Conceptualising the Carceral in Carceral Geography

Carceral geography has yet to define the ‘carceral’, with implications for its own development, its potential synergies within and beyond geography, and effective critique of the carceral ‘turn’. A range of explicatory alternatives are open, including continued expansive engagement with the carceral, and attendance to compact and diffuse carceral models. We trace the origins of the term ‘carceral’, its expansive definition after Foucault, the apparent carceral/prison symbiosis, and the extant diversity of carceral geography. We advance for debate, as a step towards its critical appraisal, a series of ‘carceral conditions’ that bear on the nature and quality of carcerality

Tracing outsideness: young women's institutional journeys and the geographies of closed space

Understanding confinement and its complex workings between individuals and society has been the stated aim of carceral geography and wider studies on detention. This project contributes ethnographic insights from multiple sites of incarceration, working with an under-researched group within confined populations. Focussing on young female detainees in Scotland, this project seeks to understand their experiences of different types of ‘closed’ space. Secure care, prison and closed psychiatric facilities all impact on the complex geographies of these young women’s lives. The fluid but always situated relations of control and care provide the backdrop for their journeys in/out and beyond institutional spaces. Understanding institutional journeys with reference to age and gender allows an insight into the highly mobile, often precarious, and unfamiliar lives of these young women who live on the margins. This thesis employs a mixed-method qualitative approach and explores what Goffman calls the ‘tissue and fabric’ of detention as a complex multi-institutional practice. In order to be able to understand the young women’s gendered, emotional and often repetitive experiences of confinement, analysis of the constitution of ‘closed space’ represents a first step for inquiry. The underlying nature of inner regimes, rules and discipline in closed spaces, provide the background on which confinement is lived, perceived and processed. The second part of the analysis is the exploration of individual experiences ‘on the inside’, ranging from young women’s views on entering a closed institution, the ways in which they adapt or resist the regime, and how they cope with embodied aspects of detention. The third and final step considers the wider context of incarceration by recovering the young women’s journeys through different types of institutional spaces and beyond. The exploration of these journeys challenges and re-develops understandings of mobility and inertia by engaging the relative power of carceral archipelagos and the figure of femina sacra. This project sits comfortably within the field of carceral geography while also pushing at its boundaries. On a conceptual level, a re-engagement with Goffman’s micro-analysis challenges current carceral-geographic theory development. Perhaps more importantly, this project pushes for an engagement with different institutions under the umbrella of carceral geography, thus creating new dialogues on issues like ‘care’ and ‘control’. Finally, an engagement with young women addresses an under-represented population within carceral geography in ways that raise distinctly problematic concerns for academic research and penal policy. Overall, this project aims to show the value of fine grained micro-level research in institutional geographies for extending thinking and understanding about society’s responses to a group of people who live on the margins of social and legal norms

Contrasts in freedom: Comparing the experiences of imprisonment in open and closed prisons in England and Wales and Norway

Open prisons are portrayed as less harmful custodial institutions than closed prisons, and prison systems that rely more heavily on low security imprisonment are typically considered to have a more humane and less punitive approach to punishment. However, few studies have systematically compared the subjective experiences of prisoners held in open and closed prisons, and no study has yet compared the role and function of open prisons across jurisdictions. Drawing on a survey conducted with prisoners (N = 1082) in 13 prisons in England and Wales and Norway, we provide the first comparative analysis of experiences of imprisonment in closed and open prisons, conducted in countries with diverging penal philosophies (‘neoliberal’ vs. ‘social democratic’). The article documents that open prisons play a much more significant role in Norway than in England and Wales; that prisoners in both countries rate their experience significantly more positively in open compared to closed prisons; and that while imprisonment seems to produce similar kinds of pains in both types of prisons, they are perceived as less severe and more manageable in open prisons. These findings suggest important implications for comparative penology, penal policy, and prison reform.publishedVersio

Re‐discovering goffman: contemporary carceral geography, the “total” institution and notes on heterotopia

Recent conceptual debates within carceral geography about spaces of detention have largely dismissed Goffman's micro‐level analysis of closed spaces and interaction. As a response to Baer and Ravneberg's 2008 contribution to this journal on the inside/outside of prisons and the importance of indistinction, with its critical view on Goffman as a thinker/scholar of relevance to studying carceral geography, this article aims to re‐engage with Goffman's Asylums in order to establish its applicability in terms of both theoretical and substantive implications for this sub‐field. The concept of heterotopia, introduced by Baer and Ravneberg as a neo‐institutional alternative to Goffman's theory, will be addressed in its relevance to understanding spaces of confinement. The empirical material is part of a research project about young women's experiences of closed institutions in Scotland, specifically prison environments, secure care and closed psychiatric units. Their descriptions of being locked up and their emotional, symbolic and embodied ways of understanding and coping include entangled encounters with closed or “total” space that show elements of spatial semi‐permeability. This spatial state can be understood as partially open, allowing the passage of certain elements while acting as a barrier to others, and it can be found in Goffman's account of the total institution as well as in Baer and Ravneberg's experiences of prison. The semi‐permeable nature of space in a closed institution – including its dimensions of inside and outside – does not become any clearer by postulating an empirical and theoretical juxtaposition between distinction and indistinction. An in‐depth engagement with Goffman's insights into the micro world of a closed institution instead offers surprising contributions to the understanding of semi‐permeable insides and outsides

The carceral city: confinement and order in Hong Kong’s forbidden enclave

Once feted, Hong Kong has recently become a centre of civil unrest. In this paper, we situate these emergent politics through a case study of corruption and everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, a mainland Chinese enclave in British Hong Kong, which developed notoriety as a freestanding grey economy. Drawing from oral testimonies of police officers, triad members and local residents, we excavate the lived experience of confinement within this contested space. These accounts reconstruct the Walled City as a ‘quasi-carceral’ site of enclosure, a zone of colonial exceptionalism and a hybrid cultural space. Through this case study, we historicize current debates in carceral geography, humanize recent interventions in urban scholarship and analyse the shifting politics at the frontier of Chinese expansionism

Abolishing carceral geographies?

No abstract available

Investigating trial spaces: thinking through legal spatiality beyond the court

This paper examines how the spaces through which legal trials take place shape attitudes towards justice. There has been a growing academic interest in the role of courts in configuring the relationships between trial participants and consequently reproducing pre-established hierarchies of power. This paper builds on this work to consider the spatiality of trials from the perspective of a particular group of court users: defendants. Drawing on qualitative data drawn from a longitudinal study conducted in prisons in England and Wales, the paper examines how defendants perceive trial spaces, exploring in particular how such insights expand beyond the narrow focus on the courtroom to draw in experiences of transportation, holding cells, bodily restrictions and the provision of food. In doing so, we seek to contribute to debates concerning penal consciousness, whereby the subjectivity and embodiment of individual participants illuminate differential experiences of the material and legal nature of trial processes. The paper concludes by emphasising how a focus on penal consciousness can help to address perceptions of the injustice of trial outcomes while improving the accessibility of courts

Investigating trial spaces: Thinking through legal spatiality beyond the court

Abstract: This paper examines how the spaces through which legal trials take place shape attitudes towards justice. There has been a growing academic interest in the role of courts in configuring the relationships between trial participants and consequently reproducing pre‐established hierarchies of power. This paper builds on this work to consider the spatiality of trials from the perspective of a particular group of court users: defendants. Drawing on qualitative data drawn from a longitudinal study conducted in prisons in England and Wales, the paper examines how defendants perceive trial spaces, exploring in particular how such insights expand beyond the narrow focus on the courtroom to draw in experiences of transportation, holding cells, bodily restrictions, and the provision of food. In doing so, we seek to contribute to debates concerning penal consciousness, whereby the subjectivity and embodiment of individual participants illuminate differential experiences of the material and legal nature of trial processes. The paper concludes by emphasising how a focus on penal consciousness can help to address perceptions of the injustice of trial outcomes while improving the accessibility of courts