Carceral Geographies Research Articles

The pendulum swings: mobilizing policies to develop mass homeless encampments in the “progressive” city

ABSTRACT Portland, Oregon sits at the forefront of experimenting with policies for sheltering unhoused people outside of congregate shelter. In 2021, the City Government legalized sanctioned encampments by adopting them into city land use codes and for periods throughout its housing state of emergency, it also decriminalized sleeping in public. But with the continued increase of homelessness in Portland, the city has abruptly returned to more punitive policies concerning unhoused peoples’ use of space. In July 2023, the city opened its first mass encampment hosting nearly 200 people, and in July 2024, it began enforcing its ban on camping in public space. To understand this shift, the paper engages with policy mobilities and carceral geographies scholarship to examine how the City of Portland came to this about-face at this particular moment. I argue the city’s normalization of smaller tiny house encampments justified its development of mass encampments, a decision that was informed by approaches to homelessness practiced elsewhere, and one in which a significant portion of unhoused people experience more punitive conditions that partly emanate from the socio-spatial relationships in the encampment.

"It Feels Like Being in Jail All Over Again": Staging the Criminalized Liminality of Sex Offenders

Abstract: Two plays focusing on the postincarceration experiences of sex offenders opened in 2018: Life Jacket Theatre Company's America Is Hard to See and Bruce Norris's Downstate . Both plays ask spectators to recognize the humanity of sex offenders while also keeping in mind the harm they caused. The questions at the heart of these plays are ultimately about ethics and space: how close do we as a society want to allow sex offenders? These plays stage the movement, space, and time—the spatiotemporality—of postincarceration carceral geographies and the embodied state of what I term "criminalized liminality." In this article, I pursue a two-pronged approach to examine how these plays explore the spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality: primarily, I employ critical spatial perspectives to address how the focus on the ethics of space in America and Downstate emphasizes theatre itself as a space of ethical engagement for artists and audiences; and, secondarily, that as a result of their content and form, each play invites spectators to consider what it means to act on and offstage. I ultimately conclude that although these plays invite consideration of alternatives to the criminal punishment system like abolition, their real power lies in their ultimate ambivalence. Each unsettles spectators without providing clear answers. The spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality and the slippage created by acting produce a certain generative uncertainty.

Prison expansion in the plains grasslands: Coloniality, ecological injustice and carceral sprawl

This article examines the politics of prison siting on contaminated land within an endangered ecosystem in Australia, contributing to the literature on carceral geography and the burgeoning field of abolition ecology. I argue that prisons materialise in the landscape through processes of dispossession, environmental degradation and value extraction that enclose Indigenous lands for caging populations cast as ‘surplus’ to settler racial capitalism. The primary focus is the interface between prisons and the Victorian Volcanic Plain grasslands at a site called Ravenhall, a former military testing site that has been remade as a ‘prisons precinct’ and native grasslands reserve on Bunurong country in the outer Western suburbs of Melbourne. I investigate the history, ecology and political economy of prison-building at this site, unearthing the assemblage of living and nonliving entities involved in the construction of carceral geographies, and the meaning-making that guides planning and conservation processes. Rather than simply protecting and enhancing the biodiversity of the plains grasslands, neoliberal conservation practices at Ravenhall facilitate carceral development by generating more visible and ‘substitutable’ natures to gloss over the socially and ecologically toxic realities of prisons. The analysis reinforces the role that carceral geographies play in reproducing structured racial-environmental vulnerabilities and the importance of challenging sprawling prison developments as part of decolonial, abolitionist and ecological justice struggles.

What does capital consume? Racial capitalism and the social reproduction of surplus people

This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.

Regulating mobility through detention: Understanding the new geography of control and containment at the Southern European border

The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of immigration detention policies at the Southern European border. This will be done by presenting original data on the actual functioning of immigration detention in Italy in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis”. By shedding light on these developments, the article reveals a notable convergence of first reception and return policies, which in turn is driving a transformation of the landscape of immigration detention leading to a proliferation of detention regimes and spaces of containment. Drawing on the literature on carceral geographies, this development is analyzed within the framework of Italy's distinct role in the geopolitics of EU border control policies. The article ultimately suggests that the immigration detention system has gradually been co-opted by the border control infrastructure, becoming part of a broader and intricate control assemblage whose essential function is the regulation of human mobility.

Maintaining Portland’s “progressive dystopia”: housing, carcerality, and the real estate state

ABSTRACT In 2020, a coalition formed between a local real estate developer, a nonprofit, and a senator soon to run for state governor, with the goal of turning a never-used county jail in Portland, Oregon, into a homeless shelter. Reading with abolitionist anthropologist Savannah Shange’s concepts of “progressive dystopia” and “carceral progressivism,” this paper is a case study of Wapato Jail’s redevelopment into the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, serving as an in-depth look at how Portland’s localized real estate state utilizes the logics of “carceral progressivism” to maintain the city as a dystopia that works for them [Shange, S. (2019). Progressive dystopia: Abolition, anti-blackness, & schooling in San Francisco. Duke University Press]. Utilizing data from archival materials, news media, and twenty interviews, I argue that the real estate state, composed of local developers with long-standing stakes in the city, form alliances in an attempt to shift the provision of services away from a Housing First approach and to maintain the city in a state of “just crisis enough” to keep growing profits and property values. Cutting across abolitionist and carceral geographies, I present an engagement with the maintenance and growth of carcerality within the real estate state, particularly as elites get involved with homeless services.

Prison geographies: Nine disciplinary approaches

AbstractMotivated by a critical concern for state‐sanctioned coercion, control, and containment across “free society,” geographers have extended Foucault's concept of “the carceral” to more and increasingly diffuse spaces and processes. In this paper, however, we aim to re‐center the prison in the carceral geographies literature, reasserting it as the sine qua non of the subfield. In doing so, we organize geographers' analysis of prisons into nine conceptual categories based on this journal's areas of geographical exploration: cultural, development, economic, environment, geographic information systems & quantitative, historical, political, social, and urban. In addition to providing a review of existing prison research in geography, we illustrate the diversity of disciplinary approaches to that most “complete and austere” of institutions.

The Carceral Geographies of Platform Delivery Work: Essential Workers and Bike Registrations in New York City

AbstractThe critical platform studies literature is increasingly considering the role of social difference as a structuring logic in the platform economy, complementing understandings of worker precarity facilitated by worker misclassification and algorithmic management. Contributing to this literature, this paper demonstrates how platforms and police produce carceral geographies that manage and exploit immigrant delivery workers as surplus populations. The carceral geographies of the platform economy account for both how carceral space produces and manages the surplus populations from which platform capital draws its workers, facilitating the disposability and exploitation of workers. Focusing on South Asian delivery workers in New York City, the paper uses the example of bike registrations to show how police and platforms expand carceral spaces in immigrant communities, increasing their vulnerability to premature death and violence. Finally, it suggests how delivery worker organising offers instances of situated resistance that challenge platform capital and carceral logics.

Doing God's time: Time, religion and reform in Ghanaian prisons

Based on analysis of interviews with prisoners and prison staff in Ghanaian prisons. This paper steers carceral geographers and others to consider religious understandings of temporality that are in a sense ‘outside time’ and their role in shaping the chronoscapes - understandings of present, past, and future - that inmates and prison staff situate themselves within. Religious transformation, heavily influence by Pentecostal Christian practices, is a key basis of prisoner reform in Ghanaian prisons. This article shows that this religious transformation is productive of understandings of temporality that are both non-linear and plural. Pentecostalism is particularly focused on conversation and the rebirth of adherents and has therefore been seen to have a particular temporality of rupture, but the chronoscapes that emerge are often more complex than a singular temporal break. If we are to fully understand the temporalities of prisons, and indeed the carceral more broadly, religion in prisons cannot be reduced solely to either a form of discipline or a coping strategy. The paper develops and deepens insights about time in carceral geographies, in particular highlighting how engagements with time are also about engagements with the timeless – with the outside of time.

Towards abolitionist agrarian geographies of Kentucky

This agrarian geography of Kentucky begins on the streets of the state's largest city, in the throes of antiracist struggle. It tracks the state's lingering colonial settler power dynamics through the racism of plantation, extraction, and carceral geographies. It then traces how resistance to these exploitations take root in place-based agri-food initiatives unfolding through urban-rural solidarity against white supremacist policing, prison systems, labor exploitation, and extractivism. It begins with a brief overview of the scale of reference of Kentucky itself. Situating the state entails addressing the trauma and topophilia (love of landscape) of its agrarian past and present. It draws upon bell hooks’ literary invocations of Kentucky-based agrarian visions, as well as place-based political ecology scholarship (seven years of Kentucky Agrarian Questions practitioner panels at the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference at University of Kentucky). Following Black and abolitionist geographies, this agrarian geography traces rural and urban shared struggles for food sovereignty, environmental justice, and liberation from racism of carceral systems. It introduces Kentucky grassroots projects connecting and uniting rural and urban struggles against carceral violence and the racism therein, such as Hood to the Holler (a political initiative emerging from Black Lives Matter mobilizations for Breonna Taylor). The essay ends with reflections on the political-ecological contradictions and imperative of working through and beyond a settler-colonial-state scale of reference like Kentucky. To extricate from and dismantle plantation modes and carceral legacies, abolitionist agrarian geographies recover the reality of Black and Indigenous agrarian history, presence, and futures. As such, rooted in place-based reckoning, resistance, and responsibility, they offer hope.

Introduction: Abolitionist Worldmaking

Introduction:Abolitionist Worldmaking Alyosha Goldstein (bio) The publication of Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation, the highly anticipated collection of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's writing edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, provides an auspicious occasion to reflect on Gilmore's decisive contributions and significant influence.1 There is perhaps no better testament to the importance of Gilmore's writing, teaching, and public lectures than how generative this work has been for so many community organizers, activists, students, scholars, and people engaged in everyday struggle. Active in social movement building since the 1970s, Gilmore earned a doctorate in geography in 1998 and cofounded grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.2 In publications such as her widely influential 2007 book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and the essays and interviews assembled in Abolition Geography,3 she analyzes the carceral geographies of racial capitalism as a way to open up new possibilities for building a politics and practice of liberation. Abolition Geography gathers together Gilmore's critical interventions and insights at precisely the fortuitous moment when decades of abolitionist analysis and organizing and the 2020 uprisings ignited by the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade have converged to make abolition a matter of mainstream debate. The essays that follow, by Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, reflect on Abolition Geography as a vital touchstone and indispensable resource for abolitionist worldmaking. Today's prison abolition movement continues the unfinished work of the nineteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery.4 In Black Reconstruction (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois showed how the 1876 "counter-revolution [End Page 359] of property" reanimated the conditions of enslavement through new or reinvigorated forms of racial terror, disfranchisement, extraction, coercion, and carcerality. He argued that the legal end of slavery was insufficient and that "abolition democracy" required establishing and sustaining the material conditions and institutions that would make possible substantive Black freedom.5 Taking up the project of abolition democracy, the present-day abolition movement emerged partly from the growing momentum of the prisoners' rights movement and campaigns to free political prisoners catalyzed by the 1971 Attica rebellion at the so-called correctional facility in upstate New York and the murder of the political prisoner George Jackson at San Quentin Prison in California.6 Books such as If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, edited by Angela Y. Davis with the Soledad Brothers and other political prisoners, published in 1971, and the Prison Research Education Action Project's 1976 Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists further galvanized the movement.7 The annual assemblies of the International Conference on Prison Abolition first held in Toronto, Canada, in 1983, and the organizing work of Critical Resistance that began in California in 1997 provided crucial spaces for expanding abolitionist networks and organizing. It is likewise important to note that women of color and queer, trans*, and gender-nonconforming people have consistently been at the forefront of these movements. To introduce and frame this forum on Gilmore's book, I focus here on briefly highlighting aspects of Gilmore's work in the context of the movement for abolition since the 1990s. Written over more than thirty years, the essays and interviews assembled in Abolition Geography argue for understanding prison abolition as a far-reaching project of fundamental social transformation rather than an effort focused solely on dismantling discrete carceral institutions. Gilmore shows how the abolition of the system of control, criminalization, and punishment that includes jail, prison, probation, policing, security and surveillance regimes, border patrol, and migrant detention is fundamental to building alternative futures. She demonstrates how and why the prison-industrial complex is situated within an expansive economy of United States imperialism and militarism, with consequences that extend into the intimate spheres of interpersonal violence, and must necessarily be addressed in struggles for racial, gender, and environmental justice. Abolition as a project is both specific and capacious. Abolition centers the racial, gendered, sexual, and heteropatriarchal dynamics of prisons, jails, policing, and other carceral institutions and practices while situating these...

Pushing Back the Walls: The Politics of Maneuver in Women’s Drug Rehabilitation

ABSTRACT This article uses participant-observation research from the women’s floor of a residential drug-treatment program in Queens, New York City, to explore how rehabilitative institutions instantiate and extend carceral geographies, practices, and design, despite their asserted “alternative to incarceration” status. Focusing on two aspects of rehabilitation architecture – routinization/orderliness and therapeutic quarantine/containment – I show how the spatial politics of rehabilitation enforce drug use as a pathological, criminological problem of racialized–gendered deviance that must be corrected through isolation, “habilitation,” and punitive discipline. Against these violent constructions, criminalized women who use drugs experimented with ways of being for themselves and each other that moved against how the rehab attempted to contain, sever, and reorient their desires. Using the examples of sleep, bodily adornment, and bedroom decor, I argue that criminalized women intervened in, commented on, and sometimes resisted carceral spatial practices of rehabilitation.

Border hotels: Spaces of detention and quarantine

‘Border hotels’ have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about ‘border hotels’, closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of ‘border hotels’, this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the ‘hotel geopolitics’ agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

Toward a World Where We Can Breathe: Abolitionist Environmental Justice Praxis

This article contributes to the growing literature bringing together environmental justice (EJ) and abolition, offering the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project in San Antonio, Texas, as a case of abolitionist EJ praxis. I argue that the Bloom Project disrupts capitalist and colonial relations, even if only provisionally, through radical space- and place-making that allow alternative worlds to emerge. “I can’t breathe” has been an embodiment and structure of feeling that reflects the historical patterns of policing and pollution across racialized geographies in the United States and connects historical patterns of racial capitalism and colonialism. I suggest that the Bloom Project is a model of how we can move from “I can’t breathe” to imagining and growing worlds where we can breathe. By foregrounding the work of the Bloom Project, this article moves away from analyses primarily focused on highlighting the ways that low-income communities of color are toxic and toward the ways that communities are imagining and practicing alternative ways of being, embodying the worlds they desire. I demonstrate how abolitionist EJ praxis contributes to the liberation of carceral geographies and toxic ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world by providing alternative relationalities based on affirming and sustaining lifeways.

Carceral Geographies/Geographien des Einschlusses: ein neues Feld für die deutschsprachige Geographie?

Abstract. While a broad debate on carceral geographies has been part of human geography and related disciplines in English-speaking academia, there are only scarce publications among German-speaking geographers. This special issue aims at bringing different researchers (Tobias Breuckmann, Julia Emprechtinger, Sarah Klosterkamp, Nadine Marquardt, Marco Nocente, Marina Richter and Anna Schliehe) and their rich and diverse research insights in the carceral field into a dialogue. What started with a session at the 2019 conference of German-speaking geography (Deutscher Kongress für Geographie), developed into a special issue that encompasses papers based on the contributions to the session as well as additional papers that round up the insights into current research in carceral geographies in German-speaking countries. The papers show the importance of applying a carceral geography perspective to research in German-speaking geography to focus on different institutions, places and spaces that share common carceral characteristics. In addition, the focus on German-speaking researchers also adds to the international debate on carceral geographies with specific insights from the national contexts.

Carceral geographies of pesticides and poultry

In this article, we focus on the agro-environmental dimensions of plantation agriculture in the U.S. South, examining the ways carceral relations constrain foodways through the interrelated control of human and non-human life, the racialized monopolization of land, and the production of hunger. Through a focus on the chemicalization of cotton plantation agriculture and the transformation of chicken to poultry, we show how the racialized control of life and labor has been extended temporally and spatially by means of agricultural technologies. In the decades following the abolition of slavery, white landowners enrolled legal structures of racialized coercion and agricultural technologies in the service of continued plantation production. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, we trace these dynamics in cotton and poultry production in the 20th century, we show how technologies putatively oriented toward agricultural “productivity” extended the carceral dynamics of prisons through agro-environmental racism, the control of land and labor, and the production of hunger. Cotton chemicals and poultry plant speedups, we argue, represent racial and spatial relations of material and ideological control and containment that displace nourishing and liberatory ways of living and relating.

Thermal (In)equity and incarceration: A necessary nexus for geographers

Despite overall societal progress in reducing adverse impacts of heat and cold, incarcerated populations remain highly vulnerable to environmental stressors. Incarcerated populations experience a combination of risk factors related to their physical health and well-being that increase their thermal vulnerability: social isolation, disproportionate mental health issues, comorbidities, limited mobility, and a reliance on external factors to provide a safe, healthy environment. In carceral spaces, thermal exposure agitates these already complex situations, shaping a confluence of various economic, political, and ecological intersectionalities. This synthesis contextualizes the ongoing scholarship on climate change, thermal exposure, the built environment, and public policy, to examine thermal inequities experienced by incarcerated populations. In examining this context, we connect our work to carceral geographies, the geographies of violence, racial capitalism, and abolition ecologies. Ultimately, the review highlights how physical geographers may directly converse with critical geographers, promote equity and environmental justice, and work to reduce adverse impacts of extreme temperature events.

Living in a ‘free jail’: Asylum seekers' and local residents' experiences of discomfort with asylum seeker accommodation

This paper shows how asylum seeker accommodation produces a politics of discomfort among both asylum seekers as well as local residents. The paper compares two collective asylum centres located in the city of Augsburg, Germany, one of which is a nationally renowned refugee integration project, the ‘Grandhotel Cosmopolis’, the other, a state-run asylum centre. Data was obtained through participant observation and semi-structured interviews between September 2016 and November 2017. Drawing on carceral geographies, the paper identifies three mechanisms through which the material and institutional standards of asylum accommodation generate discomfort among and between asylum seekers and local residents, which are self-mortification, depersonalization and role-breakdown. Through the sharing of rooms and facilities, asylum accommodation contributes to asylum seekers' self-mortification, referring to changes in the conceptions and beliefs of oneself. The comparison of the two cases highlights how large asylum centres depersonalize asylum seekers by creating images of a homogenized ‘mass’ and contribute to role-breakdown, meaning a reduction of individuals' identities performed with regard to work, home or family life. National discourses of asylum seekers as dangerous merged with the space of asylum accommodation, thereby preventing social interaction ‘as neighbours’ between asylum seekers and local residents. Overall, the paper exposes how a politics of discomfort utilizes affect as a governmental device, thereby turning asylum accommodation into a carceral space by creating social distance and ‘moral closure’.

The racial environmental state and abolition geography in California’s Central Valley

This article introduces the “racial environmental state” as an analytical framework for examining race and environment as mutually constituting modes of state power. Under racial capitalism, the state relies on the constant articulation of racial and environmental difference and domination to sustain the uneven geographies necessary for capitalism. The racial environmental state offers a way to examine hegemonic state power operating through the convergences of race and environment, as a site for resistance, and the proliferation of abolition geographies. Using this framework, the author analyzes the abolitionist struggle to transform the carceral geographies of California’s Central Valley through a campaign to stop the construction of a prison in Delano, California. This case study shows the importance of recognizing race and environment as interconnected systems of domination and resistance. It also highlights the possibilities and limitations of engaging the state in the abolitionist fight for freedom.

Prison fixes and flows: Carceral mobilities and their critical logistics

This paper asks how the logics of globalized supply chains—particularly through fixes, risk, speed and stoppages, and motility—are articulated in carceral space. We employ critical logistics in conversation with carceral geographies and critical mobilities to examine prison transfers, the routine movement of incarcerated people between carceral sites, as a logistical system designed to fix carceral crises; which is to say, to make prisons viable. This work emerges from preliminary research on prison transfers, conducted from 2018 to 2019, including interviews with advocates and formerly incarcerated people and analysis of data and administrative documents obtained from the New York Department of Corrections, among others. First, we locate the emergence of contemporary practices of logistical transfer management (“transfer logistics”) in the prison boom of the 1980s–1990s. We then examine the present-day transfer system to consider how risk calculation and carceral fixes inform movement throughout prison constellations as well as how transfers disrupt the fragile worlding that happens in prisons. Finally, we turn to how these logics are being reshaped and reiterated in the era of neoliberal urban planning through “justice hubs.”