Abstract
This timely volume considers space, agency and mobility in the context of incarceration. Contributors provide insights into the politics and lived experiences by addressing a wide range of issues and countries, approaching incarceration from multiple angles. The chapters, which are grouped around the themes of mobility, and space and agency, examine a range of topics common to different forms of carceral space. Although its foundations are strongly within human geography, the book also speaks to anthropologists, sociologists, criminologists and migration scholars. Chapters cover topics as diverse as hunger-strikes, visual and poetic representation of prison life, census taking of prisoners, the ‘Americanization’ of Colombian prisons, and the production of privacy in French and Russian prisons.
Despite the challenges of conducting ethnographic research in carceral spaces, several chapters provide detailed new qualitative data. This includes material from people with first-hand experience of incarceration, from inmates and detainees, to visitors and staff. This is combined with rich theoretical discussion. Many of the authors draw from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, including their work on governmentality, biopolitics, sovereign power and the ‘state of exception’. Erving Goffman’s work on ‘total institutions’ is also employed – albeit cautiously – by multiple contributors. This includes an interesting piece by Julie de Dardel, who augments Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ 1 with Goffman’s theory of institutional ‘underlife’, 2 to explore inmates’ strategies of resistance.
Although there is a substantial body of existing work on space and prisons, this volume takes a novel approach on a number of fronts. Several binaries are disrupted, including those of the inside/outside and fixity/fluidity, with chapters on the mobilities of personnel, policies and material objects showing how even a space of incarceration is beset with movement. This includes chapters mapping the forced mobility of immigration detainees across the USA and female prisoners in Russia, as well as a fascinating piece on the circulation of toxic waste materials as a result of the use of prison labour in the recycling of electronics. Even more importantly, however, the volume challenges the distinction between prison and immigration detention, persuasively arguing for the need to bring together the study of these two increasingly intertwined forms of incarceration. Noting that immigration removal centres are prison-like in design and practice, that immigration detainees can be held in prisons, and that immigration and criminal justice are increasingly conflated, the editors suggest that an academic distinction is unsustainable and call on scholars to address the overlaps and blurred boundaries. It is this point in particular which makes the volume such a valuable contribution to the field.