Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

Abstract

<jats:p> New technologies for recording, reproducing, and disseminating sound are increasingly accessible and provide important opportunities for listening to accounts of confinement. Through a politics and practice of ‘earwitnessing detention’, this article explores experiential patterns and distinctions between immigration detention and imprisonment. By ‘tuning in’ to radio and podcasting emerging from and through carceral spaces, we argue that both detained asylum seekers and Aboriginal prisoners in Australia narrate an experience of ‘indefinite stuckness’. Indefinite stuckness is an existential condition within a carceral continuum that is both spatial and temporal, and characterised by massive racial inequalities. For detained asylum seekers, indefinite stuckness manifests in the absence of a set release date, whereas for Aboriginal prisoners, it is a cycle of criminalisation and re-incarceration in the colony. This important distinction shapes how detention is represented: as torturous and abusive, or as an opportunity for respite from the ‘chaos’ outside. Linking these sometimes-divergent accounts of confinement are themes of friendship and community as forms of survival and resistance to the abjection that frequently accompanies indefinite stuckness. </jats:p>

Dignity, Social Reintegration of Prisoners, and the New Penal Power: European Human Rights, Experiences of Belgian Prisoners, and Professional Practices

“…In the interviews, the women explained their predicament as feeling "stuck" in prison without any perspective for reintegration, causing severe psychological and emotional distress. These experiences resonate with the notion of "stuckness" (Jefferson et al, 2019;Russel & Rae, 2019), described as the experience of being stuck in time and space as a result of the absence of hope or a future perspective, which can result in severe (existential) suffering and even in giving up on life.…”

Sensing the border(s): Sound and carceral intimacies in and beyond indefinite detention

“…Much like its predecessor, where are you today conveys the mundane nature of carceral violence. The waiting, unpredictability and abandonment involved in indefinite detention shows how time itself becomes a form of torture (Dao and Boochani, 2020; Russell and Rae, 2020). The ‘negative geographies’ (MacFarlane, 2020) of sound in this recording – defined more by what cannot be heard that what can – give us a sense of asylum seekers’ powerlessness to determine their surroundings and the rhythm of their day-to-day lives.…”

“…It also advances understandings of prison soundscapes (Hemsworth, 2016; Rice, 2016) and the emerging field of ‘sensory criminology’ (Brown and Carrabine, 2019; Herrity et al 2021; Russell and Carlton, 2020), developing a reflexive, situated and intimate methodological approach to sonic portraits of carceral worlds. Through a form of ‘sensory ethnography’ (Pink, 2015; Russell et al, 2020), we explore how where are you today created a social and digital infrastructure sensitised to the everyday life-sustaining intimacies of lives ‘in limbo’ (Russell and Rae, 2020). Simultaneously, it tasked listeners with reflecting on our (relatively and differently) privileged mobilities in shared times and places.…”

‘It’s a Gendered Issue, 100 Per Cent’: How Tough Bail Laws Entrench Gender and Racial Inequality and Social Disadvantage

“…Here, the resignation to remand is not an indication of the prison's desirability but women's marked lack of safety and security in the community. In this context, prison can sometimes appear as 'respite' from the chaos borne of the constellating hardships outlined above (Russell and Rae 2020;Schneider 2021). This should not be taken to valorise or legitimise imprisonment for homeless women or victim-survivors (Russell and Gledhill 2012).…”