”

Amongst Amnesty’s recommendations are that Arizona authorities should:

  • Reduce the number of prisoners in isolation under SMU or similar maximum custody conditions to ensure that only prisoners who are a serious and continuing threat are held in maximum custody isolation facilities.
  • Provide a route out of segregation through incentive or step-down programs so that prisoners are not held long-term or indefinitely in isolation.
  • Improve conditions for prisoners in SMU or other maximum custody facilities so that they are not confined in windowless cells or denied access to natural light; have more out of cell time and better exercise facilities with appropriate equipment.

Understandings of carceral space, which include these extreme conditions of incarceration, are important for carceral geography. Geographers have a critical constructionist notion of space, understanding that it is not passive, but is constantly being produced and remade within complex relations of culture, power and difference. Although spaces of supermax prisons await this kind of socio-spatial inquiry, in her 2005 paper, “Inclusive Exclusion: Citizenship and the American Prisoner and Prison,” Agnes Czajka considered the proliferation of prisons in the United States, particularly the increasing number of supermax security or “camp” prisons, as an example of “the normalization of a state of exception”, drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben. In a very different penal context, Teresa Dirsuweit (1999) discussed the interrelationship of identity and space, mapping out the prison in terms of the physical spaces and the signification that these spaces hold for prisoners and prison authorities, and Anita Wilson’s work has produced rich ethnographic material on the personal transformation of prison spaces.

David Sibley and Bettina van Hoven argue in their 2008 paper for ‘a fuller exploration of the relationships between prison architecture, the space–time regime, and correctional officers, on one hand, and the worlds of inmates, on the other’.  They point out, though, that as Amnesty found in Arizona, prison authorities do not often facilitate this kind of research.

Perhaps the Amnesty report shows that understanding how prison works, and how institutional spaces are produced and experienced, is critical to tackling such ‘inhumane’ conditions.

Wilson A 2004 Four days and a breakfast: time, space and literacy/ies in the prison community in Leander K and Sheehy M eds Spatialising literacy research and practice Peter Lang, New York 67–90

Death Row documentary – geography and mobility

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“Most people do not know when and how they will die. Death Row inmates do. They are told the exact day, hour and minute of their death, including all the precise details, procedures and rituals of their execution.

Death Row is a documentary series written and directed by legendary feature filmmaker Werner Herzog, telling the fascinating and controversial story of crime and the death penalty. Over the period of a year, Herzog interviewed inmates in America as they awaited their death, uncovering brutal stories of rape and murder.

Death Row is not so much a series about capital punishment as a deep and intriguing insight into the limits of human experience, asking what it feels like to know how and when you will die.” (Channel 4, UK)

There are a few days left for viewers in the UK to watch the first documentary on 4oD. It’s a fascinating piece of TV – particularly because the death row interviewee, Hank Skinner, describes the unusual experience of moving from the holding facility to the execution facility, only to be given a stay of execution, and to return once again to his holding cell.  Herzog teases out Skinner’s thoughts on food, the body, the passage of time, and the 40-mile journey between the holding facility and the execution facility. As Sam Wollaston notes in his review, ‘what Skinner saw out of the truck’s window, the other-worldliness, the noise of the tyres going over the joints in the bridge, the smell of the lake they drove by and the memories that the smell conjured up, memories of freedom’ are particularly evocative.

Although not focusing on the transportation of death row inmates per se, some recent work within geography has considered the transportation of prisoners and has theorised this movement in terms of mobilities and liminality, a state of ‘betweenness’. For example, Nick Gill’s recent paper argues that the increasing mobility of asylum seekers around the UK’s detention estate has significant implications for both the advocacy groups and professionals who hold influence over their experiences, and Dominique Moran et al’s paper contends that contemporary prisoner transport in the Russian Federation serves as an illustration both of punitive power expressed through mobility and of mobility in the carceral context.

Geography and punishment – Distance and prison visiting

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In a piece in the UK Guardian newspaper 28/3/12, Sadhbh Walshe questions the commitment of the US prison system to maintaining family connections for incarcerated individuals. She highlights the importance of the geographical location of prisons:

“Maintaining contact with an incarcerated parent is challenging, to say the least, and certainly not something that the state or federal authorities seem to think is a priority. If they did, they surely would not have more than half the prison population in institutions that are between 100 and 500 miles from inmates’ actual homes, and some over 500 miles from home, making visits next to impossible for struggling families. This distance factor alone goes a long way to explaining why, as of 2004, 58.5% of inmates in state prison and 44.7% of inmates in federal prison had never received a visit from their kids. If a child in Philadelphia wants to see their mother in the women’s prison that is an eight-hour drive away on the other side of the state, they have to be up at 1am to board a special charter bus to take them there.”

The problems which arise in terms of distance and visitation, i.e. that the further from home a prisoner is, the less likely they are to be visited, has been widely observed, and is highlighted in some recent academic research, for example in Laura Piacentini et al’s paper looking at the incarceration experience of young girls in Russia’s prison system. Matt Mitchelson‘s recent work also finds that in the US state of Georgia, the distance between prisoners and their homes is considerable.

Visitation matters, not only for the wellbeing of prisoners and their families, and to mitigate against the negative effects of incarceration on both prisoners and their families, but also because  prisoners visited during their sentences tend to be less likely to reoffend on release. Since tackling reoffending is a cornerstone of US and UK criminal justice policy (for example, see the UK government’s ‘Breaking the Cycle’ policy document, the issue of distance would seem to be a critical one.

Read the full Guardian piece, which considers the effects on children of the incarceration of parents, here.