Carceral Geographies Research Articles

Poultry and Prisons

Poultry-processing work lies within a larger web of carceral geographies that extend beyond the prison walls into factory floors, neighborhoods, and schools. These geographies depend on and are produced through racism, as the production of unequal vulnerability to premature death. Racial capitalism connects the poultry plant to the prison alongside the movement for abolition beyond the prison.

Assata’s escape as disincarceral practice

Often carceral studies tends to focus on the prison as a mode of stationary confinement, sometimes forgetting that its rationales and practices are based crucially in movement. This is especially true for black populations disproportionately affected by mass incarceration and intentionally disoriented to the causes and manifestations of the oscillation to which they are reduced. This article is concerned with the carceral landscape that emerges in the criminalization of black people and politics through the legal concept of vagrancy, and how, in turn, black surreptitious movement is used to contest incarceration. To do so, it argues that vagrancy paraphrases a suppression of black political practice, focusing on political prisoner Assata Shakur’s transnational escape to Cuba and its discursive omission in her autobiography. In tracing the transience of Shakur, the article forwards vagrancy as an elaboration of how anti-blackness materializes via carceral geographies by way of displacement, disorientation, and forced movement. It presents a reformulation of Shakur’s escape as disincarceration, which takes seriously the flight toward black liberation as one that is still meaningfully incomplete, elaborating the significance of a continual absconding from the field of representation that has been controlled and constituted by discursive and material hegemonies of race.

Accompaniment Through Carceral Geographies: Abolitionist Research Partnerships with Indigenous Communities

AbstractThis article approaches “ea”—a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) concept meaning life, breath, and sovereignty—as a vital mode of abolition ecologies, and proposes accompaniment as a methodology for mutual collaboration toward this endeavour. Research draws from ethnographic fieldwork on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu in Hawai‘i, a predominantly Native Hawaiian community, and reflects upon the author’s positionality on Wai‘anae’s insider–outsider borderlands. The argument is multifold: Carceral geographies inscribe racism by cleaving humans from the environment and each other, depriving life‐giving resources from populations deemed a threat to a dominant socioenvironmental order. At the same time, abolition ecologies entail worldmaking predicated on the interdependence of all life forces, employing syncretic practices that join disparate struggles, people, and places to generate possibilities greater than the sum of its parts. Accompaniment works against racism’s practices of criminalisation and containment while contributing to radical, syncretic placemaking as part of an expansive liberatory practice.

Carceral Practices and Geographies in Roman North Africa

I explore the landscape of carceral practices and geographies in late antique Roman North Africa by applying a comparative lens to carceral punishments of exile and condemnation to the mines. I situate the research within the field of carceral studies, using the concept of carceral practices and geographies (as opposed to the narrower concepts of prison and imprisonment). I first offer a contextualization of the punishments of exile and condemnation to the mines as carceral punishments, remaining especially sensitive to the legal, material, and spatial aspects of each punishment. I then consider how different North African Christians used their carceral punishments and geographies to negotiate issues of political and social power in the broader Roman Mediterranean, specifically the letter exchange between Cyprian and three other groups of Christians condemned to the mines (Ep. 76–79). I use the letter correspondence as a case study to explore the “real-and-imagined” aspects of carceral practices and geographies in Roman North Africa. The carceral punishments of exile and condemnation to the mines have legal, material, social, gendered, rhetorical, and lived-experience components, all of which are treated as distinct, yet also fluid and intersectional with each other. I conclude by gesturing to how the case study adds texture to our understanding of how carceral punishment worked in Late Antiquity.

Subterranean Detention and Sanctuary from below: Canada’s Carceral Geographies

This paper begins with an account of Lucía Vega Jimenez, a Mexican woman who lived and worked in Metro Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories (Canada) and who died while held in detention in British Columbia’s Immigration Holding Centre. This article argues that Lucía’s story exposes a number of critical aspects regarding the geographies and politics of migration in Canada today. First, Lucia’s story points to the ways in which Canada’s determination process invisibilises certain forms of violence and, as such, serves as a highly restrictive and exclusionary mechanism. Second, it shows how this exclusionary mechanism extends like ‘capillaries’ throughout urban space. In this context city services (like transit) increasingly become less spaces of refuge, and more privatized border checkpoints. Third, following Lucia’s story reveals how city checkpoints funnel people with precarious status into remote detention, akin to Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago.’ While expanding on carceral literature, this paper departs from existing scholarship that tends to think about remoteness horizontally. The paper argues that it is below the surface where carceral regimes become particularly hostile and—as such—the paper calls for deepened engagement with questions of verticality. Finally, the article illustrates how subterranean carceral dimensions are being politicized, agonistically, through sanctuary practices.

Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century

AbstractKatherine McKittrick famously wrote in Demonic Grounds that “black lives are necessarily geographic, but also struggle with discourses that erase and despatialize their sense of place” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xiii). From analyses of diaspora to the plantation, from studies of urban segregation to anticolonial circuits of resistance, Black thought has long been concerned with questions of space, place, and power. Yet these interventions, which span centuries and continents, have not always been recognized as “properly” geographical and have thus been systematically excluded from the formal canon of disciplinary geography. Within the last five years, however, Black Geographies as a field of inquiry has gained increasing institutional recognition—thanks to the tireless labor of Black scholars to carve out spaces for their work within the discipline. This article reflects on the state of the field of Black Geographies, with an emphasis on the radically interdisciplinary interventions this body of scholarship has made into the mainstream of disciplinary geography. I review some of the most prominent thematic areas within Black Geographies, including space‐making and the Black geographic imagination; racial capitalism; cities, policing, and carceral geographies; and racism and plantation futures. I conclude with a consideration of avenues for future research, including the need for more studies that provincialize North America and connect with Latinx and Native/Indigenous geographies.

The political mobilities of reporting: tethering, slickness and asylum control

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the coerced mobilities associated with reporting, meaning the mandatory requirement to regularly check-in with authorities for the purpose of control. Drawing on recent calls for a politics of mobility and advances in carceral geographies, we attend to the forces, movements, speeds and affective materialities of reporting with a focus on deportable migrants and the UK Home Office. In doing so we develop two conceptual lenses through which to further understand the politics of mobility. First, we develop the concept of ‘slickness’ in the context of the process of becoming detained at a reporting event. We understand slickness as a property of bodies and objects that makes them easier to move. Second, we argue that reporting functions to ‘tether’ deportable migrants; thereby not only fixing them in place, but also forcing the expenditure of energy and the experience of punishment. The result is that reporting blurs the distinction between detention and ‘freedom’ by enacting the carceral in everyday spaces.

Prisoners and Animals: An Historical Carceral Geography

This paper explores some of the key historical-geographical resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies that appear in my book, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals. In it I propose a contribution to carceral geography from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that I place into conversation draw from a number of institutional and industrial domains, including the prison, the farm, the research lab, and the zoo. In this paper I specifically focus on the shared carceral logics and ‘animalization’ of populations of humans and animals at these sites, as well as key entangled historical-geographies of the prison’s death row and the animal slaughterhouse that are at once structural, operational, and technological.

Just add water: Prisons, therapeutic landscapes and healthy blue space

‘Healthy prisons’ is a well-established concept in criminology and prison studies. As a guiding principle to prisoners’ quality of life, it goes back to the 18th century when prison reformer John Howard regarded the improvement of ventilation and hygiene as being essential in the quest for religious penitence and moral reform. In more recent, times, the notion of the ‘healthy prison’ has been more commonly associated with that which is ‘just’ and ‘decent’, rather than what is healthy in a medical or therapeutic sense. This article interrogates the ‘healthy prison’ more literally. Drawing on data gathered from a UK prison located on a seashore, our aim is to explore prisoners’ rational and visceral responses to water in a setting where the very nature of enforced residence can have negative effects on mental health. In expanding the possibilities for the theorization of the health benefits that waterscapes may generate, and moving the discussion from healthy ‘green space’ to healthy ‘blue space’, the article reveals some of the less well-known and under-researched interconnections between therapeutic and carceral geographies, and criminological studies of imprisonment.

Who's HiPS? Plain Sight Histories of Slavery

Who's HiPS?Plain Sight Histories of Slavery Jessica Marie Johnson (bio) The inaugural OI Reader born-digital article, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica" ("HiPS"), is less a publication and more a digital project. In this, "HiPS" succeeds where digital versions of print books and articles often fail. Instead of attempting to replicate the analog journal article, to shrink, contort, and stretch it for small and mid-sized screens, "HiPS" plays with all of the tools the digital humanities has to offer. Images, video, audio recordings, music, maps, and 3-D technology all make an appearance in this fascinating and impactful study of free and enslaved life at the height of slave society in Jamaica. Created by Simon P. Newman, David Ely, Anthony King, and Marenka Thompson-Odlum, it is populated by a cast of characters and performers from across time and space, including Isaac Bernard, Kenneth Bilby, Curtis Brett Sr., Olaudah Equiano, the Moore Town Maroons, William Mulligan, Edward Seaga, Matthew Strickland, Thomas Thistlewood, Gameli Kodzo Tordzro, field workers in Saint James Parish, Jamaica, in the 1980s, families shopping in Coronation Market in Kingston in 2017, and a strategic handful of the hundreds of enslaved women, children, and men who escaped the carceral geographies of the plantation by absconding into forests, town-ships, and farms across the island. This list of names is long, and the project created out of this collaboration is richer as a result of these complex, multiple tiers of labor, conversation, and ideation. "HiPS" offers digital humanists of the historical ilk a model to follow as they brainstorm ways to bring the past to life using technological tools. At the same time, as a digital project, "HiPS" struggles with a tension digital humanists and historians of slavery share: Who is hidden in plain sight? This question is important and, in some ways, could only be provoked by the born-digital environment of "HiPS." The digital humanities is an endeavor that seeks to apply digital tools and technology to "long-standing values of the humanistic tradition: the pursuit of analytical acuity and clarity, the making of effective arguments, the rigorous use of evidence, and [End Page 15] communicative expressivity and efficacy."1 Over the last decade, it has struggled to reconcile the ethics, priorities, and principles of humanistic study in professional scholarly spaces with the public-facing imperative and communal reality of new media.2 In other words, the digital projects, applications, and open source resources historians offer the world are also public products, community artifacts, and, at their best, radical archives of thought accumulated beyond as well as within the walls of the ivory tower. The result of a powerful research and creative team, "HiPS" (and by association the OI Reader) could offer a critical and radical challenge to the tradition of single-author publishing in the historical profession. It could disrupt the discipline's lukewarm acceptance of collaboration by embracing the project team model increasingly common across the digital humanities. In a beautiful and inclusive way, adding site credits—perhaps accompanying the article as a final page beyond the last page of full text, as well as being accessible via a button on the toolbar at the top of the reader window—would acknowledge the labor of everyone involved. Site credits seem like a small task, but a series of questions unfold when the power dynamics embedded in collaboration are taken seriously: Did undergraduate or graduate students do research for the article? Which librarians and archivists helped produce the work? Who was on the digital and technical team designing the 3-D maps charting Dr. John Quier's route across the island? "HiPS" has the potential to disrupt citation practice for historians of slavery even further by bringing past and present historical subjects into conversation with each other. The video of James Hakewill's painting Harbour Street, Kingston offers a perfect example. As the "HiPS" team argues, appealing to white European audiences and the white British gaze in particular shaped how Jamaica was portrayed in paintings and sketches from the period of slavery. With Hakewill's original painting as a base image and using...

Careful control: The infrastructure of water in carceral space

This paper advances carceral geographies by situating water in relation to the nexus of care and control in the carceral setting. Critical for both hygiene and health, but also requiring control and management, consideration of water offers an analytical lens to uncover everyday, intimate and embodied institutional spaces of care and control mediated by water both in its elemental form, and via water infrastructures. Drawing on extensive qualitative data generated with serving prisoners in the UK, the paper considers carceral relationships with water as variously and simultaneously unruly, restrictive, health‐enabling and therapeutic.

‘You’re all so close you might as well sit in a circle … ’ Carceral geographies of intimacy and comfort in the prison visiting room

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.

“A prison within a prison”? Examining the enfolding spatialities of care and control in the Barlinnie Special Unit

This paper uses one of Scotland's most controversial experiments in penal reform – the Barlinnie Special Unit – to examine the enfolding nature of care and control in carceral space. Connecting with recent arguments relating to “caring architecture” and using the framework of historical carceral geographies, it showcases the spatial complexities of implementing caring practices alongside reforming tactics. Beginning with a discussion of the care and control nexus within institutional spaces and its historical legacy, it considers the use of small units within the Scottish Prison System. Using the Barlinnie Special Unit as a pivot, the paper opens up the complex spatial arrangements and spatial tactics of experimental prison reform. It first examines the spatial and architectural dimensions of the Special Unit. Second, the paper focuses on issues of routine and inhabitation and the emotional uncertainty this generated for prisoners. Overall, this paper seeks to argue the importance of examining experimental spatial practices in prison reform history to highlight the interwoven spatialities of care and control in every‐day institutional life.

‘It’s a horrible, horrible feeling’: ghosting and the layered geographies of absent–presence in the prison visiting room

This paper advances geographies of absence by considering the multiscalar, overlapping, ambiguous and reciprocal absences inherent in incarceration, and the compound nature of the experiential and embodied absences characteristic of prison visiting. It progresses extant literatures by considering as absent a group which differs from those previously thus conceptualised, and by postulating absence even when whereabouts are known and co-presence is possible. Drawing on a major RCUK-funded study of the socio-spatial context of prison visitation in the U.K., it brings carceral geographies and geographies of absence into productive dialogue, demonstrating that attention to the felt presence of absence in the context of prison visiting is highly revealing of the poignant and bittersweet nature of family contact during incarceration.

Theorizing the carceral: Political economy, critical geography, and criminology

This review essay examines new works by Hadar Aviram on the political economy of penal policies and Dominique Moran on carceral geographies. It discusses how these works offer significant insights for understanding emerging policies and practices of the prison–industrial complex in conditions of neoliberal capitalism. An assessment of these works, in relation to some pressing real-world issues, suggests that new theorizing around the political economy of criminal justice systems and critical geographies of punitive practices makes important contributions to revitalizing criminological theory in the contemporary context.

Carceral circuitry

Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This article opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of ‘circuits’ to critically enquire into the carceral. Drawing inspiration from Harvey (1982; 1985), the article makes circuits do fresh work, teasing apart the emerging carceral landscape to provide a new critical epistemology for carceral geographies. In so doing, a meta-institutional agenda for critical carceral geography is derived, and possible ways to short-circuit carceral systems are revealed.

Carceral Space: Prisoners and Animals

AbstractThis paper develops a framework for exploring resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies. I illustrate the close linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality and captivity focusing on three types of sites and institutions: the prison execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; and sites and institutions of exploited prisoner and animal labor. The main themes that call for a “carceral comparison” among these sites include: the emotional and psychological strain and violence enacted on bodies that is interwoven into their day‐to‐day operations; their geographies (locations, design, and layout) and carefully regulated movements within them; relationships between carcerality and “purpose breeding” that extends across both nonhuman and human populations; the ways in which “animalization” of incarcerated bodies works to create conditions for social death and killability; and the legal and political contexts that produce certain lives as disposable “bare lives”.

‘Daddy is a difficult word for me to hear’: carceral geographies of parenting and the prison visiting room as a contested space of situated fathering

Advocating greater engagement between children’s and carceral geographies, this paper explores the spaces of parenting as they exist within a UK male prison, building upon criminological research on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families and children. Focusing primarily on the visiting room, it extends discussion of the specificities of everyday material spaces and practices of parenting currently under scrutiny within children’s geographies and geographies of parenting, and brings these subdisciplines into dialogue with carceral geography. Concerned specifically with the intimate, embodied and sometimes banal practices of parenting in this constrained and highly surveilled context, it draws attention to previously overlooked spaces and identities of situated fathering.

Zionism and Anti-Zionism: A Necessary Detour, Not a Final Destination

Zionism and Anti-Zionism:A Necessary Detour, Not a Final Destination Keith P. Feldman (bio) Given the critical keywords animating American studies at present, it should not take long to situate Palestine as a suitable subject for research in the field. Transnationalism, diaspora, and indigeneity; race, gender, sexuality, nation, religion, law, and capital; memory, survivance, refugeehood, social movement, and solidarity; orientalisms, settler colonialisms, imperial cultures, borderlands, and carceral geographies: these are among the keywords that index possible insights into the histories, cultures, politics, and economies that have entangled Palestine in an American ambit. Yet the practice of situating Palestine institutionally has been particularly unsettling. As the American Studies Association underscores in its public statements supporting the call from Palestinian civil society to boycott Israeli academic institutions, locating American studies institutionally in relation to Palestine foregrounds, rather than elides or obfuscates, the field’s entanglement with a US state that supports Israel’s ongoing project of territorial expansion and Palestinian dispossession. The ASA has undertaken such a position in the context of ongoing indigenous dispossession in the Americas and a corresponding intensification of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racisms. In doing so, it has found itself persistently countered by a legal and administrative arsenal that seeks to conflate critiques of Israel with anti-Semitism, to interfere with the governance of universities, and to demonize faculty, staff, and students who consider Palestine a site of legitimate affective, political, and scholarly commitment.1 The ASA’s boycott resolution invites us to open and maintain an ethical relation to Palestine, which means working toward the flourishing of just, vibrant, and heterogeneous Palestinian futures. Such work underscores the need, as Mark Rifkin argues more generally, “to prioritize[e] Palestinian collective self-understandings and persistent connections to their homelands as a crucial guiding frame for any meaningful and just peace.”2 The flourishing of Palestinian [End Page 1067] futures cannot be brought about without also undoing Zionism. In what follows, I offer a brief detour through Zionism and anti-Zionism that surfaces the former’s enmeshment in US imperial culture and sedimentation in the norms of American studies, and the latter’s historical occlusions and decolonial possibilities. Such a detour aims to clarify the tension between the reconcilable keywords of American studies and its unsettling institutional praxis. My title draws from a subheading to an essay written at a prefigurative moment in Palestine’s breach in US knowledge production: the historian Matthew Nemiroff Lyons’s contribution to the transnational feminist anthology Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World (2003). The anthology was originally proposed in 1987 under the working title The Third Wave: Feminist Essays on Racism, on the urging of Barbara Smith at Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. It was completed during the onset of the US War on Terror and the “second” Palestinian intifada. As a complement to Kitchen Table’s 1983 publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, the anthology sought to “further the dismantling of racism in the United States and globally.”3 According to the editors’ introduction, among the first questions to arise in crafting the book, the ones that “provoked the most disagreement and tension early on,” were not about the question of Palestine per se but about whether anti-Semitism should be “defined as a form of racism within the scope of the anthology,” and its corollary, whether “North American Jewish women are women of color” (xxi). These were not abstract queries but ones whose stakes intensified as feminist formations confronted the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and, before long, the onset of the “first” Palestinian intifada.4 M. Jacqui Alexander, one of the anthology’s editors, urged “placing anti-Semitism in a historical and material context” (xxi). Mab Segrest, another editor, historicized racial capitalism’s origins in the “fusion of settler colonization and chattel slavery” (247).5 Lisa Albrecht, a third editor, wrote as a white American Jew investigating how anti-Semitism and racism in the United States and the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” were “intricately linked.” “American Jews,” Albrecht urges, “cannot call ourselves antiracist and expect to find allies in people of color and...

Expanding carceral geographies: challenging mass incarceration and creating a "community orientation" towards juvenile delinquency

Abstract. Increasingly, governments are adopting alternative strategies to mass incarceration and drawing on the rhetoric of community to create softer and less restrictive sanctions. This paper argues that this transition provides an opportunity for geographers concerned with incarceration to consider a more expansive understanding of the carceral state. To call for a more geographically expansive consideration of incarceration, this paper draws upon a study of one juvenile court that sought to end racialized over-incarceration by promoting a "community orientation". As a consequence, juvenile detention now acts as a single node in a broader process of sorting, placing, and punishing, but the carceral aspects of juvenile court involvement did not lessen. Instead, the community orientation encapsulated a range of practices that are traditionally outside the state, yet extended the power of the state over a broad geography that resulted in the coerced mobility of children and subjection to greater insecurity. By tracing how the carceral apparatus extends into neighborhoods, community programs, probation practices, and residential placement, I argue that paying more attention to variegated carceral practices is necessary to more fully consider how incarceration has permeated places outside the prison.