detention

Reminder: Research and the Relations between Prison and Detention: ESRC Seminar 20th June 2014

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8-2754esrc-logoBy bringing together a range of established academics, early-career academics, postgraduates, practitioners, artists, activists and former detainees this seminar series will investigate the ways in which the UK experience of detention reflects and re-produces the contradictory logics inherent in modern global detention practices. Through five one-day workshop events the seminar series will span the academic disciplines of criminology, geography, politics and sociology in order to examine the phenomenon of detention as it relates to supporting detainees, penology and prisons, everyday experiences of detention and the politics of, and resistance to, detention practices. The seminars, to be held in London, York, Birmingham, Oxford and Lancaster will also reflect upon the ethical/methodological challenges that the study of detention produces and the tension, running throughout work in this area, between outright resistance to detention practices or a reformist approach based on working with the state on behalf of immigration detainees.

The Birmingham seminar will focus on the challenges of research in spaces of imprisonment and detention.

ESRC Seminar Series: Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Immigration Detention

Research and the Relations between Prison and Detention

University of Birmingham, UK, Friday 20th June 2014

10.00: Arrival and coffee

10.30: Welcome and opening comments

10.40: Can Yıldız (Kings College London) Spatiality and temporality in prison for foreign national prisoners

11.00: David Maguire (University of Oxford) Inside Job: Dilemmas, Exploits and Exploitation of a Prison ‘Insider’

Response: Marie Hutton (University of Birmingham)

12.00: Lunch

1.00 : Bénédicte Michalon and Djemila Zeneidi (CNRS – Université Bordeaux 3, France) Research in constrained contexts: methodological issues and challenges

2.15: Concluding comments

2.30: Tea

Attendance is free but places are limited. To attend please click here.

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.

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…

ESRC Seminar Series “‘Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Immigration Detention”

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The ESRC intends to fund a seminar series entitled ‘Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Immigration Detention’. This seminar series brings together scholars from the universities of Oxford, York, Birmingham, Lancaster and Exeter, who span the disciplines of politics, sociology, geography and criminology, across five events during 2012-2014. These events aim to provide a means of networking between academics and practitioners, and those who have experienced detention, in order to exchange expertise and knowledge around the operation and implications of immigration detention in a national and international context. They also aim to raise public awareness of immigration detention and provide a foundation for a strong future research bid to the ESRC in this important and under-researched area. The seminar series is coordinated by Dr Nick Gill of Exeter University’s Geography Department (Principle Investigator) and will involve international speakers from Canada, America, Finland and Australia.