Geographies of Detention and Imprisonment: Interrogating Spatial Practices of Confinement, Discipline, Law, and State Power

Abstract

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.

The production of bedspace: prison privatization and abstract space

“…The emerging subfield has grown considerably over the past decade (Bonds, 2006;Gilmore, 2007;Martin and Mitchelson, 2009;Turner, 2013). Carceral geographers might make three particularly noteworthy contributions to prison privatization debates, although they are generally absent from the prison privatization literature.…”

“…Most carceral-geographic work observes and analyzes the spatial interdependencies through which prisons are produced and sustained through a lens of geographic relationality, despite the prison's persistent appearance as the paradigmatic container-space (Martin and Mitchelson, 2009;Moran et al, 2013). That is to say that no prison -regardless of how high its walls -is spatially autonomous from its geographic setting.…”

Expanding carceral geographies: challenging mass incarceration and creating a "community orientation" towards juvenile delinquency

“…Often drawing on Goffman's (1961) concept of the prison as a "totalizing space", prison and detention are seen as inaccessible worlds, especially for researchers and places that exist outside the boundaries of everyday life (Martin and Mitchelson, 2009;Belcher and Martin, 2013). Carceral power is often used interchangeably with incarceration complexes, such as prison, immigrant detention, and other forms of confinement (e.g., Dirsuweit, 1999;Wacquant, 2000).…”

“…Carceral geographers have done much to improve our knowledge about how the incarceration experience shapes modern geographies. Geographers of rural prison buildings, immigrant detention, and the austere spaces of imprisonment have noted the ways that issues of race and class permeate incarceration expansion and resistance (Bonds, 2009;Gilmore, 2007;Martin and Mitchelson, 2009). Geographers concerned with the imprisonment experience have shown how movement, familial social relations, and peer relationships, to name a few, are impacted by imprisonment (Dolovich, 2012;Moran et al, 2012;Turner, 2013).…”

Criminals with ‘Community Spirit’: Practising Citizenship in the Hidden World of the Prison

“…Contemporary research has highlighted that there is in fact a whole range of connections, transactions and exchange that contradict perceptions of a boundary between a 'hidden' inside and the world outside (Baer and Ravneberg, 2008, Gilmore, 2007, Loyd et al, 2009, Martin and Mitchelson, 2009, Pallot, 2005, Vergara, 1995, Wacquant, 2009, 2001. In this paper, I consider one such area of in-betweeness, namely societal expectations of modern citizenship (in general) and the mechanisms via which penal authorities negotiate a particular rendering of these as they seek to create/recreate/reform 'ideal' citizens who have been subject to a penal system of punishment and rehabilitation.…”