Visual criminology and carceral studies: Counter-images in the carceral age

Carceral studies

Alongside the cultural and visual turn, there has been an abrupt move to the carceral in criminology and other disciplines. This broader conceptual framework allows for a number of things. First, it addresses the ways in which some human experiences and social practices that involve systems of confinement differ from those that a sociology of punishment can or perhaps should address. While there are important points of connection and overlap between the two, the turn to carceral studies reframes the foundations of criminology, including definitions of punishment, the role of criminalization in global processes, and the degree to which harm and suffering underpin claims to rights, citizenship, and recognition. The empirical record of confinement extends beyond what many sociologists might conceive of as punishment. Certain kinds of prison-like conditions and carceral subjects exceed the forms, routine practices, cultural meanings, and formal institutions of penality (Garland, 1990). Few sociologists, for instance, have identified refugee populations dislocated by environmental disaster and political conflict as penal subjects (although refugee camps are commonly referred to by their inhabitants and in public discourse as ‘open-air prisons’); rather, humanitarian discourses have predominated, defining refugees as victims, even as humans are stripped of political identity, categorized as stateless, and placed in camps. Such contexts point to the manner in which the carceral subject complicates and exceeds categories of criminality, penality, and victimhood.

Second, carceral studies for many interdisciplinary scholars is bound up with mapping more carefully the many configurations of confinement across neoliberal landscapes by looking for their root causes at the intersections of capitalism and shifting state formations amid globalization. In fact, mapping has been foundational in laying the groundwork for a critical carceral scholarship and carceral geographers have played significant roles in defining the carceral itself (Loyd et al., 2012; Moran et al., 2013). In their edited volume, Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, Dominique Moran, Nick Gill, and Deirdre Conlon (2013: 240) define carceral space as ‘the forms of confinement that burst internment structures and deliver carceral effects without physical immobilization, such as electronic monitoring, surveillance and securitized public spaces’. Their work as well as that of Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (2012) in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis demonstrates the important carceral linkages across geographic space, cultural ideologies, and political economies, all of which link systems of confinement to the dark side of global mobility. Both volumes highlight the ways in which struggles against imprisonment are struggles against all forms of social division, hierarchy, and injustice. In keeping with a growing literature on carceral formations, they point to the toxic effects of neoliberalism upon major social institutions, including families, education, healthcare, law, and economies, which become sites for generating fundamental exclusions. Individuals caught at the crux of myriad social forces are moved into frameworks of expulsion and confinement, resulting in practices of urban banishment, school to prison pipelines, and the criminalization of the poor, the mentally ill, and the most socially vulnerable (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Meiners, 2007; Richie, 2012; Rios, 2011; Wacquant, 2007). The state becomes ‘carceral’ as the powers to police and punish drive the boundaries and borders of everyday life.

Carceral scholars find this nexus to be a key site from which to theorize and critique state power and, more significantly, state violence. The scope and scale of the carceral enterprise on the world scale is captured by political theorist Wendy Brown (2010: 7) when she writes in her volume Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, ‘What we have come to call a globalized world harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription.’ Embedded in the walling of the world, she argues, is a ‘visual paradox’ where against diminished state sovereignty, ‘the new walls iterate … a vanishing political imaginary in a global interregnum, a time after the era of state sovereignty, but before the articulation or instantiation of an alternate global order’ (2010: 39). Such volatile, transitional moments reveal the violence of the state and provoke critical questions about its role in achieving justice. For many, the very foundations of justice and the role of the state in its formulation bring questions of citizenship, recognition, and social exclusion to the fore (Aas, 2007; Aas and Bosworth, 2013). What constitutes the very terms of recognizability is, in many ways, on the table and up for debate on the world stage. As Judith Butler (2009: 6) argues, actors hoping to address these dilemmas must engage in ‘framing the frame’, which involves commanding ‘a highly reflexive overlay of the visual field’. Pointing to the way in which something important is always outside of the frame, marginal political actors push for recognition that promotes a break with a taken-for-granted social reality, revealing alternative ways to conceptualize the problems we face. Philosopher Nancy Fraser (2009) complements this perspective by arguing that such historical events allow an unusual political space to materialize, one in which a plurality of competing frames for justice present us with the daunting but incredible opportunity to reframe discussions of justice altogether.

The social problems that undergird competing claims for justice are central to the penal predicaments of carceral regimes. Anti-prison scholars argue that ‘the analytic ability to see how seemingly disconnected institutions of state violence are interconnected and how they produce and police social difference’ (Loyd et al., 2012: 3) is central to an understanding of the slow death that maps the effect of carceral regimes upon individuals, families, and communities (Gilmore, 2007; Guenther, 2013; Kim, 2009; Richie, 2012; Rodriguez, 2006; Smith, 2009; Smith et al., 2006). This undertaking is apparent in counter-images of carcerality where representations are combined in a manner that productively challenges our understandings of penal institutions, penal subjectivities, and their relationship to the state. As representations directed toward the pursuit of an alternative justice, counter-images are evidence of how actors struggle to find innovative and effective ways in which to communicate and build alternative discourses to punishment. In order to contextualize these images differently, they depict carceral subjects in their many forms as something other or more than perpetrators and victims. For instance, they show people as having a history of belonging, now caught in life and death distinctions of law and citizenship, often in a direct relationship with state violence. As Ariella Azoulay (2011: 678) writes, these bare life, ‘non-state’ actors must be ‘tied to the regime that expelled [them] in order to learn about the nature of the regime’.

Political theorists, such as Arendt and Foucault, argue that the work of the state is to mask and efface these struggles for representation and the historical labor of what it means to be political by creating subjects emptied of political agency and belonging. Powerful ideological forces structure how we see and understand punishment including, as criminologist Judah Schept (2013: 73) argues, ‘the important roles that individual actors and communities play in adopting, reformulating and rearticulating carcerality to fit specific political-cultural contexts’, a hegemonic disposition or ‘habitus’ as he defines it that is so prevalent as to ‘imbue even oppositional politics’. Conventional carceral images such as the figures of bodies in aggregate masses, including prison tiers, tent camps and seas of dislocated humans, or individualized photos of mug shots and chained actors in orange jumpsuits framed for punitive consumption, without context, have the effect of creating ‘speechless emissaries’ and ‘abject carceral subjects’ who are effectively depoliticized (Linnemann and Wall, 2013; Malkki, 1996). Efforts to counter these images often nonetheless must take the form of both (individualized) portraiture and the (aggregate) collective, caught inevitably in the frames of sentimentalized, romanticized, and aestheticized spectacle. The counter-visual is fundamentally a tricky performance. Within these partial and unpredictable visual fields, actors push to find ways in which to steer ideological projections of carceral subjects toward a more multi-faceted understanding of incarceration. One way in which to visualize otherwise, they argue, is to see the broad swathe of emergent carceral and ‘nonstate’ actors in roles that challenge state, criminal, and humanitarian discourses—as they riot, resist, and employ violence for political purposes; engage in hunger strikes, lip-sewing, and self-mutilation; make visible kinships, friendships, and collective organizing; and perform thousands of other small ordinary acts of invisible and unrecorded resistance that foreground their own disappearance and slow death at the hands of the state. Visual criminologists have much to learn from these efforts as they seek out strategies to disrupt the ocular logics that would naturalize the carceral spaces of global neoliberalism and the disappearance of its subjects.

Visual criminology

A visual criminology intersects with carceral studies in a number of ways. As Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) argues, visual culture has been legitimized as a critical project in part because it has been linked so strongly to questions of trauma and state violence (see also Azoulay, 2008, 2011; Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013; Gronstad and Gustafsson, 2012; Guerin and Hallas, 2007; Linfield, 2010; Sontag, 2003). In the course of examining the visual through a criminological lens, one encounters a large body of cultural, media, and visual studies that take political violence and spectacles of social suffering as their focus—terrain that criminology has often omitted by defining it rather narrowly as not crime-related. From Auschwitz to Darfur, Abu Ghraib to New Orleans post-Katrina, questions about the criminalization of the vulnerable, the accountability of states, and the radical heterogeneity of justice claims continue to mount. As Eamonn Carrabine (2012: 486) argues, ‘a critically engaged visual criminology’ builds from these disparate scenes:

The cultural turn in criminology has meant a greater attentiveness to issues of representation and the issues posed are not just restricted to images that evidence criminal acts, but also figure in any act of representation that transforms traumatic experience into visual art. By describing the quite different and difficult subjectivities (between photographer, criminal, victim, spectator, torturer, and artist) that any work of representation involves, the most persistent ethical question encountered is: ‘What right have I to represent you’ (Levi Strauss 2003: 8)? In doing so, the relationship between photographer, suffering subject and the very act of looking are put at the centre of debate.

Taking up Carrabine’s (2012: 463; Brown and Rafter, 2013) declaration that there has been a ‘remarkable visual turn in criminology’ of late allows not only for an examination of a set of ‘distinctive ethical questions posed by visual representations of harm, suffering and violence’ but also a much broader configuration of criminology’s mandate. A visual criminology is a ‘visually attuned criminology’ and this includes attention to the problems of theory, methods, ethical engagement, political reform, and social responsibilities that come with the production, representation, and analysis of images (Harper, 2012; Pink, 2007; Rose, 2011; Young et al., 2008). A visual criminology is equally vast in scale and includes the proliferation of virtual assemblages of ‘written texts, still photos, video excerpts, maps, graphs and tables, and interviews, all interconnected with the live links that allow a viewer a nearly limitless number of paths through large bundles of information’ (Harper, 2012: 142). In the realm of new media, images collide and converge across complex media platforms and interfaces. Photodocumentary, for instance, is now a practice whose product—the still photo—circulates across numerous global circuits of distribution, viewing, downloading, and appropriation—trending, peaking, going viral. For scholars and activists, new possibilities open up in their own work with regard to this amazing visual scene. Many of us now strive to overcome what sociologist Douglas Harper (2012) calls the visual/non-visual divide in research by understanding and creating more and better visual forms of empirical and theoretical information, as do activists, lobbyists, government officials, and news media. Images, like politics and theory, are the space for learning how to imagine and persuade otherwise, beyond our current placements, and this practice includes alternative visions of carceral landscapes and subjects.

If provocation is the grounds for praxis, unpredictability in interpretation is to a certain extent the political power of a visual criminology. In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield (2010: 30) argues that it is precisely because photos are so open-ended—‘such utter failures at providing answers to the tangled politics’ of cruelty—

that they are so valuable: by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us to feel things we don’t quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little deeper …. Instead of approaching these images as static objects that we either naively accept or scornfully reject, we might see them as part of a process—the beginning of a dialogue, the start of an investigation—into which we thoughtfully, consciously enter.

Linked to sentiment, affect, and emotion, images seek to garner public attention and they often do this by moving us, making us feel astonishment, revulsion, outrage, admiration, confusion, denial, connection, commitment. Linfield (2010: 30–31) points to the importance of acknowledging the incorporation of ‘emotion into the experience of looking’ as a way for viewers to ‘allow the suffering of the world to enter into them instead of despising it as abjection’. Conveyors of complex emotional fields, images are important political arbiters in social movements because, as sociologist Iain Wilkinson (2005: 272) writes, social transformation requires ‘not only a radical revision of common cultural categories, but also a radical reconfiguration of moral feeling’.

With images recognized as key sites for the production and incitement of critical thinking and feeling about human suffering and social justice, there has been a growing emphasis upon the ethical encounter in the study of visual culture. Media scholars Lilie Chouliaraki and Bolette Blaagaard (2013: 254) argue,

The ethics of images refers firstly, to the social relations of power and the forms of moral-political action that the visual representations of such vulnerability call on us to perform and, secondly, to the truth claims and modes of identification with those who suffer—what, that is, these visuals tell us about ourselves as moral actors and how they invite us to engage with them.

Nicholas Mirzoeff insists that the right to look, as a right to the real, is the right to existence—that looking and recognition are central to human rights. The visualization of ‘goals, strategies, and imagined forms of singularity and collectivity’, he writes, is ‘by no means a simple or mimetic depiction of lived experience but one that depicts existing realities and counters them with a different realism’ (2011: 485). Visualizing is a way to politicize those who have been marginalized to the point of depoliticization. Critical of accounts that have argued the bleaker, more corrosive impacts of images upon public life, including saturation, fatigue, and desensitization (Barthes, 2000; Sontag, 1979), these scholars insist that visual or photographic acts may be of political necessity. Regardless of its uncertain outcomes, including voyeuristic spectacle, egregious appropriations, and silent apathy, the act of representation remains a vital form of social engagement. In keeping with this line of argument, Ariella Azoulay (2008: 24, emphasis in original) argues that the widespread use of cameras across the planet (the age of ‘civil contract photography’, as she names it) signals:

more than a mass of images; it has created a new form of encounter, an encounter between people who take, watch, and show other people’s photographs, with or without their consent, thus opening new possibilities of political action and forming new conditions for its visibility …. The users of photography thus reemerge as people who are not totally identified with the power that governs them and who have new means to look at and show its deeds, as well, and eventually to address this power and negotiate with it—citizen and noncitizen alike.

Misrecognition (of citizens and images) becomes a strategy that may be used to force a conversation, an issue, a look. This allows us, as Linfield (2010: 60) writes, to transform ‘our relationship to photographs from one of passivity and complaint to one of creativity and collaboration’.

While acknowledging that ‘photography’s strength comes from the visceral, emotional responses it evokes’, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer Jeff Schonberg (2009) add an element of precarity in their photo-ethnography of homeless drug users, Righteous Dopefiend. They write, ‘Interpretation, judgment, and imagination move to the eyes of the beholder. The personality, cultural values, and ideologies of the viewer, as well as the context in which the images are presented, all shape the meaning of pictures’ (2009: 14). This means that ‘(t)he multitude of meanings in a photograph makes it risky, arguably even irresponsible, to trust raw images of marginalization, suffering, and addiction to an often judgmental public’ (2009: 14). Some images are more susceptible to ideological projections—images of social suffering, cultural pariahs, socially taboo behaviors (drugs, sex, crime, violence) that always occur along emotionally charged lines of race, class, gender, and other vectors of marginality. These scholars point to the way that, as a critical project, a visual criminology might ‘involve us in many of the ethical anxieties and methodological frustrations’ that inform such work (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009: 14). They recognize that visual performance is necessarily laden with tensions and risks that, when foregrounded,

make possible forms of social disclosure that would otherwise remain hidden from view. Indeed, they often credit the most morally difficult, emotionally charged and semantically unstable passages of their work as being most capable of raising the human-social situation up for political recognition and critical debate.

Precariousness, when brought into view and contextualized, becomes the ground for the political and ‘the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense’ (Butler, 2009: 32). In that process, by creating explicit connections and contexts for understanding the link between social vulnerability and carceral formations, we create an opportunity to see and thereby challenge state violence. We regard ‘the violators of human rights—not the photographers who document their victims—as the real “agents of death”’ (Linfield, 2010: 60). By sheltering agonistic and ongoing antagonisms as the substance of a radical democratic politics, we may need to debate the terms of recognition endlessly. But it is no small thing to bring the debate into the frame of public discourse.

Counter-images and the anti-prison movement

While the ‘politics of abolition’ has had a historical and recently renewed place in European (Christie, 1981; Mathiesen, 1974; Ruggiero, 2010) and Canadian sociology (Piché and Larsen, 2010), it has been less prominent as a lens in US criminology with much of the scholarship on abolition situated in history, geography, and the humanities. ² An emergent and expanding US anti-prison movement has directly taken on the issues of disappearance and visibility central to mass incarceration. In a genealogy that stretches from Angela Davis (2003) to Michelle Alexander (2012), this movement is grounded in the efforts of women of color who argue against all forms of oppression by way of an intersectional analysis of violence. Anti-prison activists have framed their efforts through critiques of patriarchal, capitalist, racist, and heteronormative ideologies and their role in the production of poverty, intimate violence, police brutality, immigrant detention, and war (Davis, 2003; Meiners, 2007; Smith et al., 2006; Sudbury, 2005). The first Critical Resistance conference held in Berkeley, California in 1998 culminated in a national organization whose efforts have been central to the US anti-prison movement. Largely organized by women, the event reflected the aims of a broad abolitionist movement that would take seriously dismantling the prison-industrial complex (Smith et al., 2006). In doing so, organizers argued that mass incarceration is the root problem through which other social problems become visible and the roots of the prison are firmly entrenched in the foundations of criminal justice: policing, arrest, prosecution, and sentencing that disproportionately targeted poor communities and communities of color (Schept, 2012). Many of these activists were scholars from Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, and other area studies programs and these came to be the intellectual homes for transformative justice movements in the United States—not criminology.

A growing collective with regional and national initiatives, the anti-prison movement is now made up of myriad grassroots organizations, activist collectives, prisoner associations, think tanks, lobby groups, artists, and scholars (Loyd et al., 2012). Far-reaching in the political scope of their message, anti-prison activists differ from reformists in that rather than arguing for more humane or effective changes in the prison system, they ‘view prisons and jails as a form of racialised state violence that must be dismantled as part of a wider social justice agenda’ (Sudbury, 2013). Posing a radical critique, abolitionists argue that to confront mass incarceration, activists must address the conditions that drive violence of all kinds, including state violence. Many self-identify as part of an anti-violence movement that must take into account forms of state violence implicated in the criminalization of poor and racialized communities and the role of the criminal justice system (in particular, police and prisons) in exacerbating crime and community conditions (Richie, 2012; Smith et al., 2006). Rather than relying solely on critiques of state power, organizers, as Schept (2012: 44) argues, have had to create coherent alternative critiques of localized visions of carcerality, disrupting ‘liberal discourses of incarceration’ by pointing insistently to the ways in which only decarceration could provide ‘long term, sustainable solutions to the problems’ that underlie mass imprisonment. Such efforts mean that a repository of visual materials is readily available for those who seek to challenge prisons through radical critiques of the state, racism, capitalism, and an amalgam of related social justice issues. It also makes this movement an important source for efforts at generating new meanings about and against imprisonment.

Concentrating on the totality of social justice issues, the decarceration movement culminates in a political frame that merges student, immigrant, HIV/AIDS, health care, and queer and transgender movements as well as calls for labor, economic, racial, and radical justice. Anti-prison activists have faced a number of compelling challenges as they seek to identify the work that visual technologies can do in and against prisons that does not reaffirm the hegemony of state discourses of mass incarceration. Such work begins with reconfiguring the tired and historically objectifying stock conventional uses of the quintessential carceral image: the racialized body displayed in confinement. Furthermore, prisons as prohibited zones for photography and visuality systematically remove other ways of making incarcerated people and the force of the state visible. As Ruby Tapia (2008: 687) writes, ‘the structural, geographic, and institutional properties of the prison elude visualization in material ways. Because the prison and its populations are largely invisible, because they are made to exist only in the jettisoned reaches of our society’s landscapes, the possibilities of knowing them through seeing are foreclosed’ and our ‘theories of images and visualities’ must address the catch-22 of the spectacle of disappearance and the human-in-a-cage as the sole modes of visibility. Out of these dilemmas, a space of political urgency for making sure that the incarcerated are visible as disappeared subjects has materialized among activists.

Facing a politically charged economic crisis in the USA, activists have located an important window through which to align decarceration objectives with state budget reform, environmental concerns, immigration debates, and other politically salient issues that might generate both powerful alliances and new frames for moving away from incarceration in the minds of voters and citizens. These strategies have taken a variety of forms. Simply ‘showing up’ and being present at direct action events near prisons, statehouses, and community forums have rendered a new kind of visibility to these acts. Careful to document their presence with photos and media alerts, organizers translate these efforts into flyers, outreach materials, toolkits, legislative packets, newsletters, infographics, photos, and videos while relying upon a repertoire of social media (email, Facebook, twitterverse, the blogosphere, organization websites, youtube, and alternative media outlets) to enlarge their sphere of impact. Employing multimedia platforms, the images these groups produce are often shared and redistributed, moving quickly from one organization’s web presence and outreach materials to the next. As one example, community members gathered on Earth Day to oppose plans for a new jail in an area of San Mateo, California designated by the county as too polluted for residential use. In the photo in Figure 1, environmental justice discourses merge with anti-prison activism in a message of toxicity and death for both the environment and social life, visualized with gas masks and skull and crossbones. This photo trended in the event’s immediate aftermath across a number of news agencies, activist sites, and social media outlets.

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Figure 1.

‘Jails are toxic.’

This attention to innovative meaning-making is grounded in many of the commitments and experiences of the actors who participate in decarceration efforts. Most come from directly affected communities where actors have become explicitly involved in community organizing because of their personal experiences and connections with mass incarceration. These are communities where actors recognize that ‘“perpetrators” and “victims” coexist in a social context devastated by a combination of social exclusion, poverty, racism, addiction, and government neglect’ because they have lived in and around it (Sudbury, 2013). Julia Sudbury (2013) argues that this experience ‘shifts our focus from the commonsense assumption that policing and prisons create security, to the possibility of creating safety by redirecting resources to provide for the basic human rights of all community members’. Decarceration strategies center upon redefining ‘safety’ by giving attention to the effects of imprisonment upon families, economies, education, environment, and community. As Schept (2012: 55) writes of one successful decarceration effort, Decarcerate Lincoln County (DLC), ‘In forcing the community, including politicians, to reflect on what brought about individual and community safety, DLC successfully disrupted a rather narrow linear narrative that connected safety to a robust, if benevolent, criminal justice.’ Furthermore, mapping prisons onto economic crisis and rendering them a force of violence and economic drain in and of themselves allows hard-hit communities to speak directly to efforts to rebuild otherwise. The movement has been successful in pointing to the closing of prisons as an important step in addressing root causes of economic and other community issues (see Gilmore, 2007). As Dan Berger (2013: 9), Founder of Decarcerate PA, writes, ‘An anti-prison movement is not solely for the 2.3 million human beings locked away but is centered even more in what it takes to build safer, healthier, and ultimately flourishing communities.’ As the signs at direct action events insist, ‘Build communities, not prisons.’

The images that derive from these efforts point to the centrality of social relationships in decarceration efforts. Community members and organizers point to direct relationships to the incarcerated as a means to visualize the long-term psychological, emotional, and criminogenic effects of mass incarceration upon individuals, families, and communities. Seeking to redefine the use of carceral images, many of these groups refuse to show images of humans behind bars. Rather, often at direct action events, signs will state very clearly the relationship that the individual shares with a prisoner: ‘My brother is a human being’; ‘My uncle is a human being’; ‘I am a mom’; ‘My son is not a paycheck.’ Focusing upon the power of affective bonds (of family and loved ones), such acts highlight the individual’s connection to the outside, a process of rehumanization that seeks to politicize the identity of a loved one beyond that of bare life: Prisoners are not just fathers, brothers, and sons. They are ‘our’ fathers, brothers, and sons and mothers, daughters, and sisters. Californians for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a statewide alliance of organizations that makes a case for fiscal reform by decreasing prisoners and prisons across the state, used the photo in Figure 2 as the banner for their Facebook page. Language reminiscent of anti-Vietnam war discourse, ‘bring our loved ones home’, is used to campaign for prisoner rights by explicitly identifying severed social relationships at the heart of the collateral consequences of mass incarceration.

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Figure 2.

‘Bring our loved ones home.’

These strategies make visible the tensions that underlie mass incarceration, including the relationships that would otherwise remain hidden from view, through a politics of affect that draws attention to the character of mass incarceration less as a ‘civil war in miniature’ (Garland, 1990: 292) but rather as a project of state impunity centered upon disappearance. ³

Like anti-slavery and civil rights campaigns before them, the visual strategies invoked by organizers must anticipate the ways in which their messages are likely to be interpreted, acknowledge the lack of control over the interpretation of the image, and steadily produce more counter-images that seek to reframe neoliberal discourses of punishment. Contemporary art practices are interwoven with a politics of protest in an effort to create a space for dialogue and debate about the social problems at the heart of carceral regimes. In bringing together a nexus of social problems and forces, activists employ images to call into question the frames of justice. Their messages insist upon a public forum for thinking through the following: the failure of criminal justice and the consequent crisis for many communities that the war on drugs has created; the practices of dehumanization that are central to mass incarceration, capital punishment, and solitary confinement; and how citizenship is constructed and for whom, exposing the ways in which racialized, gendered, and class-based images of the other as criminal are used to justify unequal relations and longstanding structures of white power. These tactics of intervention ultimately take on a pedagogical intent. Employing teach-in posters and toolkits, their protest is linked to forums, exhibitions, classrooms, new media, and direct action. Through an ongoing visual politics, like other social movements, they strive to envision alternative spaces.

Joined with these efforts is an immense archive of photojournalism, art, and visual data that critique mass incarceration and carceral regimes. Freelance writer and blogger Pete Brook’s Prison Photography website (http://prisonphotography.org/) provides a daunting archive of carceral images culled from various news sources, research sites, and photo exhibitions. Brook writes of his intervention,

I believe the United States needs to pursue large-scale prison and sentencing reform …. If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking: How did it get there? What are/were the motives? What are the responses? What social and political powers are at play in a photograph’s manufacture? And, how is knowledge, related to those powers, constructed? (emphasis in original)

At his site one finds juxtaposed in close proximity: photos by children who are incarcerated; images of prisoner football, rec yards, visiting rooms, and tattoos; ‘no photos’ signs at Guantánamo; men, women, and children in solitary confinement; multiple projects that have produced portraits of men, women, and children in prison; images of walls and borders across the planet; tourist photography at Auschwitz; artistic representations of Abu Ghraib; cities laid to ruin in Syria and their inhabitants; and luminous night photos of state penitentiaries lighting up the American sky. Brook maintains a growing list of photographers of prisons, providing thoughtful commentary on their work and generating a larger narrative about the history and conventions of prison photography. With an eye for amateur, commercial, artistic, institutional, transnational, historical, stock, prisoner, and photojournalist representations, Brook lays out a compelling visual archive from which to further theorize carcerality.

At ‘Prison Culture’ (http://www.usprisonculture.com/), a blog dedicated to ‘How the PIC [Prison Industrial Complex] structures our world’, a section of the site is dedicated to the collection of data visualizations from across the web, including infographics and youtube depictions. A number of independent blogs and nonprofit websites have similar visual repositories, where critiques of mass incarceration, aging in prison, school to prison pipelines, the costs of incarceration, the drug war, and comparative world rates of imprisonment are on display. ⁴ Infographics, for example, like direct action protest signs, work to open up discursive foreclosures in carceral regimes. A single image, like the one in Figure 3, can pose the irrational social costs of imprisonment alongside the divestment of public goods like education. The image literally asks us to imagine a brown body both as a student and a prisoner, split down the middle, foregrounding the decisions we make when we choose to imprison our children.

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Figure 3.

Educate/Incarcerate.

Recently, sociologists Sarah Shannon and Chris Uggen have pursued a similar project, titled ‘Visualizing Punishment’ (http://thesocietypages.org/papers/visualizing-punishment/). On their site, they argue that the scale and cost of mass incarceration is simply too staggering for most to grasp and that data visualizations allow us to move from ‘“boring” statistics to eye-catching and intuitive images’. In their work, they seek ‘to visualize the story of mass incarceration, illustrating shifts in punishment over time, space, and the populations most affected by its rise’ through the use of interactive maps, graphs, and tables that condense large amounts of data from various official sources. Josh Begley’s Prison Map (http://prisonmap.com) follows this kind of topographic visualization. On his website, he asks ‘What does the geography of incarceration in the United States look like?’ Archiving Google Earth photos of over 5000 jails and prisons in the United States, Begley states, ‘A lot of times we’ll just use numbers to talk about this idea of mass incarceration and I thought that there maybe was something powerful about using no numbers, no words and just having the images’ (Badger, 2012). The satellite images of prison facilities scroll on and on at his website, depicting a relentlessly repetitive aesthetic symmetry of carcerality. This kind of work is reminiscent of the Million Dollar Blocks Project by the Spatial Information Design Lab and Justice Mapping Center (http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects.php?id=16). This project achieved public attention by showing incarceration migration flows for several major US cities. Shifting from ‘crime events’ to ‘incarceration events’, the designers mapped home addresses of the incarcerated which were then visualized as dense clusters across sections of the city, reflecting ‘the mass disappearance and reappearance of people in the city’ (Spatial Information Design Lab, 2006). Developers of the project describe the prison as a ‘distant exostructure’ of urban spaces sapped of infrastructure. While impressive efforts to document the sheer scale of mass incarceration and carceral regimes, these visualizations, like photodocumentary, are open, as always, to the judgment and interpretation of the viewer. In her critique of the Million Dollar Blocks project, filmmaker and cultural geographer Brett Story (2013) warns of the ways in which logics of criminalization that build upon neighborhood effects literatures resonate with carceral maps like that of the Million Dollar Blocks Project. Locating crime still in the individual and specific neighborhoods, they fail to foreground the role of the state, including its policies and laws, in carceral regimes that are unwilling to see or address the social conditions of harm and violence. Like raw images of social suffering, data visualizations too carry a set of methodological challenges and ethical anxieties. The precarity of visuality is foregrounded in all of these efforts, as we move, without certainty in the outcome of our efforts, toward making possible new forms of social disclosure and political recognition.

Another tactic in the creation of counter-images has focused upon the very notion of possibility itself through the imagining of the vista. Fernando Martí’s popular culturestrike poster, ‘This Too Shall Fall/También Caerá’, depicts a vibrantly colored quetzel against an orange sky flying past a razor wire wall lined with crosses in a white landscape (see Figure 4). In their volume, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (2012) chose a cover that depicts community activists painting the image of a door opening onto a beautiful desert vista on a border wall. English-based graffiti artist and activist Banksy has a number of murals on the barrier walls separating Israel and Palestine that incorporate this motif—a young girl holding balloons floating upward, a white ladder reaching to the sky, a dotted line with scissors creating an aperture, and a hole through which we see an island beach. With its associations of openings, freedom, and broadening horizons, the vista as a distant view through a narrow passage captures much of what it means to think and hope beyond the prison. As Schept (2012: 63–64) writes, ‘Perhaps most devastating to carceral expansion, resistance can take the form of re-imagining once-carceral space, disrupting incarceration’s inevitability and offering a counter-hegemonic cartography’, one where, in his ethnographic study, ‘the bricks and mortar’ of criminal justice are re-imagined by activists as ‘the rainwater catchment barrels, compost piles, and garden beds of a sustainable community landscape’.

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Figure 4.

‘This Too Shall Fall/También Caerá.’

Trevor Paglen’s art exhibition ‘Recording Carceral Landscapes’ functions somewhat differently, depicting the strangeness of prisons in natural landscapes by juxtaposing design images and prison blueprints against the background of rural and natural landscapes. In his exhibition, the outlines of the architectural drawings of Pelican Bay grow up out of the staggering beauty of the American Northwest, a jarring juxtaposition that raises questions as to how these became the spaces in which prisons were imagined and built. In a cover story of Paglen’s work, Bryan Finoki (2005) writes of the intersection of new media in these artist-activist creations:

With the evolution of GIS, GoogleMaps, and a phenomenon of web projects like Flickr, FoundCity, Geobloggers, and Sprol, there is a real movement now for people to define their own maps, their own boundaries and social proximities, their own landmarks, and to see and expose places which have managed to hide from public view due to a basic lack of accessibility.

Other visual maps work conceptually and historically. ‘Proliferation’ by Paul Rucker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySH-FgMljYo&feature=player_embedded) sets US prison expansion from 1778 to 2005 to music across a more than 10-minute video, as different colored dots, each representing a prison, materialize against the black backdrop of a US map. Evan Bissell’s ‘The Knotted Line’ (http://knottedline.com) is an open access online project dedicated to an alternative history of freedom and confinement in the United States. Designed to be a ‘tactile, interactive experience’, it encourages users to play with a historical timeline that marks 50 landmark episodes in the history of confinement, from conquest and slavery into the present. Seeking to open up new ways of understanding these carceral moments, the horizontal axis of the timeline is not subject to a simple scroll and view but requires clicking, stretching, and pulling the line in order to reveal the hidden histories beneath. The effort, Bissell argues, underlines the work of unpacking history. The vertical axis is dedicated to conceptual relations across history with an emphasis upon ‘reimagining and self-determination’. Along a third axis, people leave comments embedded in the timeline. Highly pedagogical, the knotted line is dedicated to the creation of a participatory and relational history that better interrogates the frameworks of confinement and freedom.

A final example, artist Ashley Hunt’s ‘A World Map: in which we see …’ (aworldmap.com), is one of the first concept maps to attempt to visualize the many ways in which global neoliberal forces generate carceral configurations and zones of exclusion. Drawing upon political theory to design the map (which includes quotes from Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Orlando Patterson, Karl Marx, and others), Hunt creates a space in which viewers explore the intersections of capital, labor, and empire in the emptying of infrastructure and the generation of flight, expulsion, confinement, and social death. For Hunt, who has a series of prison maps alongside his world map, conceptualizing visually is the practice ‘in which we see’ what we would not otherwise. He emphasizes in his work the juxtapositions, relations, and contextualizations that might disrupt the logics of mass incarceration, carceral regimes, and global zones of abandonment. Social death, for instance, is a convergence of statelessness and forms of community cut-off in the figures of the prisoner and the refugee (see Figure 5). His work is an ambitious effort to encompass the scope of carceral studies in visual terms.

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Figure 5.

‘A World Map: in which we see…’

Conclusion

In visual analysis, scholars now work through social and cultural imaginaries; visual hierarchies, economies, and ocular logics; trending images, conceptual maps and data visualizations; all in order to foreground the visual frames and optics by which we see … and do not see. Such an expansive and emergent vocabulary allows us to explore and articulate in a more nuanced manner the stakes of seeing and understanding our subject, ourselves, and our commitments in a plurality of ways. For criminologists and sociologists in the carceral era, it also allows us to confront what Valerie Hartouni (2012: loc 2647) calls an ‘optics of thoughtlessness’, a term that captures the ‘practices that enable individuals to ignore and mis-recognize (and thus participate in) the processes that produce superfluity rather than plurality as the norm and given of human life together’. In other words, a visual criminology is a space from which to cultivate the kind of moral judgment and ways of seeing that are most often institutionally erased in neoliberal discourses that drive law, politics, media, and prisons. Although we may see glimpses of global relays and networks of relation across mainstream and alternative news sites, there is still very little in the ways we collectively think the world that allow us to make the kinds of connections and linkages that decenter and dismantle social institutions like the prison. To do that requires us to understand the perpetual problem and possibility of misrecognition and the technologies and logics by which we see and fail to see. Myriad actors and groups are building the conceptual resources, archiving the historical traces, and exploring the virtual interrelationships that allow us to engage, as a part of everyday practice, in careful reflection on this issue of the frame itself, with the awareness that the image, its subjects, and its interpretation remain ultimately precarious. The critical projects that drive these practices point to the desire and wish for a radical justice of alterity and a politics of futurity, the kind of vision in which a critically engaged visual criminology might play a useful role.