Rethinking mobility in criminology: Beyond horizontal mobilities of prisoner transportation

Abstract

Typically, to be incarcerated is to be fixed: limited within specific parameters or boundaries with liberty and agency greatly reduced. Yet, recent literature has attended to the movement (or mobilities) that shape, or are shaped by modes of incarceration. Rather than simply assuming that experiences are inherently ones of immobility, such literature unhinges carceral studies from its framing within a sedentary ontology. However, the potential of mobility studies for unpacking the movements enfolded in carceral space and imprisoned life has yet to be fully exploited. When attending to mobilities, criminologists have investigated the politics of movement through a traditional horizontal frame of motion (between prison spaces, between court and prison, etc.). This paper contends that studies of mobility in criminology could be productively rethought. Drawing on movements of convicts from Britain to Australia aboard prison ships, this paper argues that straightforward, horizontal mobilities at work in regimes of control and practices of resistance marry together with vertical mobilities. Paying attention to the complex mobilities involved in carceral experience leads to a more nuanced understanding of regimes of discipline and practices of resistance that shape how incarcerated individuals move (or are unable to move) within carceral spaces, past and present.

Carceral circuitry

“…Although carceral spaces are often vertically extensive and voluminous (Turner and Peters, 2016), for example, we acknowledge that circuits may invite a rather flat understanding of carceral space. Circuits are also closed systems, whereas carceral systems are not only infusing social systems in the ways we have described, but are also becoming infused by them in countless ways (Baer and Ravneberg, 2008), from private acts of domestic and family life performed in carceral spaces (Comfort, 2002) have so rattled British government authorities.…”

Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity

“…As Sloterdijk () himself states, the world is formatted through our lively and dynamic engagements with the full extents of space which surround us spherically. On the other hand, the work of Sloterdijk is, at present, gaining currency as scholars seek to make sense of the multiple dimensions through which regimes of territory, governance and control are practiced, and resistances, transgressions and deviances are performed (see, for example, Turner and Peters ). In other words, a theory of spheres or of volume urges us to pay attention to the “fullness” of space in which politics emerges and functions.…”

“…The third enquiry is the relationship between forms of carceral spatiality and the punitive state. Together, these lines of investigation have alerted scholars within geography of the importance of carceral sites as very particular spaces for advancing geographical thinking around themes of place‐making and home‐making (Turner ); emotion and space (Crewe ); bordering (see Pickering ; Pickering and Weber ; Turner ); mobility (Conlon ; Gill ; Peters and Turner ; Turner and Peters ); time–space regimes (Moran , ); and the role of state power in defining practices of incarceration, and in the design of carceral spaces (Martin and Mitchelson ; Moran and Jewkes ; Moran et al. , ).…”

“…The paper therefore builds not only on scholarship concerned with power, territory and volume, but also that which is orientated towards understanding carceral life past and present (see Moran 2015;Turner 2016). Indeed, as we have argued elsewhere (Peters and Turner 2015;Turner and Peters 2017), carceral geographies can lend much to debates concerning the geopolitics of height and depth because in such spaces dominating power is not only projected horizontally but through aerial, panopticon surveillance and physical walls and barriers; and practices of resistance occur through escape plans that involve underground tunnelling and rooftop protests (Turner and Peters 2017).…”

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.…”