Planning working futures: precarious work through carceral space

Abstract

Geographies of precarious work are advanced through an eight month qualitative study of prisoners nearing release from HMP Brixton in London, providing a spatial rendering of working uncertainty. This builds on geographical scholarship highlighting the porosity of prison walls such that carceral space is understood as non-totalising yet extensive. Release on Temporary License (ROTL) is examined as a mechanism of such porosity, allowing offenders to undertake work outside prison. Within the context of the rehabilitation agenda in England and Wales that emphasises the generative function of prison time, we frame the ROTL as a flow mechanism that anticipates both the end of the custodial sentence and precarious work. Experiences of such precariousness emerge through prisoners’ processes of planning for future work through states of suspension, compulsion and experimentation. The focus on planning work contributes to understandings firstly of the porosity of carceral space and secondly of labour precarity. Firstly, it highlights the frictions in the flow mechanism of the ROTL, such that the porosity of carceral space cannot be understood as seamless mobility. Secondly, these frictions indicate how the structural condition of labour precarity can be lived through forms of mundane stability that might be generative as well as exhausting.