Carceral Space Research Articles

The Institutional Hearing Program: A Study of Prison-Based Immigration Courts in the United States

This article presents the findings of the first research study of the Institutional Hearing Program (IHP), a prison-based immigration court system run by the U.S. Department of Justice. Although the IHP has existed for four decades, little is publicly known about the program's origin, development, or significance. Based on original analysis of archival records, this study makes three central contributions. First, it traces the origin and growth of the IHP within federal, state, and municipal correctional facilities. Notably, although the IHP began in 1980 as a program to deport Cuban asylum seekers held in civil detention in an Atlanta prison, it now operates to deport noncitizens serving prison sentences in twenty-three federal prisons, nineteen state prison systems, and a few municipal jails. Second, this article uncovers the crucial role that prison-based immigration courts have played in shaping the design of carceral institutions around the priorities of an immigration system that primarily targets Latinos for deportation. Third, this article shows how immigration courts embedded in carceral spaces have served as influential, yet overlooked, incubators of changes to immigration law and practice that today apply to all immigration courts, not just the IHP. These findings have important implications for contemporary understandings of the relationship between immigration detention, racialized control of migration, and penal punishment.

Transcarceral lawscapes enacted in moments of Aboriginalisation: a case-study of an Indigenous woman released on urban parole

AbstractThe field of carceral geography was lately developed by critical human geographers grappling with the spatiotemporal modes of social control and coercion particular to institutions of incarceration (Moranet al., 2018; Moran and Schliehe, 2017). This has included – in keeping with Michel Foucault's (1991) genealogy of the carceral as an art of disciplinary power – studying the disparate ways in which carceral techniques proliferate from and beyond the built site of the prison, becoming incorporated into other spatial formations. Carceral geographers have characterised this extension as transcarceral (Moran, 2014) or heterotopic (Gillet al., 2018; Moran and Keinänen, 2012). However, despite frequent references to law and legal institutions, carceral geographers generally do not theorise about law. Through a case-study involving an Indigenous woman paroled in Toronto, the author theorises about how carceral spaces are expressed through legal forms and techniques, affecting how paroled individuals, particularly thoseAboriginalised, are emplaced within urban space.

Stir: Poetic field works from the Distant Voices project

In this brief research note I discuss and share from, Stir (2020): a collection of poems that were written while I was the research associate on the Distant Voices project based at the University of Glasgow (2017–2021). These poems reflect on my experience of doing ethnographic research in carceral spaces, and are written from the perspective of an outsider with a pass that allowed access for a limited time only. The collection is open access and available to read online. The note situates my project within the context of poetic practice in the social sciences. Inspired primarily by feminist scholarship, I also draw on actor-network theory to describe my research process as one of ‘translation’. The note also touches on historical anxieties about the legitimacy of the approach and the sociological preference for ‘found poetry’. I reflect on some ethical and creative questions that arose for me in writing poetry as social research, including representing research participants, use of pronouns and authorial voice, and emotions and research. I also discuss the affordances of working creatively with ethnographic materials, and the role of poetry in pursuing social change.

Liminality revisited: Mapping the emotional adaptations of women in carceral space

This article draws on interview data with women in two prisons in the UK to understand the emotionally nuanced and sensorially attuned relationship between confined individuals and carceral space. The article presents an ‘emotional map’ comprising: (i) living or ‘being’ spaces; (ii) free places; and (iii) ‘therapeutic spaces’ in prisons.This tri-spatial thematic analysis enables us to use Victor Turner’s concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ to uncover the complex, contradictory and sometimes transient emotions that permeate spaces in prison. This in turn allows us to explore the particular challenges that accompany transitional periods of adjustment to prison life, the environmental constraints that women in prison live with and navigate, and the careful ‘spatial selection’ strategies they implement in order to seek or avoid particular emotional states.

South African and Northern Irish Political Prison Writing Reimagining/Reconfiguring the Carceral Space

Without overplaying the convergences in the discriminatory and oppressive practices carried out during the twentieth century by the states of South Africa (1948–1994) and Northern Ireland (1921–1998), it is difficult not to see prisons as one of the spaces where the power of the state was hotly contested. Physically isolated either by the countryside or by the ocean, the notorious prisons of Long Kesh/H Blocks and Robben Island housed vast numbers of political prisoners whose resolve and resistance the prison and state regimes attempted to break, deploying a variety of brutal strategies to do so. These violent infringements on prisoners’ human rights also occurred in prisons situated in more central areas, but regardless of the physical situation of the prison, its inhabitants were (and of course still are today) rendered invisible and inaudible. This essay will focus on prose and poetry produced by political prisoners during incarceration and, in some cases, after their release. I would like to explore how the various aesthetics developed by both well-known and anonymous writers participate in a very political reconfiguration of both the carceral space and the wider biopolitics of the state. I suggest it is in the very stylistics of the texts that their implicit political message can be deciphered, and the prisoners’ agency asserted. Paradoxically, then, in spite of attempts to push the prisoners out of sight, their resistance becomes all the more visible and audible, and forces a redistribution of the sensible through dissensus.

“And you will wait …”: Carceral transportation in electronic monitoring as part of the punishment process

Electronic monitoring, often accompanied with house arrest, is used extensively across the United States as a means of pretrial supervision and as a condition of probation and parole. In this article, we bridge the literatures of procedural punishment and carceral geography to detail how this previously understudied process of transport from jail to electronic monitoring serves not just as a necessary bureaucratic process, but as a key moment of punishment and power. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 60 people who were currently or recently on EM in Cook County, IL, we argue that this moment of transport is itself a punitive experience. We find that sheriff’s officers involved in the transport process punish individuals through the manipulation of time and space, verbal threats, and infantilization. This punishment in transport instills a subjugated status that sets the tone for the EM experience, aiding in reinforcing the home as the new carceral space.

Compelling Labor and Chilling Dissent: Creative Resistance to Coercive Uses of Solitary Confinement in Prisons and Immigration Detention Centers

Solitary confinement has been used for centuries as a mechanism for controlling incarcerated people. Increasingly, however, prisons and immigration detention centers are strategically administering solitary confinement specifically to compel incarcerated people to perform labor. The coerced labor of incarcerated people acts as a tool in a system of racial capitalism. The largely uncompensated labor of incarcerated people results in savings for prisons and immigration detention centers across the United States. These economic savings make it efficient for the government to continue filling prisons and immigration detention centers with people of color. This Note, published in Volume 36 of the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal, explains how solitary confinement and forced labor exacerbate each other in our current system of racial capitalism. This Note offers five observations: First, when solitary confinement is used specifically to threaten people to work and as punishment when they refuse to do so, it continues a legacy of exploiting the labor of people of color to further a system that protects white privilege, power, and profits. Second, officials in both prisons and immigration detention centers today use solitary confinement as a threat to coerce incarcerated people into performing low-wage or no-wage labor and as punishment for refusing to work. The use of solitary confinement to compel labor is ubiquitous in federal and state carceral facilities, whether managed by the state or by private corporations. Third, solitary confinement is used to chill organized dissent regarding forced labor in both prisons and immigration detention centers. Incarcerated people have been preemptively placed in solitary confinement to prevent them from demonstrating against labor conditions and have been placed in solitary confinement as punishment for rising up. Fourth, labor coerced using the threat of solitary confinement is used to construct and reconstruct the infrastructure of solitary confinement itself. In state and federal prisons, incarcerated people are tasked with producing items like beds and restraint loops that are used to furnish solitary confinement cells. In immigration detention centers, forced labor is used to clean and maintain solitary confinement cells and other areas of carceral facilities. Fifth, advocating to end practices like solitary confinement and forced labor requires creative resistance by people inside carceral spaces and people outside of them. Art can be a powerful tool to bring oppressive conditions to the public’s attention, but care must be taken to avoid recreating elements of the prison-industrial complex through the production and display of activist artwork. The ubiquity of forced labor resulting from the threat of solitary confinement exposes the destructive and pervasive nature of carceral violence used to further a system of racial capitalism. Understanding how oppressive practices compound one another can help us reject them altogether and imagine a world without carceral punishment.

From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945

From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945

Introduction

Recognizing that the ‘prison’ and the ‘street’ are increasingly understood to be enmeshed sites of exclusion and confinement, this introduction proposes an analytical orientation towards relations and practices across these sites, which attends specifically to the ways in which they are mutually constitutive. Utilizing notions of traversal and porosity, we push debates on confinement beyond their prison-centric impulse. This decentring of the prison goes beyond reading one site in terms of the other (the street as just another carceral space; the prison as another site of exclusion). We challenge the divisiveness of prison/street binaries and the domination of boundary-making by emphasizing the importance of polyvalent experiences and by drawing attention to the practices of people who traverse the prison/street threshold. On the basis of the fine-grained ethnographic contributions making up this collection, the introduction points towards novel avenues for a (grounded) theorization of confinement in terms of overlap, traversal and porosity.

'Bad for the Health of the Body, Worse for the Health of the Mind': Female Responses to Imprisonment in England, 1853-1869.

Upon committal to one of the newly established female convict prisons in the mid-nineteenth century, women entered a system intended to regulate them in body and in mind for the ends of reform. This article interrogates how women’s health needs were identified and contested by the prison officials and doctors tasked with their custody and care. It highlights the importance of broader temporal gender beliefs in dictating their treatment in this carceral space and explores how the women themselves exercised agency over the terms of their imprisonment. In addition, it reveals the previously underexplored transference of women between the institutions that made up the female convict estate that was prompted by concerns about the impact of a rigorous prison system on their physical and mental health.

"That's the Lowest Place on Earth!" Experiences of the Carceral Spaces of Australian Police Custody for Marginalized Young Men.

Young men are overrepresented among people detained in police custody in Victoria, Australia, a closed institution that has mostly escaped public scrutiny. Our study sheds light on this underexamined place from the perspective of 28 marginalized young men (aged 19-24) detained there prior to adult prison. Drawing on Bacchi's "What's the problem represented to be?" approach and the subdiscipline of carceral geography, we disrupt the assumed purpose of police custody as a place to simply detain people while awaiting court and/or transfer to prison. We illustrate how police custody, although ostensibly for ensuring the safety and protection of the community, privileges that of some over others, with detrimental effects for marginalized groups. We highlight how harsh, degrading, hostile environments intersected with lived experiences and exacerbated psychological, social, and physical health harms; made possible young men's constitution as dirty, violent, and subhuman; and worked to legitimize breaches of human rights.

Quality of Life in Jail: Gender, Correlates, and Drivers in a Carceral Space

Quality of life (QOL) is an important area of exploration in U.S. corrections linked closely to well-being and an important indicator of intervention efficacy. Little is known of QOL in U.S. jails despite the admittance of over 10-million people to these settings every year. Research regarding the dimensions, correlates, and gender disparities in QOL in jails is important to shaping gender-responsive supports and reducing recidivism. Independent t tests and correlational and regression analyses were used to explore dimensions, correlates, and gender disparities in QOL among persons incarcerated in a large, southeastern jail (N = 299). All QOL domains were significantly related to overall QOL, and psychological QOL contributed most readily to respondent's overall QOL. Females, on average, reported lower QOL than males with significant differences between the groups in physical health and psychological domains. The importance of psychological QOL intervention and healthcare continuity are discussed.

Transformative Praxis With Incarcerated Women: Collaboration, Leadership, and Voice

The ever-widening net of racialized and colonial carceral spaces and neoliberal strategies of control of poor and marginalized communities means that social workers are often in positions of complicity with or resistance to (or both) the norms and practices of the carceral state. Feminist praxis can both challenge and inadvertently sustain the prison industrial complex and its harms. Approaches that even tacitly accept some of the basic premises and discourses of correctional frameworks risk being co-opted and transmuted into racialized and colonial control practices. In this article, I use the example of Walls to Bridges Canada, a social justice iteration of the U.S.-based Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, to illustrate the power and significance of feminist praxis that privileges the epistemic vantage point of those who are incarcerated. This article will examine how collaborative work with criminalized and incarcerated women (in classrooms, research studies, and community work) moves beyond “giving voice,” to promoting leadership by those with lived experience and shared collaborative knowledge production.

Sustainable Spaces, Sustained Mass Incarceration: Environmental Protection as Racial Violence in the Design of Juvenile Incarceration

Though scholars of racial capitalism have separately analyzed mass incarceration and environmental racism as state-sanctioned racial violence, few have put these two seemingly disparate topics of study in direct conversation. Yet tracking “sustainability” in the designs of an environmentally friendly juvenile detention facility reveals that state-subsidized corporate mechanisms of environmental protection are fundamental to racialized mass incarceration in the United States. In the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro, California, building designers constructed a juvenile court, social services center, and jail that all met the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Standard for sustainable construction practices put forth by the US Green Building Council. In this carceral space, however, the ideals of sustainable building design obfuscate the role of racial capitalism in sustaining the punitive regulation of Black and other nonwhite youth through incarceration.

Familiarity and strangeness: Seeing everyday practices of punishment and resistance in Holloway Prison

London’s Holloway Prison, the largest women’s prison in western Europe, closed in 2016. The impact of the closure on the women incarcerated in Holloway, and the prison’s place in the local community, is the focus of a project led by Islington Museum. Here, we develop an innovation, emotion-led methodology to explore photographs of the decommissioned Holloway, asking what they communicate about experiences of imprisonment and practices of punishment. The images illustrate the strategies of control, mechanisms of punishment and tactics of resistance that operate through the carceral space. From a feminist, anti-carceral perspective, we emphasise the importance of seeing prison spaces and attending to the emotional responses generated. We offer a creative intervention into dominant government and media narratives of Holloway’s closure and suggest that considering what it is that feels familiar and strange about carceral spaces has the potential to operate as a form of anti-carceral work.

Solidarity in spaces of ‘care and custody’: The hospitality politics of immigration detention visiting

This article contributes to criminological understanding of immigration detention by highlighting volunteer visiting as a space of embodied thinking about critical responses to the burgeoning crimmigration system. It draws from interview material with volunteer visitors and people held in immigration detention centres to assess conceptual relevance of critical hospitality studies for anti-border practice. Both within Derridean scholarship on hospitality and in social-discourses on migration, host/citizen and guest/migrant identifications are understood as stable subject positions. I argue that to support resistance to deportation and establish mutual solidarity and cooperation in this context, detention visitors adopt multiple strategies of hospitality that position themselves as visitors as well as hosts. By counter-posing differing ways that volunteers occupy these roles, I show how the copresence of divergent ways of offering hospitality allows visitors to navigate the complicities that necessarily afflict support in solidarity with migrants in carceral spaces of border control.

Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

New technologies for recording, reproducing, and disseminating sound are increasingly accessible and provide important opportunities for listening to accounts of confinement. Through a politics and practice of ‘earwitnessing detention’, this article explores experiential patterns and distinctions between immigration detention and imprisonment. By ‘tuning in’ to radio and podcasting emerging from and through carceral spaces, we argue that both detained asylum seekers and Aboriginal prisoners in Australia narrate an experience of ‘indefinite stuckness’. Indefinite stuckness is an existential condition within a carceral continuum that is both spatial and temporal, and characterised by massive racial inequalities. For detained asylum seekers, indefinite stuckness manifests in the absence of a set release date, whereas for Aboriginal prisoners, it is a cycle of criminalisation and re-incarceration in the colony. This important distinction shapes how detention is represented: as torturous and abusive, or as an opportunity for respite from the ‘chaos’ outside. Linking these sometimes-divergent accounts of confinement are themes of friendship and community as forms of survival and resistance to the abjection that frequently accompanies indefinite stuckness.

Deviant Care for Deviant Futures

Abstract This article introduces the concept of carceral care as those public-facing “do-better” penal practices, policies, and material actions used to ward off future investigation of underlying institutional violences of carceral spaces. As a model for denaturalizing carceral care, time, space, and the perpetuity of reform, it explores theories of deviant care, mutual aid, and QTBIPoC radical relationalism. It investigates how inhabiting deviance is a necessary care practice as modeled every day by queer bonds of survival, particularly from within the confines of carceral spaces. Based on relationships built over the last four years with trans women of color organizing inside a “male-designated” state prison in Corcoran, California, this article connects questions of deviant care as the refusal of the diagnosable and individuated self through queer black/indigenous feminist of color resistance and radical thought.

Carceral Spaces and Social Reproduction: Exploring Export Processing Zones in Sri Lanka and Prisons in Argentina

AbstractThe article reflects on the ways in which social reproduction intersects with (im)mobility in export-processing zones in Sri Lanka and the outskirts of prisons in Argentina. Framing factories and prisons as “carceral spaces” and drawing upon diverse case study materials, it focuses on (i) the daily circulations and waiting that take place around these closely regulated sites and (ii) the relations of care that emerge in these sites. The article analyzes how gendered care work can be an active form of agency and resistance to structural confinement and violence, which is nevertheless embedded in broader forms of depletion.

Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails

AbstractIn this paper I ask how might environmental justice studies scholarship be recast if we consider the phenomenon of environmental injustice as a form of criminalisation? In other words, since environmental injustice is frequently a product of state‐sanctioned violence against communities of colour, then what are the implications of reframing it as a practice of treating those populations as criminally suspect and as deserving of state punishment? Moreover, how are the targets and survivors of environmental injustice/racism enlisted in generative ways that resist that criminalisation and support abolition? I answer these questions through a consideration of how struggles inside and outside of carceral spaces represent urgent and timely opportunities to rethink the possibilities of environmental justice theory and politics by linking them to practices and visions of abolition ecology and critical environmental justice.