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.

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Institutions have troubled us for decades. Although the history of this engagement has been noted as somewhat “fragmented” (Billo & Mountz, 2015, Progress in Human Geography, 40, p. 199), geographers have engaged in detailed discussion on how to research institutions (Flowerdew, 1982, Institutions and geographical patterns, Croom Helm, London, UK), and noted their multifaceted and heterogeneous nature. In a special issue in 2000, Philo and Parr initiated a discussion on an emerging and wide ranging literature of institutional geographies and their epistemological frames. This collection seeks to invigorate institutional geographies in thinking through trouble and moving to develop “geographies of trouble.” This special section on “Troubling Institutions at the Nexus of Care and Control” has emerged from three sessions at the annual conference of the RGS‐IBG in 2016. The papers reflect a diverse engagement with the institutional in geography and provide novel insights around the nature of trouble. We believe geographers could develop trouble, scaling up to map the interconnected circuits of trouble interventions but also to move forward and consider how these networks and institutions are changing, adapting and increasingly troubled themselves.

Based on a survey administered in 13 prisons in England & Wales and Norway, as part of a research programme with explicitly comparative aims, this article seeks to address both the relative and absolute dimensions of the Nordic penal exceptionalism thesis. It outlines the consistently more positive results in Norway compared to England & Wales, explaining them primarily with reference to the former’s much higher quality and use of open prisons. At the same time, it emphasizes that, even in an unusually humane prison system, prisoners report considerable pain and frustration. The article also makes the case that comparative analysis should strive to be systematic, but that such comparisons are always imperfect, making methodological transparency all the more essential.

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.