Between crime and colony: interrogating (im)mobilities aboard the convict ship

Abstract

Recent literature in carceral geography has attended to the importance of mobilities in interrogating the experience and control of spaces of imprisonment, detention and confinement. Scholars have explored the paradoxical nature of incarcerated experience as individuals oscillate between moments of fixity and motion as they are transported to/from carceral environments. This paper draws upon the convict ship-an example yet to gain attention within these emerging discussions-which is both an exemplar of this paradox and a lens through which to complicate understandings of carceral (im)mobilities. The ship is a space of macro-movement from point A to B, whilst simultaneously a site of apparent confinement for those aboard who are unable to move beyond its physical parameters. Yet, we contend that all manner of mobilities permeate the internal space of the ship. Accordingly, we challenge the binary thinking that separates moments of fixity from motion and explore the constituent parts that shape movement. In paying attention to movements in motion on the 2 ship, we argue that studies of carceral mobility must attend to both methods of moving in the space between points A and B; as micro, embodied and intimate (im)mobilities are also played out within large-scale regimes of movement.

Rethinking mobility in criminology: Beyond horizontal mobilities of prisoner transportation

“…However unsuccessful, such movements reproduced the status of the convict as lower and inferior, but also produced the subject as having some limited power in the face of the authorities. As we have noted elsewhere (Peters and Turner, 2015), convict bodies are not simply passive in relation to dominant, confining power -mobilities are enacted that challenge and reform, or simply make known those regimes of power that discipline, order and control.…”

“…Carceral mobility involves the coerced, disciplined and also emancipatory, minute, temporal, partial and laborious motions that are part and parcel of what it is to be incarcerated (see Peters and Turner, 2015).…”

“…Mobility was a constant in the embodied lives of those incarcerated. Far from being static within the confines of prison space, prisoners -on a micro, intimate scale -still moved; be it disciplined, coerced or otherwise (see Moran et al, 2012;Peters and Turner, 2015;Pickering 2014). Notably though, they moved within the volumes of space available, and it was through this volume that power was exercised (see Weizman, 2003).…”

“…3 undulation of the ship at sea (the waves, currents, wind and so on) (see Peters and Turner, 2015). Therefore, the convict ship demonstrates how prisoners moved in varied ways, not only through regimes of mass mobility facilitated by technologies of transportation.…”

The orphanage as an institution of coercive mobility

“…While spaces of detention and imprisonment have traditionally been conceptualised as environments of fixity and stability (Turner and Peters, 2016), carceral geographers have increasingly begun to consider the scalar mobilities involved in incarceration (see Gill, 2009;Moran et al, 2012Moran et al, , 2013Peters and Turner, 2015;Stoller, 2003;Turner and Peters, 2016), and that movement can indeed be a form of control (Foucault, 1991). As Moran (2015) notes the focus of the early empirical work in geography examined mobility in terms of access to or exclusion from it, and that such an approach presents mobility as an ontological object, rather than a characteristic.…”