carceral geography

One in one hundred

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“For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars” states a study reported in the New York Times in 2008.

Thanks to Shaul Cohen, [Carnegie Council Global Ethics Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Oregon], for the recommendation of this website from a project by his colleagues at neighbouring Oregon State University.

The project website was created by Oregon State University’s Inside-Out students in the fall of 2011. Their hope is that it will grow as an interactive community and online presence for any person who identifies as a part of the 1 in 100 people incarcerated in the United States.

New paper: “Mapping the shadow carceral state”

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There’s a new paper in pre-print in Theoretical Criminology: ‘Mapping the shadow carceral state: Towards an institutionally capacious approach to punishment’ which might be of interest to carceral geographers.

In the paper, Katherine Beckett and Naomi Murakawa of the University of Washington, USA, argue that although recent scholarship has highlighted the expansion of the US carceral state (and estate), ‘criminal law and criminal justice institutions increasingly represent only the most visible tentacles of penal power‘ (p2, my emphasis). In an attempt to ‘map the more submerged, serpentine forms of punishment’ (ibid) they describe the ‘shadow carceral state’, which they argue makes use of legally liminal authority, where punitive power is expanded through the combination of civil, administrative and criminal legal authority.

They identify the capacity of institutions in the US which are beyond what is ‘formally’ recognised as the criminal justice system, to impose punitive sanctions including incarceration, and they liken this situation to Cohen’s (1979) dystopian vision of the ‘punitive city’, with blurred boundaries between inside and outside, fuzzy definitions of ‘crime’, and ‘dispersed state social control beyond the prison walls’ (p2). In particular, there’s a table within the paper that shows the types of legal charges for which incarceration is a possible outcome, and whether or not the state defines such incarceration as ‘punishment’. The ‘shadow carceral state’ is manifest in part in these ‘not-punishment’ incarcerations.

Beckett and Murakawa argue that ‘a variety of institutional actors have manipulated the ostensibly discrete boundaries of civil, administrative and criminal law, thereby creating and/or enlarging non-criminal pathways to punishment’ (p18). For carceral geography, the paper represents a call for research not to focus exclusively on the ‘tail-end’ of the carceral process – incarceration itself – but to widen its scope to consider both the carceral state and the ways in which it ‘ensnares and sanctions’ by creating new non-criminal routes to punishment which impose regulation of restriction of mobility, and the legal opacity between civil, administrative and criminal law which make this possible.

Carceral geography recognises the parallels and overlaps between incarceration as a result of the criminal justice process, and, for example, the detention of migrants with unclear or contested legal status; a forthcoming book and seminar series specifically seek to draw together scholarship of these practices rather than to see them in isolation. The idea of the ‘shadow carceral state’, though, pushes this further, encouraging us to think about the carceral state as well as the carceral estate, what ‘punishment’ means, what constitutes it, and the ‘consequential pathways’ (p18) that lead to incarceration.

Pseudo-carceral spaces? Replica prison cells

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The ‘Choice’  Bus is making its way to middle schools in San Antonio, bringing a message about ‘the importance of education and the consequences of wrong choices’  to school children. In part, the message is conveyed through the replica prison cell installed at the back of the yellow school bus. The bunk bed, toilet and sink were donated from a prison in Alabama, and the idea is that children will find the cell off-putting enough to discourage them from offending. A short video here shows the bus, the cell and reactions of visiting children. There are numerous other examples, of  ‘deterrents’ of this kind, including this from North Wales, UK.

As recent posts show, I’m interested in challenging the inside/outside binary of the prison, and I find the creation of replica cells, and the uses to which they are put, fascinating. In these examples the message is about the powerlessness of incarceration; the lack of choice which derives from making the ‘wrong’ choice. The communication of this message through the vicarious cell experience, of course, assumes that imprisonment is in some way a deterrent to crime – itself a highly contested viewpoint…

Elsewhere, though, the creation of such pseudo-carceral spaces outside the prison, in which ‘free’ individuals experience incarceration vicariously, carries different intentions.

In the UK, for example, the Foyer of the Royal Festival Hall in London was recently the venue for the ‘Go to Jail’ exhibition, run by Rideout, a UK creative organisation working within the field of criminal justice. Visitors could enter the cell to inspect living conditions, and chat to ‘prisoners’ ‘confined’ to the cell about life inside. After visiting, there was a digital consultation about setting prisoners’ tariffs and cell facilities. Rather than explicitly to deter visitors from offending, the aim in offering a transient experience of incarceration, was to encourage them to reflect on prison conditions and the rehabilitation of inmates.

The construction and display of a replica cell is also a tactic frequently deployed by pressure groups to draw attention to particular penal regimes, for example this replica Cuban prison cell in Madrid, and this replica cell drawing attention to political prisoners in Burma.

In two other exhibitions, replica cells are a vehicle for different messages, about prisoners’ agency within and beyond carceral space:

In “The House That Herman Built” a full-scale wooden model of Herman Wallace’s cell is contrasted with detailed plans of his dream home, allowing his imagination to traverse the prison wall.

In Prisoners Interventions a replica prison cell is used to give visitors to an exhibition of prisoners’ inventiveness and ingenuity ‘a physical and psychological understanding’ of the spaces they inhabit, and a context for the design and manufacture of their inventions. The exhibition (and a later book), a collaboration between incarcerated prisoner Angelo and ‘Temporary Services’, showcases recreations of objects made by prisoners to address the needs of their restrictive environment, from sex dolls to salt and pepper shakers, to chess pieces. In Angelo’s words, “Even the simplest of innovations presents unusual challenges, not just to make an object but in some instances to create the tools to make it and find the materials to make it from. The prison environment is designed and administered for the purpose of suppressing such inventiveness. Officially, the devices described here are considered contraband, subject to confiscation in routine cell searches. But inmates are resilient if nothing else—what’s taken today will be remade by tomorrow, and the cycle goes on and on.”

While replica cells enable different messages to be communicated and explored, this pseudo-carceral space itself awaits investigation. Different from the ‘transcarceral’ spaces discussed by Allspach (2010), we might consider them transient carceral landscapes, offering a simulacrum of the prison for the spectatorship of onlookers. What is clear, though, is that as Herman Wallace and Angelo have shown through their collaborations, the involvement of prisoners in creating replica cells shows that they can do more than act as a threatening ‘deterrent’. They can stimulate debate about prison conditions, and the purpose of incarceration, and also about the agency of prisoners in these spaces, and the unexpected and ingenious ways in which they engage with and beyond them.

Prisons and prisoner behaviour – space and affect

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“Very little is understood and appreciated of the behavioral influence of environmental factors on prisoners and staff. It would be difficult to find a correctional official, warden, superintendent, or line officer that does not agree that a facility’s architectural design has a corresponding influence on prisoner behavior.” (Austin 2003, 5)

I keep coming back to this passage of text from James Austin’s report for the US Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons, wondering why, and thinking that this is exactly the kind of question that carceral geography is well placed to address.

In today’s Guardian magazine, Amelia Gentleman’s piece on Halden, the world’s ‘most humane prison’ raises this question again, although in an utterly different penal regime – the decarcerative setting of Norway rather than the hyperincarcerative context of the US. One of Norway’s highest security institutions, Halden apparently smells of coffee, cells have flat screen TVs and fluffy towels, and prisoners look out over wooded landscapes within the prison grounds. Doors don’t slam shut and prisoners are out of their cells for most of the day. The prison’s architects were set a challenge of designing a space that was ‘light and positive’, and ‘shouldn’t look like a prison’. The principle, given that in Norway the maximum sentence is 21 years and all prisoners are expected to return to the world outside, was that ‘life behind the walls should be as much like life outside the walls as possible.’ As the prison governor discussed, the spatial context is just as important as the rehabilitative regime:

“Everyone who is imprisoned inside Norwegian prisons will be released… everyone… will go back to society. We look at what kind of neighbour you want to have when they come out. If you stay in a box for a few years, then you are not a good person when you come out… We don’t think about revenge in the Norwegian prison system. We have much more focus on rehabilitation. It is a long time since we had fights between inmates. It is this building that makes softer people.” (my emphasis)

Although governor Are Høidal is as convinced of the effect of the building on prisoners’ behaviour as are the correctional officers in James Austin’s report, little is known about how this effect takes place. Some fascinating work within criminology sheds some light on prison architecture, notably Michael Fiddler’s 2011 papers on the phantasmagoric prison, and the prison’s Gothic shadow, but perhaps of greatest interest to carceral geographers is Philip Hancock and Yvonne Jewkes’s recent paper ‘Architectures of incarceration; The spatial pains of imprisonment’ which calls into question the ‘enlightened humanism’ of new generation prisons like Halden, and identifies some ‘pains of imprisonment’ which arise specifically in these contexts, pointing out that the intentions of architectural design can also be lost in everyday practice. They conclude by raising questions about the future of prison architecture and design, and also ‘for the role and trajectory of… research… and particularly for our need to understand the lived experience of such spaces for all those required to inhabit them’ (p627, my emphasis).

Understanding the lived experience of spaces is, of course, at the heart of geographical enquiry. Space is recognised by geographers as more than the surface where social practices take place. As Adey (2008, 440) argues, ‘specific spatial structures… can work to organise affect to have certain effects’. Designers of spaces consider ‘seductive spatiality’ (Rose et al 2010, 347) or ‘ambient power’ (Allen 2006, 445) through which to direct or shape human behaviour within these spaces. Essentially, geographers understand that space ‘matters’, and can affect the ways people act within it.

Although almost a decade has passed since Austin noted that “There are few, if any, studies that have assessed the impact of prison architecture on prisoner behavior” (2003, 6), perhaps dialogue between criminologists and carceral geographers will go some way towards furthering our understanding of the lived experience of carceral space. And in so doing, carceral geography could address critics of geographies of affect and emotion, who argue that such studies should address more topics of relevance, and that geographers of affect should ‘seek out projects and avenues that offer grounds for critical and political thought at the same time that they open the door for participation in efforts to make positive social and political change’ (Woodward & Lea 2010, 170).

Carceral Geography – new books!

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What’s that saying? You wait forever for a bus and then three come along at once? Well, this is not quite all at once, but the great news is that there are four new forthcoming books which should be of interest to geographers and others working on spaces and practices of incarceration.

Further details are available on all of these books through the links above, but some brief information is below:

“Border Watch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control”

Alexandra Hall 2012

Questions over immigration and asylum face almost all Western countries. Should only economically useful immigrants be allowed? What should be done with unwanted or ‘illegal’ immigrants? In this bold and original intervention, Alexandra Hall shows that immigration detention centres offer a window onto society’s broader attitudes towards immigrants.

“Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis”

Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, Andrew Burridge [Eds] 2012

The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people—more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. Beyond Walls and Cages offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future. Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression. See the related blog here.

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

Dominique Moran, Nick Gill & Deirdre Conlon [Eds] 2013

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.

Look out for this one early in 2013 – more details to come.

“Carceral Geography: Prisons, Power and Space”

Dominique Moran 2013

The so-called ‘punitive turn’ has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. This book introduces ‘carceral geography’ as a geographical perspective on incarceration, tracking the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant sub-discipline, and suggesting future research directions which are dynamically 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, recidivism and the advance of the punitive state. This book conveys a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, tracing the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. By synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and by exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ‘carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

More details to come as this one progresses…

Faith in Carceral Space

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In her recent paper in Political Geography, JoAnn McGregor argues that removal centres for detained immigrants in the UK are acting as spaces of religious revival. By exploring why confinement for removal fosters enhanced religious engagement, her paper examines experiences of detention and deportability based on ex-detainees’ accounts, investigates institutional provision, and detainees’ own initiatives regarding faith, and treats faith in its affective, emotional, narrative and performative dimensions. McGregor finds that faith acts as as a source of resilience for non-citizens faced with legal exclusion.

McGregor’s work is amongst the first within geography to explore the importance of faith during confinement. However, in cognate disciplines there are intriguing glimpses of the role that faith plays within and beyond carceral space. For example, Revd. Peter Phillips, a mature PhD student at the University of Cardiff, UK, is working on the role of prison chaplains ‘caught in no-man’s land’ as both agents of the prison establishment and/or as counter-agents within it.  In so doing, he works with theories of liminality to explore participation in ritual-like activities, affiliation/disaffiliation, and the importance of prison chaplaincy in prison ethnography, focusing particularly on prison chapels and reception areas. Within criminology, Grant Duwe and Valerie Clark find in their study of prison visitation and recidivism in Minnesota US, that visits from clergy lowered the risk of prisoners reoffending after release by 24%. They suggest that the training that clergy often receive in helping individuals through difficult life circumstances, may mean that they are able to give offenders the kind of effective counsel and support that they need. Their study contributes to a growing body of work considering the effectiveness of faith-based rehabilitation programmes during incarceration (e.g. Dodson et al 2011), and the role of faith in facilitating ‘reintegration’ after release (such as Kerley et al’s 2011 study of a faith-based transitional centre for women in the Southern United States).

Within carceral space, recent geographical research in Russian prisons suggests that in constructing prison chapels, the Russian Orthodox Church provides spaces of retreat and escape from the oppressively communal prison environment. Women interviewed for a recently completed research project suggested that not only were chapels used as spaces for devout prayer, and for recreation in the form of choral singing, but that they also provided a rare sense of solitude and privacy within prison walls, where prisoners retreated into the privacy of the self.

McGregor’s work highlights the potential for faith to act as a “‘coping mechanism’” to help detainees “through distressing periods in detention” (2012, 243). By drawing attention to the complex role of faith in the lives of the detained (and those released after detention), though, her work points to ways in which carceral geography, along with cognate disciplines, can nuance understandings of faith in carceral space, perhaps to problematise what might be understood by the  ‘effectiveness’ of faith-based interventions.

Are you working on faith in carceral space? Let us know about your work by posting a comment below:

Mother’s Day in Prison – virtual crossing of the prison wall

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Mother’s Day in the US has highlighted the problems facing families trying to bridge the divide of the prison wall to stay in touch with incarcerated loved ones. Some of these examples highlight the value of online advocacy and social media in bringing issues of personal communication to a wider audience

  • Media Literacy Project, Strong Families, and Thousand Kites have a Mother’s Day radio special which highlights the charges made in the US by telephone corporations to families wishing to keep in touch with their incarcerated loved ones.
  • The American Civil Liberties Union has a new  Justice Mamas feature on its website, with a series of mothers talking about what it is like to have a son behind bars and in solitary confinement
  • The Get on the Bus initiative in California brings children to visit their mothers in prison. Sixty percent of parents in state prison report being held over 100 miles from their children.

What each demonstrates is the reach that the prison has beyond its physical boundaries, into the lives of the families and friends of the incarcerated. Carceral geography has debated the apparent ‘inside/outside’ binary, (for example Baer & Ravneberg 2008, Moran in press), and within criminology, prison sociology and ethnography there is a wealth of research into the ‘collateral’ effects of incarceration (see for example the work of Helen Codd, and Megan Comfort’s recent book). Where carceral geography can contribute further, though, is in the exploration of these hybrid inside/outside spaces of collateral confinement, in which contact with the carceral, be that vicarious, for example through telephone conversations, or actual, through the entry of  ‘free’ individuals into the carceral estate, affects the lives of the family and friends of prisoners.

Just as important, though, is work which addresses the after-effects of incarceration, such as Matthew Lowen’s paper at the AAG conference in Seattle in 2011 which considered the effects of supermax confinement on prisoners’ lives after release. Matthew argued that “upon release prisoners experience social and spatial isolation as a result of limitations imposed by laws, regulations, and societal expectations.  Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that prisoners often impose social and spatial isolation upon themselves thus limiting their contact with others and in effect contributing to the re-creation of the many limiting conditions of mobility while in solitary confinement”.

Whilst Mother’s Day rightly draws attention to the suffering of the families of the incarcerated, as Matthew Lowen argues, “there is a need for a deeper analysis of the political implications the of socio-spatial (im)mobility of prisoners held in solitary confinement as well as recently released prisoners with a history of solitary confinement.” See more in the American Service Friends Committee’s report “Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona’s Prisons and Jails” (Matthew Lowen and Caroline Isaacs, 2007)

Contraband cellphones – the ‘porous prison’

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On opposite sides of the world, in very different penal systems, penal authorities are trying to gain control of the communication technology used by inmates both to organise themselves within the prison, and to make contact with those outside. In Jakarta, Indonesia, an impromptu raid unearthed and confiscated illegal devices such as cell phones, chargers, and an iPad, and in California USA, the private company that owns the pay phones in the state’s prisons is installing technology to prevent inmates from using smuggled cell phones to make their calls.

Although the motivation in the US is partially to protect the profits of the service provider, aided by new legislation which makes smuggling a cell phone into a prison a misdemeanour punishable by a fine of up to US$5,000, Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Matthew Cate said that the “groundbreaking and momentous technology” to be installed “will enable [the prison system] to crack down on the potentially dangerous communications by inmates.”

Under the new plan, each prison will have a cellphone tower that can be controlled by prison officials.  Cell phones supplied by the approved provider will be able to send and receive signals, but contraband phones will be useless.

The introduction of this technology in California’s jails draws attention to the porosity of the prison wall, engaging with Goffmann’s interpretation of the prison as a ‘total institution’, and to critiques which draw attention to its porosity and permeability. The blurred nature of the prison boundary has been observed by Baer and Ravneberg (2008), who in their description of Norwegian and English prisons highlight the indistinction that they perceived between outside and inside, and by Moran (in press) in relation to prison visiting spaces in the Russian Federation.

The prison wall is permeable not only in that it permits the interpenetration of material things (people, supplies) but also intangible things (ideas, the internet, emotional attachments), and this move in California could be interpreted as a means of wresting back some control over the level of porosity or permeability of the prison wall to communication technology.

Beyond spaces of confinement – papers at RGS-IBG 2012

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The provisional schedule for the RGS-IBG conference in Edinburgh in July this year is now available online. For those interested in geographies of imprisonment and detention, as well as the two sessions themed around ‘Everyday Geographies of the Punitive State’, there are a number of fascinating papers in store.

Selecting just two of these, both Menah Raven-Ellison’s paper Home beyond detention  and Avril Maddrell’s paper Doing time in the charity shop: space of reparation and rehabilitation for the Licensed Prisoner? A ten year review draw attention to practices of ‘confinement’ which take place beyond formal institutonal boundaries. Abstracts, taken from the RGS-IBG provisional programme, are given below.

Home beyond detention (Menah Raven-Ellison) In the third quarter of 2011, 6,593 people were detained in the UK for the purposes of immigration control (Home Office, 2011). While 1,123 of those detained were women, major shortcomings are identified in their treatment and calls made for a more gender sensitive asylum system that meets the needs of women asylum-seekers. Although 35% of these women went on to be released there is a lack of research that investigates the on-going legacy of detention and the consequences for the belonging, social integration and mental wellbeing of ex-detainees and those close to them. This paper presents some preliminary empirical findings, drawing on in-depth narratives of ‘home’ for previously detained women living in the UK. In doing so it seeks to uncover how women’s experiences of detention may endure over time and space, often defined by the enduring indeterminacy and exceptionality of detention and the imposing ‘spectre’ of future confinement. Conceptually, this paper seeks to contribute a critical feminist perspective to the emerging geographic research on detention, imprisonment and confinement by focusing on how geographies of detention may extend beyond institutional boundaries to the home as an equally geopolitical space as experienced in the everyday lives of women.

Doing time in the charity shop: space of reparation and rehabilitation for the Licensed Prisoner? A ten year review (Avril Maddrell) Research on charity shops ten years ago showed that they fulfil a number of social functions and draw on a wide range of volunteers, including licensed prisoners on day- release from open prisons. This identified the space of the charity shop not only as a conduit for fundraising, recycling and alternative consumption, but as a complex social environment in which prisoners ‘do time’ and shadow state functions are performed by shop managers and other volunteers who undertake explicit and implicit surveillance, re-training and social rehabilitation of prisoners on licence (Maddrell 2000; Horne and Maddrell 2002). In-depth interviews with charity shop prisoners, volunteers, licensed prisoners and prison officers are used to undertake a ten year review of this scheme, the implications for prisoners, prisons, charity shops and personnel, the general public and custodial policy. Questions addressed include whether in this context the charity shop can be read as panopticon? And whether the near-compulsory nature of community service work under licence challenges definitions of what constitutes a ‘volunteer’?

Distance Matters: Parenting in Prison

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Where prisons are matters – not just for the local inhabitants of surrounding areas concerned for their house prices or their employment prospects, but for the families of the incarcerated who face problems in visiting prisoners when they are held at distance from home, and for imprisoned parents who want to see their children.

In New York, USA, two politicians have recently introduced bills that would establish a pilot program for 60 parents to be incarcerated near their children. According to a piece in the NY Daily News, although more than 73% of incarcerated women in New York are mothers and roughly 100,000 New York children have a parent in prison, the state Department of Corrections makes no provisions for parents when it assigns them to prisons across New York state.

The impact of distance on the experience of imprisonment, particularly for mothers with young children, is the focus of  a recently completed project looking at the experience of women in Russia’s prison system, and is discussed in a forthcoming book, as well as in a recent paper which describes Russia’s geography of punishment.

While carceral geography has tended to concentrate on the impact of the spatial distribution of places of incarceration on the communities which host or surround them, research into the impact of distance from home and family during imprisonment would complement the wealth of research within criminology and prison sociology into the ‘collateral’ effects of  incarceration.