Imagining Prison: Culture, History, Space

In this article I explore the diverse ways in which stories of prison and punishment have been told in the literary and visual arts. Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. Every culture generates founding myths to account for society?s origins, typically situated in some dreadful primordial event. The imaginary origins of Western civilization are to be found in tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture and suffering. The theme of exclusion is symbolically rich and spaces of confinement ? both real and imagined ? have provided stark reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization can be. This article examines how prison space has been represented in the literary and visual arts so as to grasp the complex cultural landscapes of punishment

Iconic Power, Dark Tourism and the Spectacle of Suffering

In this chapter I explore some of the ethical questions posed by dark tourism and the spectacle of suffering, via two examples. One is of Ai Weiwei’s temporary exhibition on Alcatraz, which juxtaposes extraordinary conceptual art installations in one of the major sites of prison tourism, to explore the relationships between art and activism in carceral space. The second is the display of genocidal evidence at both the Khmer Rouge “security centre” code-named S-21, which was a former high school in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and the “Killing Fields” of Choeung Ek, ten miles east of the capital, where prisoners were taken to be executed. Recognizing that dark tourism involves a “fluid spectrum of intensity” (Stone 2006: 146), the museum experience is nevertheless central to it where representations of death, disaster, or atrocity are displayed for an uneasy mix of education, commerce, and memorialization purposes. At the lighter end of the scale are those sites loosely associated with violence and trauma, examples of which would include the London Dungeon or the proposed Dracula theme park in Romania, which are “firmly entertainment focussed and commercialized,” while toward the middle of the range and combining “education and entertainment” are prison tourist sites, whereas the “darkest” places (such as Holocaust museums) are locations that “can invoke sombre reflection, grief, sorrow, shock and horror” (Barton and Brown 2015: 238)

Staging women in prisons: Clean Break Theatre Company’s dramaturgy of the cage

The article explores the limitations of the dramaturgies of the cell through a close reading of several key play texts commissioned by the UK’s leading arts in criminal justice organisation working with women, Clean Break. The apparently humanist positioning of women in prison as just like everyone else erases the specificity of women’s backstories. Conversely, by adhering to the constructions of female prisoners as holding binary positions of either ‘monsters’ or ‘victims’ of the system, plays can re-inscribe morally unitary approaches to women’s deviance and resistance. Many plays about women in prison hold a claim for resisting stereotypes and are in opposition to the injustice of criminal justice processes, and yet, in the realist mode, the monster/ victim position seems to be an inescapable binary

Changing Fortunes: Criminology and the Sociological Condition

Criminology and its relationships with sociology are today at a crossroads, and this article explores the changing fortunes of each as they have evolved over the last 50 years. The separation has occurred as criminology has successfully established itself as an independent subject with an impressive ability to attract students, scholars and research grants. Some see the striking expansion of criminology and move away from the basic disciplines as an indication of success and impressive achievement, while others are more sceptical and highlight the costs such isolation brings. The article examines the consequences of these changes, then it focuses on the fates of some of the key concepts in sociological criminology, before concluding that social theory can be a unifying force, capable of reinvigorating the ties between the two disciplines

Unsettling Appearances: Diane Arbus, Erving Goffman and the Sociological Eye

Both the photographer Diane Arbus and sociologist Erving Goffman were fascinated by the way we present ourselves to others and this paper sets out how each understood the drama of human interaction. It begins by exploring how their work parallels some developments in the sociology of deviance, and notes how Goffman was one of the earliest critics of this field, before briefly sketching out Arbus’s controversial career and then turning to a more detailed look at three of her images. It concentrates on how the gap between intention and effect, or what Goffman terms the difference between the impressions we ‘give’ and those we actually ‘give off’, are at the core of her work and this sociological insight animates her compositions. The paper then describes how their work unsettles ‘normal appearances’ and provides rich resources for understanding human conduct

Punishment in the Frame: Rethinking the History and Sociology of Art

Images of punishment have featured prominently in Western art and this article explores what might be learnt from studying such pictures of suffering. It seeks to develop an approach to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships between the two. It begins by setting out the current state of the sociology of art, before discussing ‘new’ art histories that are inspired by social analysis. It then concentrates on how images of punishment have featured in Western art. This substantive material provides a rich resource to understand the force of representation and offers an opportunity to develop an aesthetic sociology that avoids some of the problems identified in the article. The approach developed in the second part is one that seeks to elaborate an aesthetic sociology that combines a historical sensitivity to images with the analytical concerns of social science. It strives to extend the art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings toward more sociological interpretations of visual analysis

Documentary criminology: Girl Model as a case study

Visual and cultural criminology are integrated with documentary filmmaking to develop a theoretically grounded, practice-based approach called ‘documentary criminology’. The first section establishes the need for documentary filmmaking in criminology and outlines methodological opportunities. The second section examines theoretically the aesthetics and substance of documentary criminology. The third section takes the film Girl Model (Redmon and Sabin, 2011) as a case study to demonstrate how documentary criminology embedded in lived experience (in this case, the experience of scouts that recruit young Russian girls, purportedly for the modelling industry) can depict sensuous immediacy. The final section contrasts the aesthetic and ethical consequences of documentary criminology within Carrabine’s (2012, 2014) concept of ‘just’ images to a documentary filmmaking approach that remains interpretively open-ended. Readers can access Girl Model at https://vimeo.com/29694894 with the password industry

Paul Nizan: conspiracy and the contemplation of crime

Paul Nizan (1905-1940) is also known in France as the ‘impossible communist’, for his long-term allegiance to the Party and the abrupt cancellation of his membership, in the late 1930s, following the Nazi-Soviet pact. This paper discusses a number of his writings, focusing particularly on his best known novel, The Conspiracy, where a revolutionary cell plans illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address ‘cultural’ aspects of crime and refer to notions such as ‘thrill’ and ‘seductions of crime’ among others. These notions, it will be argued, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel

Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning

Green criminology has sought to blur the nature-culture binary and this article seeks to extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding of the shifting contours of the divide. The article begins by setting out these different approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the 19th century and how the world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture

'Drowning in here in his bloody sea' : exploring TV cop drama's representations of the impact of stress in modern policing

The Criminal Justice System is a part of society that is both familiar and hidden. It is familiar in that a large part of daily news and television drama is devoted to it (Carrabine, 2008; Jewkes, 2011). It is hidden in the sense that the majority of the population have little, if any, direct contact with the Criminal Justice System, meaning that the media may be a major force in shaping their views on crime and policing (Carrabine, 2008). As Reiner (2000) notes, the debate about the relationship between the media, policing, and crime has been a key feature of wider societal concerns about crime since the establishment of the modern police force. He outlines the recurring themes in post-war debates in this field. For Conservatives there has been an ongoing concern that the media is criminongenic, as it serves to undermine traditional institutions, including the police. From the viewpoint of radical criminology, the impact of the media is two-fold: it exaggerates legitimate concerns about crime and emphasises the bureaucratic and other restrictions under which the police operate (Reiner, 2000). This is seen as undermining due process and legitimatising what can be termed a ‘maverick’ approach to policing. An early example of this can be seen in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies (Siegel, 1971) where Harry Callaghan acts as a one-man law enforcement system outside of the formal legal process, a process portrayed as corrupt, inefficient, and concerned with offenders’ rights rather than protecting victims. From a policing perspective, Reiner (2000) argues that film and TV drama creates a simplistic narrative of crime solving that is almost completely divorced from the reality of modern police work, a finding consistent with more recent work by Cummins et al., (2014)