Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals

Karen M. Morin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317266662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals explores resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies. The work proposes an analysis of the carceral from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a 'trans-species carceral geography' that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that are placed into conversation draw from a number of institutional domains, based on their form, operation, and effect. These include: the prison death row/ execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; sites of exploited prisoner and animal labor; and the prison solitary confinement cell and the zoo cage. The relationships to which I draw attention across these sites are at once structural, operational, technological, legal, and experiential / embodied. The forms of violence that span species boundaries at these sites are all a part of ordinary, everyday, industrialized violence in the United States and elsewhere, and thus this 'carceral comparison' amongst them is appropriate and timely.

1 Introduction

Carceral space, prisoners and animals

Introduction

Standing at the top of the most iconic place on my university campus – the quad – one overlooks a beautiful pastoral landscape that encompasses the lower part of campus to the far extent of the ridge-and-valley Appalachian Mountains in the distance. This otherwise picturesque view of Pennsylvania’s rolling hills and steepled architecture is always spoiled for me, though, by two sites of enclosure poking out of the landscape: the upper portions of the “monkey cages” facility that are the hallmark of the university’s animal behavior program, and the bell tower of the federal penitentiary, USP-Lewisburg, on the edge of town. The monkey cages facility currently houses an impressive array of primates for an undergraduate liberal arts school, including baboons, lion tail macaques, squirrel and capuchin monkeys, all of whom live out their lives in what appear to be small, mostly concrete lab cages. Few in the community would notice or care that the lived experience of these animals is not unlike that of the 1,000+ prisoners at the penitentiary, a site that has become notorious in recent years for its insidious Special Management Unit (SMU) program that features 23- or 24-hour a day double-celled lockdown of federal prisoners from around the country, brought here for years of “readjustment” (Morin 2013).

The juxtaposition of the Lewisburg penitentiary and the animal research labs at my university offers a useful leitmotif for the subject of this book. The nexus of mass incarceration in U.S. prisons and mass exploitation of nonhuman animals today presents a “critical moment in history” (Thomas and Shields 2012: 4). These processes are connected, and the purpose of this book is to develop a framework to position and interpret some key points of connection across these human and nonhuman ‘carceral spaces’. Although incarceration has conventionally come to refer to the legal confinement of prisoners under the jurisdiction of the state, ‘the carceral’ has also come to be understood as embracing the myriad ways in which persons could be confined by other means, such as in spaces of detention for immigrants and refugees, as well as those ‘trans-carceral’ spaces touched by the prison and security state apparatus outside of the formally carceral, that spill over into everyday life in myriad ways (after Foucault 1977; Peck 2003; Moran et al. 2013; Loyd et al. 2012; Shabazz 2015a). In this work I propose an analysis of the carceral from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. As I discuss in the next section, Moran et al. (2017) advance a useful taxonomy, if you will, to define carceral space as encompassing a set of ‘carceral conditions’ that bear the nature and quality of carcerality, and in so doing help us move beyond Foucault’s (1977: 298) notion of carcerality as encompassing the social in its entirety.

The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that I place into parallel conversation draw from a number of institutional domains, based on their form, operation, and effect. These include: the prison death row/execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse (Chapter 2); sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals (Chapter 3); sites of exploited prisoner and animal labor (Chapter 4); and the prison solitary confinement cell and the zoo cage (Chapter 5). The relationships to which I draw attention across these sites are at once structural, operational, technological, legal, and experiential/embodied. The forms of violence that span species boundaries at these sites are all a part of ordinary, everyday, industrialized violence in the United States and elsewhere, and thus this ‘carceral comparison’ amongst them is appropriate and timely.

Acampora (2006), citing the work of philosopher Heini Hediger, first drew my attention to the potential of a cross-species ‘carceral milieux’. In his study of zoos Acampora (2006: 109) briefly noted the similarities among calls for the reform of zoos and the reform of prisons – that is, progressives’ calls for improvement of prisons resonated with the professionalizing practice of zoo management. In both cases, Acampora argued, the reformer “wants the inmates to feel as comfortable, as snug, and as much at home as possible” – with such comfort perhaps belying nothing more than increasingly sophisticated means of regulating and disciplining captive bodies. Temple Grandin (2012), for example, a spokesperson popular with the global meat industry, employs a ‘somatic sensibility’ in designing putatively ‘humane’ slaughterhouses that reduce the stress, anxiety, and suffering of the animals passing through them. In instances such as this we see an argument to reform and improve the conditions of captivity and death, which stands in stark contrast to arguments for abolishing institutions like the slaughterhouse altogether (a theme I return to in the Afterword). Acampora’s insights about the cross-species carceral milieux and their respective politics and policies challenged me to think about other sites and institutions of human and nonhuman carcerality that could offer further useful insights into regimes of captivity, structures of oppressions and inequalities, and epistemologies of violence.

The sites and institutions of human and nonhuman incarceration I discuss are embedded within the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), the Agricultural Industrial Complex (AIC), and the Medical Industrial Complex (along with a key site of the ‘Entertainment Industrial Complex’, the zoo). Thus, I bring together and into conversation the insights emerging from carceral geography and criminology with those of critical animal studies. I synthesize works that address human and nonhuman captivity and disposability within the PIC, MIC, and AIC – the ways that humans and nonhumans can be made disposable and killable in the prison and slaughterhouse; can be exploited for entertainment or as experimental research material; and whose bodies and labor can be made into property and commodity. My theoretical and conceptual focus is on the geographies of these sites (locations, design, and layout); the highly regulated technologies and movements within them; the emotional and psychological strain enacted via daily operations; the legal contexts within which these industries are (or are not) regulated; and the ways in which ‘animalization’ of certain bodies works to create the conditions for their exploitation and disposability. These are not particularly new ideas, but I offer a novel synthesis and application of them. Cross-pollinating these themes and literatures and brokering between them offers an opportunity to reflect not only on the ways in which industrial violence against humans and nonhuman animals is naturalized and made possible, but also the ways that these regimes of violence are maintained together – they are enmeshed and entangled in similar processes, co-constituted and co-articulating in their basic carceral logics.

The developmental trajectories and overlaps of these industrial complexes followed different historical-geographical paths towards their present iterations. With a few exceptions, my project is not in specifically comparing these developmental trajectories – governmental regulations or deregulations of industrial processes; legal maneuverings that served to protect, enrich, and incentivize certain practices; architectural or technological advances; or so on. Nonetheless a number of geographical and historical developments cannot go without notice – such as the rise of the prison industry that in many ways stepped in to fill the economic void created in many communities by deregulation of factory-scale farming. More to my project though are what these industries collectively produced over the past few decades: unprecedented numbers of confined bodies subjected to unprecedented levels of violence within the industrial U.S. today.

Key to my thesis throughout is that the distinctions between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ themselves are made through encounters with carceral spaces. Which humans and nonhumans have the force of legal, political, cultural, or other protections due to their special ‘human’ qualities, and which fall outside of those protections as ‘animal’? The process of ‘animalization’ in particular subjugates both certain humans and certain nonhumans into hierarchies of worthiness and value. Fundamental to how and why certain prisoners and certain animals can be exploited, objectified, or made killable within the prison, the farm, the research lab, and the zoo are the social constructions of the human–nonhuman divide – the ‘carceral logics’ and social meanings that attach to various bodies and populations. The hierarchies that these distinctions perpetuate are based on a number of social markers, perhaps most importantly, racial ones. Racial difference is foundational, for example, to much of the ‘criminal as animal’ rhetoric, particularly via animalistic representations of Black and other minoritized men (Kim 2016; Deckha 2010; Alexander 2012; Cacho 2014; Wacquant 2001). Meanwhile certain animals such as pets can be anthropomorphized and ‘humanized’ while others – vermin, pests, livestock – remain ‘animalized’. Many processes are in play that either amplify the status of certain humans and nonhumans, or reduce the status of others. These have different and important implications – not least of which are the processes that govern how certain lives can be made disposable and killable because they lack ostensibly human qualities. ‘The human’, though, is itself a highly contested category, from which many human lives have been and continue to be excluded (Wynter 2003). And indeed, perhaps in Western societies at least, it has only been the White, Western, bourgeois man who has ever occupied or been imputed the place of ‘complete’ human (Ko 2016; Jackson 2015; see below and Chapter 3 for further discussion).

In what follows I do not argue that the carceral oppressions experienced by various vulnerable populations are exactly the same, but neither do they need to be the same in order to ‘think them together’, to observe, juxtapose, associate, and ultimately challenge the disciplinary regimes and structures of violence that comprise these often taken-for-granted industrial sites. Quite obviously these sites had and have distinct historical and geographical developments and contexts and are characterized by unique forms of oppression that impact lives very differently. To highlight their similar structures and mechanisms is not to say that these abuses are the same – “different atrocities deserve their own languages” (Haraway 2008: 336N23). I acknowledge their important differences, for example the sheer scale of the number of bodies exploited, abused, and killed within these spaces is worth considering. Many would argue that the thousands of prisoners on death row or executed via capital punishment does not compare to the billions of nonhuman animals killed in the U.S. each year for food or other commodities (Chapter 2). The issue of ‘informed consent’ across human and nonhuman groups to labor or serve as research subjects for the profits of others is a highly contested issue (Chapters 3 and 4). And clearly the purpose or ‘intent’ of the prison, the farm, the slaughterhouse, the zoo, and the research lab are different – they are marked by different purposes and end ‘products’. Most spaces of animal confinement and captivity were not invented or designed to be places of punishment. And (at least arguably) the prison was not invented or designed to primarily provide a cheap source of labor for the manufacture of textiles (Chapter 4) or to assemble a captive population on which to test infectious diseases (Chapter 3).

Nonetheless, I would argue that much can be gained by placing these sites in conversation and highlighting their common denominators, the ways that their processes are entangled and reinforce one another. I bring together insights from carceral geography and critical animal studies to expose how the politics and regimes of domination work throughout some of the main industries in the U.S. today, reaching new levels of “industrialized efficiency” (after Gilmore in Loyd 2012: 42). It is important to be able to recognize the carceral logics, respective taxonomies of power that work through hierarchies of ‘worthiness’, commodification of vulnerable populations and capital accumulation strategies, and political and legal protections that pervade and are mobilized through these industries.

In a later section below I also reflect on the important though somewhat intractable methodological, ethnographical, and epistemological questions that my work raises. That is, how is it possible to assign or presume a subjective experience of violence and suffering and pain onto another being, whether human or nonhuman? To understand violence against human and nonhuman animals it is important to not only be able to epistemologically define what we mean by ‘violence’ and ‘cruelty’ in the first place, but also to be able to establish that suffering and pain are in fact experienced in carceral spaces such as the death house and slaughterhouse and not simply assume it to be so. And again, although the positionalities, subjectivities, and experiences of those exploitable and killable within these spaces are not the same, they do nonetheless share key aspects. Below I discuss various approaches to validating evidence, empirical and otherwise, of the emotional, psychological, and physiological trauma of inhabiting the body of the exploitable, disposable, and killable in carceral space.

Carceral logic and carceral space

Attempting to define ‘the carceral’ raises some basic questions about social and spatial relations. What makes a space a carceral space? What is it that makes us think of confinement of various kinds as being carceral or not? Is the carceral defined by the nature of the confinement – its intended purpose, or the inhabitants’ experience? Does the intention behind confinement make a space carceral, or just the ‘fact’ of confinement? Where (if anywhere) does the carceral start and where does it stop? Is there an outside to the carceral and if so, where would it be (after Moran et al. 2017)? What are similarities and differences among various sorts of captivities, confinements, and incarcerations, particularly with respect to the physical spaces and practices that take place within them?

Moran (2015a) has defined carceral geography as a field of geographical research that focuses on practices of incarceration and zones of confinement, viewing ‘carceral space’ broadly as a type of institution with particular types of distributional geographies, and internal and external social and spatial relations. These include the architectures and geographies of carceral systems; the disciplinary regimes inherent in carceral settings; and the embodied experiences of imprisonment. Conventional wisdom suggests that the prison and jail are quintessential carceral spaces, with ‘incarceration’ conventionally understood as referring to the legal confinement of sentenced offenders under the jurisdiction of the state. What the carceral is then is related to what the prison is; it is anchored in the prison. So, as Bosworth (2010) has asked, “what is it about the prison that makes it a prison? What are its defining characteristics?” These are key questions; if the carceral is synonymous with the prison, it is a synonym that potentially surpasses the material and extends into the metaphorical (e.g. the ‘prison of our minds’). Even within the U.S. criminal justice system, though, the carceral has also come to be understood as far exceeding imprisonment for criminal activity, embracing the myriad spaces and ways in which people are confined by the state, for example in the case of migrant detention (Moran et al. 2013; Mountz 2011; Loyd et al. 2012). Thus, the notion of spatial confinement and incapacitation is key to the carceral, but one that is expansive, that goes beyond the narrowly geographical to include a variety of practices, meanings, and social relations.

Carceral geography to date has concerned itself primarily with spaces of confinement broadly conceived through structural, political, and institutional contexts, operating at every scale from the personal to the global, and with a concern for everyday experiences and practices (Routley 2016; Moran et al. 2013; Loyd et al. 2012; Morin and Moran 2015). The carceral thus exceeds categories of criminality and penality, involving systems of confinement but which differ from those that a sociology of punishment or criminality would address. In this way, the carceral has come to encompass the spaces of detention of refugees, noncitizens, asylum seekers, the trafficked and the renditioned – as well as ‘forms of confinement that burst internment structures and deliver carceral effects without physical immobilization’, and embracing those trans-carceral spaces into which the more formally carceral constantly seeps (Moran et al. 2013: 240; Shabazz 2015b; Moran et al. 2017). Such spaces thus reflect the “carceral turn” and deployment of a new range of strategies of social control and coercion, with unprecedented fluidity between forms of confinement (Moran 2015a).

Davis (1990), for example, described Los Angeles as the quintessential “carceral city” comprised of heavily policed and privatized zones with accompanying segregated wastelands. Shabazz (2009: 285; 2015a; 2015b), Wacquant (2001; 2005; 2009), and others have proposed that the deployment of carceral techniques and mechanisms of prison punishment – surveillance, policing, containment, and restrictions on movement in homes, streets, housing projects, and neighborhoods, are the same as those used in prisons, thus effectively preparing especially young men for prison life. That many people inhabit trans-carceral spaces beyond the prison or jail is important to recognize, particularly with respect to the policing of Black neighborhoods and populations, who are then disproportionately represented in prisons and jails. Thus certain spaces and circumstances can become carceral through their very contact with the prison or other forms of actual custody (Orson 2012).

With respect to human populations in this study I focus (only) on the spaces, practices, technologies, and logics of the carceral as they relate to U.S. “correctional” institutions – prisons and the prison industry. Where my project extends beyond human corrections is with various nonhuman species and populations. In this book, I propose an engagement with interpretations of the carceral as including spaces and practices of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure, at various scales, be they state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, extra-legal, spatially fixed or mobile, and embodied (after Moran et al. 2017). Drawing these domains together into parallel conversation illuminates their shared carceral logics. Thus, in a broader sense my interests lie in defining carcerality in its structural/physical form; its functional mode of operation; its technologies and techniques; and in its experiential aspects. I study these carceral forms, modes, and logics within the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC), and the Agricultural Industrial Complex (AIC) (as well as other carceral sites such as the zoo). The carceral spaces and institutions within these ‘industrial complexes’ intersect quite fundamentally with respect to the violent experiential effects on the vulnerable populations within them. In drawing out a trans-species carcerality I argue that the carceral far surpasses spaces of human incapacitation to encompass the slaughterhouse, the research lab, the farm, and the zoo, and conceptually extends to the trans-carceral spaces and practices beyond these institutions proper (such as GPS tracking of wild animals). In that sense carcerality clearly exceeds categories of criminality, penality, punishment, and imprisonment.

Employing such an expansive definition of the carceral runs the risk of leading us to the unhelpful conclusion that just about any space could be considered carceral; i.e. that we live in a ‘carceral age’ surrounded by regimes of regulation and control that are aided by neoliberal reforms and the new security state apparatus, and these invade all aspects of life – they are simply ‘everywhere’ (Foucault 1977; Peck 2003). But if everything and everywhere is carceral, then the concept becomes evacuated of meaning (Bosworth and Kaufman 2011) and loses its potential for helping us to understand how a very specific carceral logic extends (only or mainly) to certain bodies and certain populations – and not to others – incapacitating and disposing of them in particular kinds ways and in particular kinds of spaces.

The view of a universal carceral owes to the foundational insights of Michel Foucault, particularly the last chapter of his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison entitled “The Carceral” (1977: 293–308). Here Foucault offered numerous terms and concepts related to the prison extended outward and that have been foundational to carceral studies generally, including: “carceral continuum,” “carceral city,” “carceral archipelago,” “carceral network,” “carceral methods,” “carceral system,” and “carceral texture of society.” These are all a piece of and implicated in what Foucault described as “rippling carceral circles” emanating from the prison or prison-like spaces and reaching far beyond them, diffusing in carceral circles like ripples of water throughout society (1977: 298). Prison-like spaces such as almshouses and orphanages (what he called the “compact” carceral) extend in widening circles to charitable organizations and moral improvement societies (the “diffuse” carceral) that use carceral methods in ostensibly ‘assisting’ populations but also surveilling them. Beyond these lies the great carceral network of other domestic, urban, and embodied sites – the carceral archipelago – that transports the disciplinary techniques of the prison into the social body as a whole (1977: 298).

For Foucault, the prison was the centrifugal point from which the carceral circles radiated. With his model, the prison ‘opens out to the social in its entirety’. On a number of levels F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Prologue
• 1. Introduction: carceral space, prisoners and animals
• 2. Death row across species: the execution chamber and the slaughterhouse
• 3. The prison as/and laboratory: sites of trans-species bio-testing
• 4. Laboring prisoners, laboring animals
• 5. Wildspace: the cage, the supermax, and the zoo
• 6. Afterword: reflections on trans-species rights and ethics
• References
• Index