Marking the Carceral Boundary: Penal Stigma in the long Shadow of the Prison (original) (raw)
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A Legal Geography of Prison and Other Carceral Spaces
Antipode, 2024
As scholars apply the concept of “the carceral” to more and increasingly diffuse spaces of containment, displacement, and cordoning across free society, I call for a means by which “carcerality” is measured and understood as a productive force in the denial of constitutional rights and protections. I therefore provide a legal reading of car- cerality, which establishes prisons as the sine qua non of the carceral landscape, pre- ceded by an analysis of how the reliance on civil law, nuisance ordinances, and other methods of constitutional circumvention in the absence of criminal procedure works within the public sphere to punish residents residing within what Foucault called the carceral archipelago. Along the way I provide vignettes about my own experience with the legal and insidious forms of criminalisation and non-criminal punishment that com- prise the carceral continuum.
Ethnography, 2002
Based on comparative fieldwork conducted in and around four French prisons in 1990-94, this article analyzes processes at work in the `sensitive perimeter' that surrounds and isolates establishments of penal confinement. The first part retraces the nested dynamics of relegation at the planning and building stage that lead to the geographic isolation of carceral establishments - their expurgation from city centers and removal to distant locations devoid of economic and symbolic value. The second part focuses on the distortions induced by carceral divisions in ordinary interactions taking place in the bars and hotels located in the immediate vicinity of prisons. It is found that the dichotomous cleavage effected and materialized by the prison, with inmates embodying `evil' on one side and guards as carriers of `good' on the other, seeps through the walls and infects a wide range of social relationships. The prison both radiates and exports the penal stigma it is assumed to...
Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2019
This intriguing book was first published in French in 2015 as L'Ombre du Monde: une anthropologie de la condition carcerale. It is great that it has been translated: the Englishspeaking world remains too ignorant of French penology. As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources. Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist, currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at Princeton. He came to prisons quite late in his working life, having started out as a medical doctor, moving through public health to anthropology. This book is the result of seven months spent as a researcher in a French maison d'arret (short-term prison) over a period of four years. The book starts with an intriguing preface, a discourse on 'a world of prison'. He comments on the paradox that this site of closed confinement is a space open to research: permission to carry out research in French prisons is easily won. He explores many extraordinary facts: driving without a driving licence (which would have received a fine in the 1990s) is the cause of one in ten incarcerations in France today; imprisonment for cannabis is going up, whilst sentences for embezzlement are going down. Fassin suggests that in recent decades, the smaller the offence, the greater the escalation in penal harshness. After the Preface, the Prologue. It starts in a tribunal correctionnel (criminal court), with la comparution immediate (a fast-track summary trial), where a string of defendants receive short custodial sentences. How wonderful that a book on prisons starts with a court scene: too many English prison anthropologies or sociologies sideline the law. This book is dense with law. In the Prologue, 'Where it all begins', Fassin points out that 'prison is the product of the work of the police and the judges, governments and parliamentary representatives, journalists and film directors, and even society as a whole, through the fiction known as "public opinion"' (p.11). Prison is not separate from the social world: it is its disturbing shadow. Next there's an introduction offering a dose of Foucault and Durkheim to help the reader understand the expanding prison and the social composition of the prison population, as an indicator of what and who society thinks should be punished. Chapter 1 continues this theme: in order to understand prison, we have to know who is locked up, for what reason and for how long. Fassin argues that the politics of fear in recent years has focused public attention on insecurity rather than on inequality, so that we have come to accept short terms of imprisonment, without really questioning whether or not they act to the detriment of the social integration of the individuals involved. In Chapter 2, Fassin confronts one of France's most confusing 'well-kept public secrets': the 'voluntary ignorance' about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in French prisons. Explanations are easy to trace, and some of them creditable: fear of labelling people and an ethical concern about the possible consequences of exploring it.
The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice
This intriguing book was first published in French in 2015 as L'Ombre du Monde: une anthropologie de la condition carcerale. It is great that it has been translated: the Englishspeaking world remains too ignorant of French penology. As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources. Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist, currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at Princeton. He came to prisons quite late in his working life, having started out as a medical doctor, moving through public health to anthropology. This book is the result of seven months spent as a researcher in a French maison d'arret (short-term prison) over a period of four years. The book starts with an intriguing preface, a discourse on 'a world of prison'. He comments on the paradox that this site of closed confinement is a space open to research: permission to carry out research in French prisons is easily won. He explores many extraordinary facts: driving without a driving licence (which would have received a fine in the 1990s) is the cause of one in ten incarcerations in France today; imprisonment for cannabis is going up, whilst sentences for embezzlement are going down. Fassin suggests that in recent decades, the smaller the offence, the greater the escalation in penal harshness. After the Preface, the Prologue. It starts in a tribunal correctionnel (criminal court), with la comparution immediate (a fast-track summary trial), where a string of defendants receive short custodial sentences. How wonderful that a book on prisons starts with a court scene: too many English prison anthropologies or sociologies sideline the law. This book is dense with law. In the Prologue, 'Where it all begins', Fassin points out that 'prison is the product of the work of the police and the judges, governments and parliamentary representatives, journalists and film directors, and even society as a whole, through the fiction known as "public opinion"' (p.11). Prison is not separate from the social world: it is its disturbing shadow. Next there's an introduction offering a dose of Foucault and Durkheim to help the reader understand the expanding prison and the social composition of the prison population, as an indicator of what and who society thinks should be punished. Chapter 1 continues this theme: in order to understand prison, we have to know who is locked up, for what reason and for how long. Fassin argues that the politics of fear in recent years has focused public attention on insecurity rather than on inequality, so that we have come to accept short terms of imprisonment, without really questioning whether or not they act to the detriment of the social integration of the individuals involved. In Chapter 2, Fassin confronts one of France's most confusing 'well-kept public secrets': the 'voluntary ignorance' about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in French prisons. Explanations are easy to trace, and some of them creditable: fear of labelling people and an ethical concern about the possible consequences of exploring it.
Carceral Geography is the study of how spatiality intersects with punishment. Moran’s study offers a comprehensive overview of recent work and defends the view that studying the spatial dimensions of penality is crucial. It raises a number of pertinent questions: How do spatially targeted policing strategies lead to ethnoracial and socioeconomic disparities in prisoner populations? Why is prison construction sometimes the subject of Nimbyism and at other times welcomed as a valuable source of revenue and job creation in faltering communities? Are prisons really impermeable “total” institutions or can their boundaries be porous? How does the decentralized “archipelago” of penal institutions, differentiated along degrees of internal control (“categories” in England and Wales, “levels” in California, and “open” vs. “closed” prisons in Scandinavia), contribute to the production of docile bodies? Can architecture and interior design play a role in the construction of “humane” prisons – or should such a notion be rejected as oxymoronic?
Annales de Géographie
Despite longstanding implicit recognition of the significance of prison space, which can be traced back at least as far as Bentham’s notion, introduced in 1791, that prisoner reform and wellbeing are achieved in part by a 'simple idea in architecture', prison architecture, design and technology (ADT) remain under-researched and poorly theorized. This exploratory paper reviews some of the literature on carceral space, principally from human geography, but also from criminology and environmental psychology. It poses questions which point to the pertinence of research into prison design at a critical juncture in penal policy in the UK, as the Ministry of Justice rolls out a 'new for old' policy, closing down at least thirteen historic prisons and partially closing several other sites, and commissioning new, large custodial facilities which appear to represent a return to previously shelved plans for warehouse-style 'Titan' prisons. The paper argues that carceral geography's concern for the lived experience of spaces of imprisonment could provide a unique and insightful perspective on this critical area of scholarship, and suggests new areas for future research which could generate the empirical material necessary to research this critical topic.
Prison geographies: Nine disciplinary approaches
Geography Compass, 2024
Motivated by a critical concern for state‐sanctioned coer- cion, control, and containment across “free society,” geog- raphers 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 geogra- phers' 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.
Introduction - Confinement Beyond Site: Connecting Urban and Prison Ethnographies
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2020
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.