Carceral Mobilities

Interrogating Movement in Incarceration

Jennifer Turner, Kimberley Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138184046
• eBook ISBN: 9781317292029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Mobilities research is now centre stage in the social sciences with wide-ranging work that considers the politics underscoring the movements of people and objects, critically examining a world that is ever on the move.

At first glance, the words 'carceral' and 'mobilities' seem to sit uneasily together. This book challenges the assumption that carceral life is characterised by a lack of movement. Carceral Mobilities brings together contributions that speak to contemporary debates across carceral studies and mobilities research, offering fresh insights to both areas by identifying and unpicking the manifold mobilities that shape, and are shaped by, carceral regimes. It features four sections that move the reader through the varying typologies of motion underscoring carceral life: tension; circulation; distribution; and transition. Each mobilities-led section seeks to explore the politics encapsulated in specific regimes of carceral movement.

With contributions from leading scholars, and a range of international examples, this book provides an authoritative voice on carceral mobilities from a variety of perspectives, including criminology, sociology, history, cultural theory, human geography, and urban planning. This book offers a first port of call for those examining spaces of detention, asylum, imprisonment, and containment, who are increasingly interested in questions of movement in relation to the management, control, and confinement of populations.

1Carceral mobilities

A manifesto for mobilities, an agenda for carceral studies

Kimberley Peters and Jennifer Turner

Introduction

Mobilities research is now an established field of academic enquiry (Faulconbridge and Hui, 2016). In the decade since the publication of two seminal papers that positioned mobilities as ‘centre stage’ in social science research agendas (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 208; Hannam et al., 2006), a proliferation of wide-ranging work on the politics underscoring the movements of people and objects has emerged. As is well documented elsewhere (Adey et al., 2014; Cresswell and Merriman, 2011), this has ranged from a study of technologies of motion (airplanes, trains, buses, cars, and bicycles) to the infrastructures that enable/disable mobility (roads, rails, airports, data centres); the subjects made mobile or immobile by regimes of regulation and control (including commuters, tourists, migrants, military personnel, and so on); and the materialities that shape and are shaped by mobilities (food distribution, fossil fuels, passports, and so forth). What ‘mobilities thinking’ has come to achieve, therefore, is a critical consideration of a world that is ever ‘on the move’ (Cresswell, 2006). But with the ‘maturity’ (Faulconbridge and Hui, 2016: 8) of the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006: 207), how might the study of mobilities move forwards? For Faulconbridge and Hui, the future of mobilities research relies on the study of movement – and the politics of movement – remaining ‘vibrant, creative and generative’ (2016: 1). It relies on a recognition that ‘mobilities research is itself on the move’; drawing in new spaces, subjects, events, occurrences, and temporalities to examine through a mobilities framework (Falconbridge and Hui, 2016: 1). This movement, we argue, has motioned scholars towards the study of carceral mobilities.

At first glance, the words ‘carceral’ and ‘mobilities’ seem to sit uneasily together. Consider the brute physicality of a prison wall. Whether stone, brick, edged with barbed wire, or flanked with surveillance, the boundary between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of this particular carceral space also marks an assumed boundary between movement and stasis (Philo, 2014). Outside of these sites is a presumed autonomy of movement, a liberty to move freely. Inside, there is an assumed prohibition of movement, an imposed stasis and inability to move at will. Such a distinction is evident in the conceptual understandings generated in respect of other sites of detention, captivity, and holding: the migrant camp, the detention centre, the quarantine island (to name just a few). Unsurprisingly, then, where there has been a shift in recent years to take seriously regimes of imprisonment, detention, temporary-holding, and captivity (see Conlon, 2011; Loyd et al., 2012; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Moran, 2015; Morin and Moran, 2015; Moran et al., 2013; Pallot, 2005; Turner, 2013, 2016) the study of mobilities have been traditionally ‘overlooked’ (Moran et al., 2012: 446; and also Ong et al., 2014; Philo, 2014). Scholars have, by and large, neglected to ask what a study of movement might offer to understanding environments of relative stasis.

To answer such a question we have to look more carefully to carceral boundaries, and to the concept of relation (Adey, 2006). Carceral boundaries – such as prison walls or detention centre fences – mark a further distinction between the visible and invisible which cements the dichotomy between mobility and immobility that has come to define knowledge of carceral systems. Outside is a world that is known. Inside is world few of us will see and which is visualised and known only through media depictions and the imagination (Turner, 2016). These often stark, material boundaries hide the inside, creating an appearance of immobility within carceral estates vis-à-vis an appearance of hyper-mobility beyond them. Indeed, for Peter Adey, it is relation which is crucial to understanding mobilities. For those embracing a mobile ontology (see Cresswell, 2010), the world is always, wholly ‘on the move’. Stasis, stillness, fixity are products of a relationship with mobility (in other words, we can only know that there is immobility when comparing it to mobility). Mobilities rely on anchor points and moorings, binding the two together (Hannam et al., 2006). Moreover, though, as Adey contends, mobilities held in relation create ‘illusions of mobility and immobility’ (Adey, 2006: 83). A sleepy village may appear to be immobile, unchanging and static. But this is only because of the ‘speed’ of change and movement elsewhere. The sleepy village is, of course, not fixed. Through the passage of time, small, almost unnoticed changes occur. Place is mobile, only at a different pace. Returning to sites of incarceration, here the ‘inside’ appears less mobile than the outside. The ‘outside’ appears more mobile than the inside. Of course sites of incarceration should not only been understood through the equally problematic dichotomy of inside/outside (rather, as this book shows, carceral spaces reach into, beyond, spill over, muddy, and blur any socially and materially constructed boundaries; see also Turner, 2016) but it remains that carceral spaces evoke a visual trickery – an illusion of immobility, where instead spaces of incarceration are often underscored by mobilities. These are mobilities that are simply different than those that might ‘normally’ be associated with our understandings of movement and motion (Adey, 2006: 83).

The illusion (see Adey, 2006) of carceral space as fixed space limits the possibilities of engaging with such sites as a means of unlocking new knowledge of mobilities. It has led to a neglect in the study of mobilities in relation to carceral life – and to a ‘weakness’ in the study of mobilities as the field has shied away from spaces of apparent fixity (Moran et al., 2012: 446). Yet with mobilities research expressing an explicit focus on the dimensions of power embedded in mobile life (including, then, of course how power works to immobilise) carceral settings seem to be fertile ground generating fresh insights into questions of how, why, in what ways are people and objects able, unable, and restricted in their movement. Likewise, mobilities can offer carceral scholars a framework for better understanding the operation of the power that works to confine, contain, detain, immobilise and also make mobile incarcerated peoples. In other words, the question is not whether studies of mobilities have a place in the field of carceral studies and vice versa, but rather: How might examinations of mobilities in carceral settings, and carceral examples of im/mobility, help enrich both the study of carceral geographies (see Moran, 2015) and the progression of mobilities research into the next decade? What opportunities, in short, can sites of immobilisation and stasis offer for understanding mobilities and mobile experience, practically and theoretically?

In the introduction to this edited collection we therefore present something of a manifesto for where the mobile field of mobilities studies might move next, alongside an agenda for the future of carceral studies. There is now a wide acknowledgement that ‘[m]obility is … a constant practical concern in the management of penal systems’ (Moran et al., 2012: 449) (see also Gill, 2009; Moran et al., 2013; Mincke and Lemonne, 2014; Mountz, 2011; Philo, 2014). As Alison Mountz and colleagues have noted (2013), no regime of incarceration is without movement. Movement predicates and dictates what it is to be imprisoned, detained, or held captive (see Moran et al., 2013; Gill, 2009; Moran et al., 2012; Peters and Turner, 2015). As such, whilst carceral space may not be the most apparent lens through which to explore mobilities, mobility is part and parcel of carcerality. This acknowledgement allows us to ask a host of questions pertaining to past and present manifestations of carceral life: How are the movements of persons and objects enabled and restricted within carceral environments such as prisons, detention camps, and asylum centres? Through what means does movement occur between such sites, as people, contraband, and ideas are transported between spaces of confinement? In what ways do technologies of incarceration, legal and regulative apparatus, and economic systems impact who and what can move – and where – in/between carceral spaces? How are identities made mobile within carceral regimes, and in what ways do virtual and imaginative capacities shape new possibilities for movement? Ultimately, what systems of power shape these mobilities and what does this mean for better understanding methods of incarceration, and the politics of mobilities? These are the questions central to this edited collection.

In proposing that studies carceral mobilities might be a means of generating fresh discussion for mobilities scholars and carceral geographers alike, we are not arguing for carceral mobilities to emerge as a tightly bounded subfield under the banner of ‘mobilities’ but rather as a means of continuing the interdisciplinary project that the mobilities paradigm has so far generated (see Faulconbridge and Hui, 2016). Mobilities has been a project uniquely cross-and transdisciplinary in scope. A study of carceral mobilities is inspired by this lineage and provides a means of extending this trajectory into the future, weaving together scholars working in the cognate fields of criminology, sociology, international relations, and human geography. Drawing on a wide range of perspective and expertise, but sharing – fundamentally – a concern with mobility, this collection seeks to ask how the key tenets of mobilities thinking might be reanalysed in the context of the carceral; and how the carceral can be better understood through an attention to mobilities. Accordingly, this book hopes to offer the potential to radically contribute to studies of mobilities as well as those centred on the politics of incarceration. In what follows we outline this project in greater detail, summarising the contributions this book makes to our understandings of carceral mobilities, before suggesting how such research might extend further in the future.

The chapters

The book to follow attends to the relationship between carcerality (or, we might argue, carceralities, as we recognise the conditions, qualities, and experiences of carceral life to be multiple not singular) and mobilities. It does so through 16 carefully selected chapters, authored by geographers, criminologists, legal scholars, sociologists, and practitioners working in (and with) social policy. These chapters each identify and unpick a range of mobilities that shape (and are shaped by) carceral regimes. They speak to contemporary debates across carceral studies and mobilities research, offering fresh insights to both areas of concern. Importantly, the book moves this discussion internationally – from the Global North to the Global South – providing an examination of carceral mobilities that are themselves not singular but which are couched in a variety of specific, yet networked, spatial contexts (including Australia, the United States, Latin America, France, Britain, Romania, and Italy). Moreover, the book is organised in four sections that move the reader through the varying typologies of motion underscoring carceral life: tension, circulation, distribution, and transition (see Peters, 2015; and also Cresswell, 2010). Each mobilities-led section seeks to explore the politics encapsulated in specific, yet fluid, regimes of carceral movement. Accordingly, as the field of carceral studies gains momentum (see notably Moran et al., 2013; Moran, 2015; and Morin and Moran, 2015) and the social sciences continue to analyse a world of movement and mobility (see Adey et al., 2014; Faulconbridge and Hui, 2016), Carceral Mobilities offers a text of international, interdisciplinary scope which contributes to these topical, timely areas of concern.

The chapters in Part One consider how carceral movements are driven by, and are laden with tensions – a strain produced between two or more subjects and/or objects. Tension, this section shows, is a force (see Cresswell, 2010) that produces particular mobile outcomes. Specifically the authors each consider the tensions between those who are incarcerated and those who seek to incarcerate them. In Chapter Two Kate Coddington explores how, since the Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation of 2007, Aboriginal Australians in this area have experienced a range of interventions targeting their communities. Meanwhile, hundreds of asylum seekers have experienced mandatory, indefinite detention in the same region, earning it the name ‘Detention Capital of Australia’. Coddington argues that in spite of the apparent differences in these cases of incarceration, similar mobile, ‘carceral logics’ underscore these different modes of detention. Crucially for Coddington, these carceral logics are mobile. Regulatory regimes, she posits, move across space and time, and this has violent consequences for both Aboriginal Australians and asylum seekers.

Also attending to the ways in which violence is manifest through carceral regimes, in Chapter Three Roberta Altin and Claudio Minca investigate the semi-carceral operations of detention/hospitality centres for asylum seekers, focusing on the carceral regimes that govern the movement of those housed in the centres. Drawing on the case study of the Gradisca Hospitality Centre for Asylum Seekers in the North East of Italy close to the Slovenian border, Altin and Minca examine the rising tensions surrounding supposed ‘unconstrained’ mobilities of those seeking asylum who are permitted into ‘buffer zones’ local to the camp. Here, asylum seekers and migrants alike are seen to create a ‘human excess’, stimulating a prejudice amongst those ‘hosting’ them. Whilst perceived as mobile, such individuals are in fact subject to conditions that create heavily regulated and prescribed mobilities – producing a quasi-carceral experience, for largely non-criminal populations. Whilst there is a tension between perceived ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and between those who ‘belong’ and ‘do not belong’, Altin and Minca show how asylum seekers also use the mobilities which constrain them to create space for resistance.

Moving back to Australia, Chapter Four turns to youth justice and the tensions between young people and the authorities who seek to govern them through so-called diversionary practices (such as tags, curfews, probation). Elaine Fishwick and Michael Wearing show how such measures, articulated within a landscape of neocolonialism, are as incarcerating as prison, raising tensions regarding where regimes of carcerality apply (and do not apply). In particular, they demonstrate that diversionary practices for ensuring youth justice within New South Wales hinge on mobilities – the perceived need to govern ‘unruly’ mobilities through the control of how, where, and when young people can and cannot move. Like Altin and Minca they show how the existence of ‘carceral logics’ (to borrow from Coddington) creates ‘liminal’ spaces of semi- or quasi-confinement for those subject to such measures.

To conclude the section, in Chapter Five, Bénédicte Michalon also pays attention to semi-quasi, tension-filled regimes of carcerality via an investigation of the ‘continuum’ of mobilities (borrowing from Gill, 2009) for migrants and asylum seekers in Romania. Here Michalon shows how regimes of so-called tolerance create specific modes of mobility that allow neither unrestricted movement nor total confinement. ‘Tolerance’ refers to a very temporary right to remain in Romanian territory for irregular migrants who are neither legal nor who can be deported. ‘Tolerance’, Michalon reveals, is fraught with tension – allowing irregular migrants the right to move but only under specific, self-regulated conditions.

Following on, Part Two explores considers various forms of circulation – physical, material, and imaginative – that operate in carceral space and across the boundary between prison and society (see also Turner, 2016). The authors each explore how carceral life depends upon, is forged and framed by, and is threated via circulations. As such, these authors urge us to rethink how mobility is perceived and encountered in carceral space. Writing from a perspective of prison sociology, in Chapter Six James Gacek contends that much can be learned from the workings of space and motion by understanding inmates’ identity constructions and their ability to cope with stress within prison. Using qualitative interviews with ten men who have experienced incarceration in Manitoba, Canada, Gacek draws attention to the psychosocial dimensions of spatiality, the role of inner space, and importance of daydreaming for prisoners to ‘escape’ and move beyond their physical existence ‘inside’ prison. Accordingly he explores an imaginative circulation of personhood from inside to outside and back again, through the power of the mind. He suggests that the use of imagination by inmates is crucial for allowing inmates to adapt to – and move beyond – the carceral structure.

Relatedly, in Chapter Seven Alex Tepperman unpacks the circulation of ideas through the spreading of a ‘convict code’ in early-twentieth-century American prisons. His chapter tracks the spread of an anti-institutional ideology common among American inmates from the 1920s to the mid-twentieth century. In addressing the informal movement of inmate culture through the mass movement of prisoners nationwide, Tepperman...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Carceral Mobilities
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Carceral mobilities: A manifesto for mobilities, an agenda for carceral studies
• Part I: Tension
• Part II: Circulation
• Part III: Distribution
• Part IV: Transition
• Afterword: Ordinary mobilities, ordinary incarcerations
• Index