This article surveys the state of emerging geographic research on detention, imprisonment, and confinement. Prisons and detention centers vary widely in location and form, but all hold human beings without consent by other human beings. We first survey geographical research on prisons and, second, on detention centers. We then argue that this geographic research offers three primary contributions to the study of imprisonment and detention. First, analyzing the spatial practices (the ordering of space and time) of these institutions provides a productive framework for understanding the materiality of social, cultural, and economic relationships. Second, this research provides an important perspective on state responses to the globalization of trade, migration, war, and security. Third, detention and imprisonment are productive sites for exclusionary discourses. In closing, we urge geographers to think deeply about how detention's indeterminacy works beyond the detention center, to be wary of implicit valorizations of imprisonment, and to take seriously the global expansion of the confinement industry.
A host of power relations are structurally imposed upon the imprisoned and these produce vulnerabilities that require considerable energy and attention. This paper argues, however, that 'vulnerable populations' is a politically reactive legal category in the context of research with prisoners. In turn, this form of categorical vulnerability is often misaligned with 'actually existing vulnerability' or 'relational vulnerability' in the context of prison life. Substantive ethical, methodological and practical problems result from this misalignment, as I illustrate through the case of my research with former prisoners in Athens, Georgia. I seek to prove two claims in support of my central argument. First, actually existing vulnerability is fundamentally relational and it involves the researcher, the researched, collaborators, and (often distant) people and social structures that were not necessarily directly involved in the research process. Second, vulnerability is a spatially and temporally contingent process. The essay reviews the peculiar history by which prisoners came to be categorized as a 'vulnerable population' in the United States, in addition to recounting my first-hand experiences during the research process. Vulnérabilité relationnelle et procédé de recherche auprès d'anciens prisonniers d'Athens en Géorgie (USA)RÉSUMÉ Une grande quantité de rapports de force sont imposés structurellement à ceux qui sont emprisonnés et ces rapports produisent des vulnérabilités qui demandent une énergie et une attention considérables. Cet article soumet, toutefois, que « les populations vulnérables » forment une catégorie légale politiquement réactive dans le contexte de la recherche auprès des prisonniers. A son tour, souvent, cette forme de catégorie de vulnérabilité ne correspond pas à « la vulnérabilité réelle qui existe » ou à la « vulnérabilité relationnelle » dans le contexte de la vie en prison. Des problèmes substantiels éthiques, méthodologiques et pratiques résultent de ce décalage, comme je le démontre à travers le cas de ma recherche auprès d'anciens prisonniers d'Athens, en Géorgie. Je cherche à © 2016 informa uK limited, trading as taylor & Francis Group KEYWORDS carceral geography; relational vulnerability; vulnerable populations; imprisonment MOTS CLÉS géographie carcérale; vulnérabilité relationnelle; populations vulnérables; emprisonnement ARTICLE HISTORY
Abstract. This paper reports results from a critical discourse analysis of Annual Reports for Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, Inc. (formerly Wackenhut), the two largest private prison firms currently operating in the United States. Considerable geographic scholarship has analyzed privatization, on the one hand, and imprisonment, on the other. However, geographers have paid less attention to explicitly for-profit imprisonment. In particular, geographers have overlooked or ignored the emergence of bedspace, a concept that now pervades penal discourse. Rather than continuing conventional public-versus-private prison debates, this paper identifies bedspace as the discursive common ground upon which private prison industrialists and the state actually converge. Applying Henri Lefebvre's theorization of "abstract space" to imprisonment, I argue that the discursive creation of bedspace produces a nondialectical representation of space that is fully commodified and bureaucratized. However, the paper concludes that this nondialectical space problematically severs the immanently human geography of imprisonment, which is a "messy" space that is always lived and experienced in particular ways, from its inanimate architectural infrastructure (i.e., beds). Beyond the potential ethical and empirical challenges raised by the production of such an abstract space, bedspace signals the discursive and material convergence of state punishment with capital flows that build and often move beyond prison boundaries while obscuring violent geographies.
We investigate the economic geographies of streets named for Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK Streets), which are an increasingly common means by which various community members across the United States are attempting to commemorate the slain civil rights leader. It is our intent to characterize these negatively "branded" spaces in order to challenge some of the common perceptions about them and inform current and future MLK Street naming debates. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.
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