Carceral Geography

Spaces and Practices of Incarceration

Dominique Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409452348
• eBook ISBN: 9781317169772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The '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. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the 'carceral' as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The ‘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. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesising existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ‘carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

This introduction defines carceral geography as an emergent subdiscipline of human geography, provides a brief overview of the three emerging themes within geographical scholarship of incarceration around which the book is structured, and sets the scene for the following chapter which traces the origins of work in this field and its dialogues with research in other disciplinary areas.

Carceral Geography

Carceral geography is a new, fast-moving and fast-developing sub-discipline. Although the first paper by a geographer published squarely in this field was probably the work of Teresa Dirsuweit (1999) on women’s imprisonment in South Africa, the enormous potential of spaces of incarceration for geographical enquiry was highlighted by Chris Philo (2001), who turned a review of Kantrowitz’ (1996) Close Control: Managing a Maximum Security Prison; The Story of Ragen’s Stateville Penitentiary into an agenda-setting article germinating the ideas which have informed the early development of this area of research, in terms of a critical engagement with spaces of confinement and a dialogue with the work of Foucault. The early work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1999, 2002) also ignited geographers’ interest in prisons as a ‘project of state-building’ (ibid. 2002: 16). More than a decade after Philo’s 2001 paper was published, and with the sub-discipline proving an increasingly vibrant field of scholarship, this book now provides an overview and synthesis, and suggests some future directions for research.

The term ‘carceral geography’ (Moran et al. 2011) was coined to describe this vibrant field of geographical research into practices of incarceration, viewing such carceral spaces broadly as a type of institution whose distributional geographies, and geographies of internal and external social and spatial relations, should be explored. Although the first geographical studies of spaces of confinement were individual, disparate works in different contexts and with different aims and theoretical framings, the gradual coalescence of a corpus of work in this field has come to reflect a growing dialogue with the work of Goffman (1961) on the ‘total institution’, of Foucault (1979) on the development of the prison, surveillance, and the regulation of space and docility of bodies, and of Agamben (1998, 2005) on the notion of a space of exception, where sovereign power suspends the law, producing a zone of abandonment. Although the ideas advanced by Goffman, Foucault and Agamben often underpin this scholarship, other theoretical frames are also increasingly deployed, for example de Certeau’s concept of tactics (Baer 2005), along with theories of liminality and mobility (Moran et al. 2011).

Reflecting upon the emergence of carceral geography, Philo (2012: 4) described it as a sub-strand of ‘geographical security studies’, drawing attention to consideration of ‘the spaces set aside for ‘securing’ – detaining, locking up/away – problematic populations of one kind or another’, but there is an argument for a slightly more nuanced interpretation of the work in this emerging field.

There are three related and interconnected emergent themes within carceral geography, which may be broadly conceived of as the nature of carceral spaces and experiences within them, the spatial geographies of carceral systems, and the relationship between the carceral and an increasingly punitive state. This book takes as its structuring logic these three thematic areas, surveying existing scholarship, both within human geography and within allied disciplines which have taken an overtly spatial focus, and suggesting directions in which future scholarship could move.

Structure

Following this introduction, the book unfolds first through a chapter which outlines the origins of carceral geography and its on-going dialogues with disciplines with a long-standing engagement with spaces and practices of incarceration. It then proceeds through three sections, first on carceral space, next the spatial geographies of carceral systems, and finally the relationship between the ‘carceral’ and a punitive state. These three sections are by no means discrete, and there is significant overlap between the issues addressed in each of them; structuring the book in this way suggests neither that existing work is restricted to these themes, nor that they should necessarily shape the ways in which future scholarship develops. Their utility here is in structuring discussion of the state of the field at present, and in enabling connections to be made between the themes emergent within carceral geography, and contemporary theory building within human geography more broadly.

Each of the three sections comprises three chapters, the first of which provides an overview of existing work, followed by two which develop and take forward specific areas of work. In the first section, on carceral space, the first chapter surveys many of the initial geographical studies of incarceration which can be characterised as developing an interest in the nature and experience of carceral spaces, and in which theorisations of imprisonment informed by Foucault have been debated and contested. Dirsuweit (1999) examined a prison for women in South Africa, showing that rather than being rendering ‘docile’, prisoner resistance to omni-disciplinary control was expressed through the reclaiming of culturally-defined prison space. In New Mexico, Sibley and van Hoven also contested this Foucauldian regulation of prison space and the docility of bodies, describing ‘spaces … produced and reproduced on a daily basis’ (van Hoven and Sibley 2008: 1016), and the agency of inmates making ‘their own spaces, material and imagined’ (Sibley and van Hoven 2008: 205). In the UK, Baer (2005) identified the personalisation of prison space, suggesting that this spatial modification reflected the construction of the meaning of prison spaces. Informed by understandings of carceral space as lived and experienced, and of the integral relationship between space and time (Massey 2005), the two chapters which follow suggest that carceral geographers could usefully consider the embodied experience of imprisonment, and could highlight the temporal aspect of imprisonment. These two chapters accordingly take up these two themes, exploring first the corporeal nature of incarceration, and then the experience of what might be termed carceral ‘TimeSpace’.

The second section focuses on spatial geographies of incarceration, one step removed from the spaces of individual institutions. Research into the geographical distribution of sites of incarceration across space has often been inspired by concern for the impact of the siting of places of incarceration on the communities which host or surround them, and has frequently considered critiques and reinterpretations of the ‘total institution’ Goffman (1961). Examples have included Che (2005) on the location of a prison in Appalachian Pennsylvania, US; Glasmeier and Farrigan (2007) on impacts of prison development in persistently poor rural places in the US; Engel’s (2007) research on prison location in the American Midwest; studies of the effects of ‘geographies of punishment’ on experiences of incarceration (e.g. Moran et al. 2011, Pallot 2007); Bonds’ (2009) questioning of prison siting as a means of encouraging economic development, and Mitchelson (2012) on spatial interdependencies between prisons and cities in Georgia, US. Much of this work extends critiques of the ‘total institution’ (Goffman 1961), and suggests that the ‘carceral’ is something much more than merely the spaces in which individuals are confined. In considering how carceral geographers could further advance this field of inquiry, the following two chapters identify and develop themes emerging from this work, which are implicit in the operation of carceral systems for both the communities which host them, the prisoners who inhabit them, and those who visit the incarcerated. These two chapters accordingly focus first on theorisations of disciplined, coerced, or governmental mobility, as an inherent part of the functionality of carceral systems, and next on the nature of the boundary between what is considered ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the prison, drawing attention to these two aspects of carceral systems in ways which resonate with contemporary themes within critical human geography such as mobility, affect and embodiment.

Finally, the third section explores the notion of the ‘carceral’ as a social construction relevant both within and outside physical spaces of incarceration, which has informed some of the most recent research into the relationship between the ‘carceral’ and a punitive state. The first chapter provides context, detailing the ‘new punitiveness’ (Pratt et al. 2011), and its relationship to hyperincarceration and the carceral ‘churn’ (Peck and Theodore 2009: 251). The work of social theorists and geographers such as Wacquant (2010a, b and c), Gilmore (2007) and Peck and Theodore (2009), has called for greater attention to the causes of and solutions to hyperincarceration (Wacquant 2010b: 74) ‘prisonfare’ (Wacquant 2010c: 197), and the carceral churn. At higher level of abstraction again from lived spaces of incarceration, Peck (2003) and Peck and Theodore (2009) have discussed the relationship between prisons and the metropolis in the context of hyperincarceration, in the aftermath of what Wacquant (2011a: 3) described as ‘a brutal swing from the social to the penal management of poverty’ particularly in the United States, with a ‘punitive revamping’ of public policy tackling urban marginality, and establishing a ‘single carceral continuum’ between the ghetto and the prison (Wacquant 2000: 384). This conceptualisation of the prison as a locus on the carceral continuum resonates with the work of Baer and Ravneberg (2008) who problematised the conceptualisation of a binary distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, instead positing prisons as ‘heterotopic spaces outside of and different from other spaces, but still inside the general social order’ (ibid. 2008: 214).

In taking forward this scholarship, the following two chapters draw attention to the built form of prisons, as ‘different spaces’, occupying a variety of roles within the social order. The first discusses their design and functionality, arguing that they can be understood as the physical manifestation of penal philosophies, and arguing that carceral geographers could usefully turn their attention to prison design as a means of understanding what it is that prisons are intended to do, and the ways in which they achieve this through the deployment of space and architecture. The second chapter takes forward the idea of a carceral cultural landscape, and advances the notion of the ‘post-prison’, a site no longer functioning as a space of incarceration, but nevertheless still saturated with, and arguably communicative of, messages about the purpose of imprisonment both in terms of the of the system during which it was constructed, and during which it is protected, conserved, demolished, or left to decay.

Context and Comparison

Carceral geography has emerged at a specific moment both with reference to geographical theory-building and in relation to current developments in penal policies; namely the rise of the ‘new punitiveness’ and the advance of increasingly rapacious carceral systems. In surveying the emergence of carceral geography, this book draws on existing research both within and outside of geography, detailing the themes which characterise this work and the approaches taken to understanding the spaces and practices of imprisonment. The picture of carceral geography which results is, therefore, coloured significantly by the nature of existing scholarship, and the contexts in which research has been carried out. Much research has been undertaken in the United States; with its context of mass incarceration inevitably compelling academic attention, and the book reflects this emphasis. Although the carceral milieu and practices of the United States are argued to be exported to other contexts, with increased punitivity arguably becoming a characteristic of much of the Anglophone world (e.g. Pratt et al. 2011), research drawing on other, different, carceral contexts, such as the Russian Federation, and Scandinavia, is also discussed here. The intention is not to provide a comparison; rather to identify themes and issues which have commonality and purchase across contexts, albeit expressed or experienced differently according to local contingencies.

The imperative to shed light on the US carceral system has within human geography developed in tandem with an overt abolitionist perspective (e.g. Loyd et al. 2012), drawing together perspectives on incarceration and migrant detention to understand these practices as ‘state violence’ and to argue that ‘freedom of movement and freedom to inhabit are necessarily connected’ (ibid. 8–10). Whilst entirely consonant with this sentiment, this book addresses a different set of intentions, and whilst recognising that there is much to be gained from a synthesis of studies of both ‘mainstream’ imprisonment and migrant detention (e.g. Moran et al. 2013a), it focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on imprisonment rather than migrant detention. The intention here is to open a space for consideration of the purposes of imprisonment and the contexts in which these are constructed – a theme well developed within criminology and prison sociology, but as yet largely elided within carceral geography. Turner (2013a: 35) has argued that carceral geography has tended to ‘position spaces of imprisonment within thematics of containment and exclusion, which removes from consideration the particular contextual issues of reform and rehabilitation’. This book seeks to question and to problematize the notions of reform and rehabilitation as they apply to contemporary practices of imprisonment, within an overarching intention to draw together discourses of incarceration, and to open a space for research dialogues 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.

Chapter 2
Origins and Dialogues

Carceral geography sits at a nexus of interrelated developments in geographical research: the immense influence of the engagement between Michel Foucault and questions of space, place and geography; the prominence within contemporary critical human geography of the ideas of Giorgio Agamben about ‘bare life’ and spaces of exception; the growing currency of the work of Loïc Wacquant on hyperincarceration and the punitive turn in the United States and Western Europe, and the integration of these perspectives into human geography by scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jamie Peck. In parallel, the recent spatial turn within criminology and prison sociology (Kindynis 2014) increasingly draws upon human geographical understandings of space and spatiality as multiplicitous and heterogeneous, lived and experienced (e.g. Pickering 2014). As a result, an increasingly interdisciplinary approach has emerged within the social sciences which has opened a space for the coalescence of work under the heading of carceral geography (Moran et al. 2011, Moran 2013a).

This coalescence has occurred at a critical moment in contemporary penal practice, with the expansion of ‘workfare’ and ‘prisonfare’ policies, the criminalisation of immigration and the expansion of the carceral estate. Of particular note in relation to studies within criminology and prison sociology, is that carceral geography’s focus on the spaces and practices of confinement extends both to ‘mainstream’ incarceration, i.e. of individuals detained by the prevailing legal system and migrant detention, where irregular migrants and ‘refused’ asylum seekers are detained, ostensibly pending decisions on admittance or repatriation (e.g. Moran et al. 2013a).

The coalescence of carceral geography is a relatively recent development with human geography, but it both builds on longstanding human geographical concerns, and engages with scholarship in disciplines for which incarceration and confinement have long been core research themes. The emergence of carceral geography at this particular juncture, though, is indicative of its connections to the wider body of work in critical human geography, and of its synergies with the praxis of social and political change aimed at challenging and transforming prevalent relations, systems, and structures of inequality and oppression. By way of providing context for the subsequent sections of the book, this chapter therefore briefly traces the origins and emergence of carceral geography, locates it in relation to dialogues with cognate disciplines such as criminology and prison sociology, and considers the socio-political context in which geographers have turned their attention to spaces and practices of incarceration. It proceeds by first discussing carceral geography in relation to themes within contemporary human geography, and its connections to criminology and prison sociology, and finally by engaging with the contemporary discourses of punitiveness and hyperincarceration.

Human Geography and Carceral Geography

Attempting to ‘fix’ the relative position of one area of research within the fluid context of contemporary human geography is a futile undertaking, not only in terms of its achievability given the fast-moving nature of this scholarship, but also in terms of the risk of imposing any sense of boundedness on the scope of this work and its potential for fruitful convergences. The purpose of this section of the chapter, then, is to describe, rather than to prescribe, the nature of the subdiscipline of carceral geography in terms of its recent emergence, and some of the synergies already apparent with more ‘established’ themes of work in human geography.

Starting first with terminology, the notion of the ‘carceral’ in relation to space arguably came first into the vocabulary of human geography through Davis’ (1990) City of Quartz, in which he examined the hardening of the cityscape of Los Angeles, calling it a ‘carceral city’ with a pervasive security agenda which enmeshed the city in networks of surveillance, where police lobbying for expanded law-and-order land use threatened to ‘convert an entire salient of Downtown-East Los Angeles into a vast penal colony’ (Davis 2006: 254), and in which he observed at the time of writing that the prison population was already the highest in the nation, looking set to double within the next decade. Davis’ (1990) notion of the ‘carceral city’ had an immediate influence, turning geographers’ attention towards gated communities, video observation cameras, and the securitisation of urban space. Whilst existing in close relationship to these securitised spaces as potential destinations for the criminalised underclasses excluded from affluent ‘forbidden cities’, prisons at this time themselves remained largely under-researched by human geographers, despite the astonishing acceleration of the expansion of the US’, and especially California’s, prison estate (Gilmore 2007).

The metaphor of the prison, though, via the notion of the Panopticon (after Foucault 1979), gained increased purchase in discourses relating to the changing nature of urban space. Similarities between this ‘ideal prison’ and urban space began to be discussed in relation to unavoidable visibility via surveillance (Cohen 1985, Soja 1989, Hannah 1997, Koskela 2000), where urban citizens’ constant awareness of their own visibility was argued to recall Foucault’s notion of ‘conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault 1979: 201). Similarly, the ‘unverifiability’ of urban surveillance (Koskela 2000: 253), never knowing whether cameras are active or whether their footage is being watched, was seen to have parallels with the inmate’s lack of knowledge about when exactly (s)he is being observed; ‘the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any moment, but he must be sure that he may always be so’ (Foucault 1979: 201). The anonymity of power both in the idealised Panopticon and in urban space, and the absence of force which Panoptic surveillance is argued to enable through the power of the ‘gaze’, were further axes of similarity.

Whilst the ‘ideal prison’, thus understood via the principle of the Panopticon, orbited these discourses of securitisation and surveillance of urban space, arguably the first foray by a geographer writing in the English language into a ‘really existing’ prison was undertaken in South Africa by Dirsuweit (1999).¹ And from the outset, as exemplified by her work, geographers’ engagement with carceral spaces has sought both to question the literal interpretation of Foucault’s work on the Panopticon, and to situate prisons in their spatial and cultural context, e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Origins and Dialogues
• Part I Carceral Space
• Part II Geographies of Carceral Systems
• Part III The Carceral and a Punitive State
• Bibliography
• Index