immigration

Transcarceral spaces – (dis)empowerment in release from confinement

/ carceralgeography

Heading back from the IBG conference in Edinburgh, I reflected on two fascinating papers on similar themes but drawing very different conclusions.

Menah Raven-Ellison described the experience of women released from immigrant detention in the UK and ‘dispersed’ into poor quality accommodation in towns and cities often distant from any existing family or support networks these women may previously have had. Although Menah is only part way through her PhD fieldwork, her impression so far is that these women experience extreme disempowerment, so much so that in her paper she characterised their status as ‘bare life’, after Agamben – beings entirely without agency.

By contrast, Avril Maddrell’s paper on UK male prisoners released ‘on licence’ from open prisons, detailed their experience of working in high street charity shops, and the positive effect that this activity seemed to have on their sense of self worth, and their motivation to find work on release.

Clearly it’s difficult to draw parallels between these two groups of previously or ‘semi’ incarcerated individuals. Both occupy what might be considered ‘transcarceral’ spaces after Allspach (2010), in that they are released from formal incarceration – in the case if the migrant women, no longer in formal detention, and for the men, on day release from open prison. Both still experience ‘re-confinements’ though – for the women, in the distant locations of their dispersal destinations, and the conditions of the accommodation in which they must remain, and for the men in the monitoring performed by the charity shop managers and the frequent reports back to the prison.

The outcomes, though, according to Raven-Ellison and Maddrell, are very different. For the migrant women these spaces of reconfinement represent for Raven-Ellison extreme denial of agency, whereas for the male prisoners, there is a certain degree of empowerment, with Maddrell describing some prisoners taking on a ‘security’ and surveillance role in charity shops and ‘spotting’ potential shoplifters, in a curious reversal of their own ‘surveilled’ status; and of charity shop work leading to shop management roles for some some prisoners after release.

In an RGS-IBG conference themed around Security of Geography/Geography of Security, these and many other papers provoked the audience to think about what security means. Given the overarching logics of confining asylum seekers and ‘mainstream’ prisoners, and of managing their release in ways which differ so widely in the outcomes for individuals, whose security is really being protected?

Carceral Geography – new books!

/ carceralgeography

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”

/ carceralgeography

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.