Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper considers the intimate exchanges taking place in a space whose public/private designation is indistinct; the prison visiting room. Drawing on extensive research with serving prisoners, their visitors, and prison staff in the UK, and using as an interpretive lens recent geographical conceptualizations of comfort as affective complex, it seeks to better understand how the spaces provided for prison visitation affect the ‘doing’ of intimacy in ways that arguably detract from the potential benefits of prison visitation in supporting the well-being of both prisoners and visitors. The paper suggests that the bodily practices involved in achieving comfort-as-condition-of-possibility may simultaneously undermine the propensity for the resultant corporeal comfort to deliver this effect.
Highlights
In recent decades, scholarly work on sexuality, care, children, and family has proliferated, in what Valentine (2008, 2097) called scholarship of ‘intimate relations’
The chair, we posit, is inevitably located within a microgeography of placing and spacing relative to other chairs and tables. The nature of this microgeography means that in order to achieve a degree of closeness or intimacy, visits participants must arrange their bodies into positions which they know will quickly become uncomfortable, and must sustain relative corporeal stillness in this uncomfortable position for as long as possible
Our purpose in this paper was to advance geographies of intimate relations by considering the intimate exchanges which take place in a space of indistinction between public and private, and in so doing, to deploy recent conceptualizations of comfort as affective complex to understand, at the micro-scale, how intimacy might be ‘done’ in these spaces. By applying these perspectives, to the particular context of the prison visiting room, we have been able to better understand the ways in which comfort as an embodied contingency forged between body and chair, acts as a condition of possibility for the intimacy and closeness often desired during prison visitation, and thought to contribute to the positive observed effects of visitation
Summary
Scholarly work on sexuality, care, children, and family has proliferated, in what Valentine (2008, 2097) called scholarship of ‘intimate relations’. Reporting results of a meta-analysis of prior statistical studies, Mitchell et al (2016) contrasted the effects on recidivism of conjugal visits, furloughs (home visits), and the more standard short in-person ‘contact’ visits taking place in a conventional visiting room, concluding that the level of intimacy or ‘closeness’ of visitation – as an important element of its ‘experience’ – matters in terms of its beneficial effects This finding is in line with longstanding observations, based on qualitative data, that rather than being characterized by ‘closeness’, conventional in-prison visitation situations can instead be stressful and intimidating If closeness and intimacy in visitation are important in supporting its positive effects, but if conjugal or home visits are not legal or practicable for all prisoners, are we able to identify features of the spatial context which impede feelings of closeness?
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