Video Links from Prison: Court “Appearance” within Carceral Space

I. Introduction

With the steady diffusion and assimilation of communication technologies into the criminal justice system, people in custody are increasingly appearing in court from spaces of incarceration, linked by video technologies and mediated by screens. Prisons, police stations, detention centers and mental health facilities in many jurisdictions are now networked with courtrooms, justice agencies and legal representatives. The associated legislative changes are effecting major conceptual shifts in how and where criminal justice is enacted and delivered. While much literature explores video links from the perspective of high-tech courtrooms, I examine video links as an emergent prison technology and one that ensures inmates’ physical exclusion from courtroom space. During video-linked court appearances, prisoners are immersed within the oppressive aesthetics of state detention, rather than in the more dignified space of a communal courtroom. In this article, I interrogate how video link technologies impact prisoners’ sensorial experiences of legal space and engagement with their own remote legal procedures. The arguments presented are grounded on fieldwork interviews and observations I undertook in 2012 with 31 prisoners in two New South Wales (NSW) correctional centers. Several scholars have identified the need for such research into prisoners’ experiences of video technologies. ¹ I argue that there is a need to explore the phenomenological experience of video links from carceral space and how that impacts on prisoners’ engagement with law.

I commence with an explanation of video link technology – what it is, the rationale for its implementation, and how it is used in various jurisdictions. I move to introduce my research methodology and the empirical fieldwork I undertook with NSW prisoners to understand their experience of using video links. In this context, phenomenology is introduced as a means to analyse prisoners’ distinct spatial and sensorial experiences of courtrooms versus prison video studios. I focus on the nature of carceral space as a site for the administration of justice and how it qualitatively differs from the more formal ambience of a courtroom. From the perspective of the prison video studio, video links are then critiqued as a manifestation of the sensory bias towards sight – a technology that facilitates the visible appearance of a prisoner and the download of verbal content, but one that militates against a prisoner’s sense of immersion in their own legal proceedings.

II. The Technology and its Rationale

Video conferencing technology allows two or more people in separate sites to see, hear and interact with one another in real time. ² Globally, the technology is referred to with differing terminologies including prison video link, telelaw, telejustice, technologically augmented courts, cyber courts, distributed courts and virtual courts systems. Video link technologies are being integrated into criminal courtrooms, police stations and prisons around Australia and the developed world. Several common law jurisdictions, including the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK), have video conferencing systems in criminal justice. ³ In 2012 I observed the UK Virtual Court system for preliminary hearings in operation at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court. With this system, a live link is established between police stations and the Virtual Court so that a defendant remains in police detention. I also observed the Prison to Court Video Links system in operation at London’s Snaresbrook Crown Court.

Digital technologies, screens and enticing visual displays are proliferating in legal procedure. ⁴ The drive for technology-augmented criminal process primarily focusses on issues of expediency and increased court throughput, economic rationalization, cost reduction and improved security. As an example, integral to the UK Ministry of Justice’s goal of “swift and sure justice” is the use of Virtual Courts and the Prison to Courts Video Links. These technologies are seen as a means to improve productivity, accessibility and speed, as well as increase convenience and security for vulnerable witnesses and victims of crime. ⁵ The technology is considered by many to be an efficient and economical replacement for face-to-face legal conferences between lawyers and their incarcerated clients, and as a means to minimize the expense and discomfort of the transportation of prisoners to and from courts. ⁶ Certainly, all the prisoners I interviewed identified the minimization of prison transport with the associated strip-searches and disruptions to prison life as a major benefit. However, Ward argues that the significant reforms to the UK’s criminal justice system are a function of neoliberal economic policies that seek efficiency streamlining, but perhaps threaten to strip justice back to its bare bones and compromise due process. ⁷

In Australia, NSW is at the forefront of video link usage and this is the jurisdiction where I conducted my fieldwork. Video links operate in “411 courts, correctional centres and other justice agency sites” for civil and criminal proceedings. ⁸ In NSW the technology is referred to as audio visual link (AVL) pursuant to s. 3(1) Evidence (Audio and Audio Visual Links) Act 1998 (New South Wales) (“the Act”). AVL is defined to mean “facilities (including closed-circuit television) that enable audio and visual communication between persons at different places.” Pursuant to s. 5C of the Act, any premises where video link is used for giving evidence or making submissions under the Act, is considered to be part of the NSW court that is sitting at a courtroom, thereby intimately linking the disparate space of a courtroom with the non-judicial site of prison. A displaceable presumption in favor of video link appearance now operates for most bail, committal, sentencing and appeal procedures, so that both adults and children appear by AVL, unless the court directs otherwise or the proceedings are “physical appearance proceedings.” “Physical appearance proceedings” are defined in s. 3(1) as any trial or hearing, any inquiry into a person’s fitness to stand trial, and certain bail proceedings. Accordingly, 57.4 percent of court appearances and 100 percent of all parole hearings were conducted by AVL in NSW. ⁹ As a consequence of this new technologized regime, correctional centers are being fitted with video studios that can be connected with remote courtrooms, lawyers, legal aid, and health services such as psychologists. The technology is also used for “family video contact” sessions, a program aimed particularly at Aboriginal prisoners to encourage maintenance of family bonds. The family video visits program is still quite small with 192 documented sessions in the most recent annual report. By comparison, 38,996 court and parole appearances were facilitated by video link. ¹⁰

III. Research Methodology and Phenomenological Framework

Following ethics clearance from The University of Sydney and Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW), I conducted interviews in 2012 with 31 prisoners in two NSW correctional facilities: Dillwynia and Mid North Coast Correction (MNCC) Centres. The semi-structured interviews were audio-taped and based on open-ended questions designed to provide spontaneous narrative responses from the prisoners. I broke the interview questions into five sections. After introducing myself and going through the Participant’s Information Statement and Informed Consent, I asked each prisoner about their personal background including their age, gender, languages, ethnicity and inmate status (remand or convicted). My sample population included 17 female and 14 male prisoners, with 18 being held on remand, and nine identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. The average age of the female prisoners was 35.5 years, and 31.5 years for the male prisoners. In the second part of the interview, I gathered data regarding the length of their incarceration/remand, the number of video link sessions they had experienced in prison, as well as their familiarity with communication technologies in the “outside” world. For example, questions included: “Have you ever used AVL before? If not, have you used similar technology (e.g. Skype) in the general community?” “Was the use of such technology entirely new to you?” To an extent, these factors shape the prisoners’ experiences of prison video link technology. Seven prisoners had only used video links once in prison, while one third had used it many times. Fourteen participants had used AVL most recently for court appearance; four prisoners had used it for bail; four for parole; four for legal conferencing; three for sentencing, and the remainder had used it for family law matters and psychological assessments. Perhaps not surprisingly, the 20–29 year age group expressed the greatest familiarity and confidence in using communication technologies.

The third part of the interviews focussed on preparations for the AVL session. This included logistical information, such as how they came to know about the AVL encounter, as well as their emotional responses leading up to the AVL. For example, I asked: “Did anyone explain the AVL process to you beforehand?” “Did you know who your solicitor was prior to the court matter being heard?” “How long have you had to wait today for your AVL session?” The fourth category of questions related to the practical and technical experience of AVL where I was keen to glean prisoners’ perceptions of the audio and visual qualities and how their communication and comprehension were positively or negatively impacted. For example, I asked: “Could you hear satisfactorily?” “Could you see satisfactorily?” “How was the eye contact?” “How did you know when you were ‘on’ and ‘off’?” “How was your presence acknowledged?” Finally, I asked the prisoners about their overall emotional experience of AVL, specifically requesting them to compare the AVL experience with being physically transported to court. I asked them how they felt about the level of privacy, how they felt about the distance between themselves and their lawyers and family members, and how they felt about “appearing” in court from prison wearing prison attire. Here I sought to gauge how respectful the prisoners felt the remote proceedings were, and whether they felt they were treated with human dignity. I also asked all prisoners for suggestions as to how the system could be improved and specifically asked those who identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander if they felt that their specific needs were met. In essence, my interview questions sought to reveal an understanding of prisoners’ multi-sensorial and embodied experiences of using video links from the space of prison to “appear” in court or to consult with their legal representatives.

On completion of the prison fieldwork, the interview data were thematically coded and analysed using NVivo qualitative research software. Coding in NVivo entailed creating “nodes” that allowed the data to be organized and collected into themes, ultimately enabling relationships, patterns, hierarchies and ideas to emerge from the data. Through this process, I came to identify core themes, particularly the spatial, corporeal and visual impacts of video links from prison. For the purposes of this article, I reference the prisoners’ accounts of AVL and the qualitative attributes of carceral space, focussing on the visual, auditory and temporal elements. The selected comments represent the most articulate responses from prisoners regarding these issues. I acknowledge that my empirical data emerge from prisoners’ constructed and mediated experiences of using video links within a certain discourse, being a penal regime. The data do not represent a pure or objective form of reality. ¹¹ Nevertheless, as a researcher, I am a “non-con” and, unlike convict criminologists, I cannot “tell it like it is.” ¹² Convict criminologists insist on the need to ‘incorporate the voice of prisoners’ in prison research, ¹³ highlighting the significance of the prisoners’ verbatim accounts I have gathered and analysed.

In deference to convict criminologists’ privileging of the perceptions and experiences of prisoners, I have adopted a qualitative, phenomenological approach. Phenomenology presents a way of investigating prisoners’ subjective, “lived body” experiences of using video link technologies in prison space. It provides a means to disclose the world of incarceration and reveal prisoners’ perceptual experiences of video conferencing. I use phenomenology in my research to provide insights into how technologies in prisons transform spatial, corporeal and visual relationships for prisoners. Phenomenology is the study of the nature of experience, and seeks to describe original experience, ¹⁴ in this case, the experience of appearing in court from prison by video link. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that our experience and perception of the world is through our whole body, not just the eye. ¹⁵ Human perception from a phenomenological standpoint is therefore an inter-sensory experience. In examining the subjective experience of using video link facilities in carceral space, Juhani Pallasmaa’s haptic notion of architecture may be applied. Pallasmaa, who references the work of Merleau-Ponty, suggests that every experience of architecture is multi-sensorial, providing us with a sense of space and scale, an awareness of the durable materials, surfaces embedded with authority and traditions of construction. ¹⁶ I apply this theoretical framework to examine the disparate spaces of courtroom and prison video studio, and to understand the distinct phenomenological qualities of each.

IV. Courtroom Space

Courtrooms are civic spaces filled with signifiers and finished in materials that resonate with ritual, state authority and a visible manifestation of the legitimacy of the law. ¹⁷ Courtroom space exudes meaning, semiotic resonance and spatial syntax ¹⁸ through its “elevations, ornamentation, and partitions.” ¹⁹ The built environment of the courtroom has aesthetic and sensory dimensions that “suffuse[s] our engagement with everything about us,” ²⁰ evoking reverence and deference. ²¹ A courtroom is therefore more than just a site – it is a spatial representation of society’s conception of justice, providing dignity to legal process, ²² with its enclosed space symbolizing law’s independence. ²³ The built environment of the courtroom is designed to facilitate the impartial administration of justice, yet the space encodes, structures and reflects inherent power relations and hierarchies in the law. In conjunction with courtroom procedure, the goal of “participatory parity” may be compromised. ²⁴ Courtroom space is not neutral in the sense that it is partitioned into zones of segregation, zones of authority. ²⁵ The separationist courtroom design specifies and codifies the distribution of participants, ²⁶ and hierarchically arranges the proceedings, relationships and communications. ²⁷ The segmentation of the space is generated by the material environment and the intangible sensorial environment. Visual and aural elements define accessibility, audibility and sight lines, ²⁸ while the intangible senses of proximity and presence in a courtroom are the product of hapticity (relating to the sense of touch) and proprioception (the sense of one’s body, its movement, posture and spatial location). Courtroom space is therefore not just seen, it is experienced phenomenologically through the body, through the sensorial interactions of touch, smell, sound, and through human encounters within that space: “Whoever steps inside it is sacrosanct for the time being.” ²⁹ Of course the boundaries of justice are tested by the increasing use of digital technologies and media broadcast. Mohr gives an example of the televised 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial in California where the trial became “delocalized” in cyberspace: “a collage of courtroom, crime scene, television studio.” ³⁰ Mohr considers that architecture is the medium of communication, and he defines “architecture” broadly to refer to both the built environment including “the foyers and corridors, video links, remote witness rooms and media facilities,” as well as the architecture, or legal framework, of the trial. ³¹ While, conceptually, due process is preoccupied with location, spatial arrangements and design, ³² clearly the physical boundaries of the space of legal adjudication are increasingly contested.

V. The Courtroom Dock

Of the delineated zones in the courtroom, the custody dock especially challenges the adversarial system’s ideal of equality before the law. ³³ During criminal proceedings, the accused person is isolated within the custody dock, a key separationist structure that foregrounds the implicit power imbalance of the state versus the individual. The dock calls into question the presumption of innocence, being a space of pillory “where the defendant (often aptly called ‘the prisoner’) is incarcerated during his trial.” ³⁴ The courtroom custody dock has been critiqued as inherently intimidating for an accused person. ³⁵ Furthermore, the dock is complicit in generating a guilty image or impression of dangerousness, ³⁶ and can be interpreted as part of a ceremony of degradation of the accused person. ³⁷ One prisoner I interviewed, F14, discussed using AVL and compared it to her discomfort in being on public display in the space of the courtroom dock:

I feel that [AVL is] just the same as if you’re up on the stand, and … oh, tell you the truth, I feel a lot more comfortable in a video room than on the stand … because you’re totally focussed on that camera, on your solicitor, the judge, the magistrate and everything else … but in the court, you’ve got the whole room right looking at you … so video link, it cuts that out.

She appreciated the diminished public scrutiny and possible pillorying afforded by the video studio in prison, a shield from the courtroom gaze. This prisoner’s account suggests that the new location of the custody dock in prison may liberate prisoners from the prejudicial courtroom dock. ³⁸ However, I received many contrary accounts from prisoners suggesting that the relocation of the dock to prison, effected by AVL and discussed in the following section, results in alienation as well as further stigmatization of the prisoner. For example, M02 told me that he preferred to be physically in court as he could comprehend proceedings better when immersed in the courtroom dynamics: “I don’t really understand all the court, like what they say and that, you know. Umm, in person, I know what’s actually going on.” M13 expressed how the use of AVL made him feel disengaged and isolated from the world:

I was already in a cell on me own disconnected from the whole prison system, let alone the world … so the video link was just another [disconnect]… so nup, I didn’t feel connected to anything.

Within the courtroom dock, the accused person becomes a non-participating object that has justice done to her or him. ³⁹ These harms are exaggerated by the increasing plexiglass encasement of courtroom docks and the spatial containment of risk, ⁴⁰ and now, I argue, with the use of video links. Only a couple of the prisoners I interviewed had experienced being in a glass-enclosed dock in jurisdictions outside NSW (where they are rare). They likened the experience to video links from prison, identifying similar communication barriers. Recent case law has considered the potential prejudicial impression created by high security docks, as well as the ensuing communication problems. ⁴¹

While many theorists argue that there is a tension between the prisoner’s right to the presumption of innocence and the actual enjoyment of that right, with even the traditional, non-glass courtroom dock implicated in this friction, ⁴² there is, perhaps, a positive reading of the dock. The courtroom dock is symbolic not only of the alleged deviant but, I argue, it also symbolizes the potentiality for direct liberty from a civic space. The dock may be considered a liminal space (a threshold or transitional space) and inextricably linked to the rites of passage inherent in criminal justice. ⁴³ From this space, the accused person may face expulsion from society through imprisonment, or may walk free and be reintegrated into society. When one considers the implications of relocating and confining the custody dock within a prison, as effected by video link technologies, this point is made explicit. Video links from prison present as the apotheosis of security and efficiency, succeeding in the complete spatial containment and exclusion of an incarcerated defendant.

VI. The Virtual Dock: Video Technologies in Carceral Space

NSW’s displaceable presumption in favor of video links means that prisoners “appear” in court broadcast live from prison for many criminal proceedings. The legislation effectively relocates the courtroom custody dock to the new conceptual court space located within prison space, thereby conflating courtroom space with the space of state prosecution and punishment. The relocated custody dock is fortified by prison walls, so defendants appear virtually in remote courtrooms, secured and digitally encased on screens. Video links represent the pinnacle of spatial partitioning by guaranteeing the accused person’s actual incarceration during legal procedures.

Much existing scholarship on communication technologies in justice focusses on the courtroom endpoint, whereas my research examines video links in criminal justice from the prison perspective. The video link systems at the prison endpoint are of a different configuration to the courtroom endpoint, given the disparity between courtroom and prison environments. According to one video conferencing vendor, prison video systems provide prisoners “remote but full access to their judicial rights, and the highly durable system also withstands the most taxing environments.” ⁴⁴ My fieldwork afforded me the opportunity to see the prison video facilities. Within Dillwynia, these video link studios were adjacent to the spacious, carpeted and light-filled visitors’ area, complete with a Gloria Jeans Café, musak and sofas. MNCC was far more carceral than the relative luxury of Dillwynia – there were more security doors to pass, and before entering the sterile zone on the perimeter around the prison, I was fitted with a duress alarm. The AVL studios were contiguous to the prison officers’ room and a long, hot pink, concrete corridor. Holding cells and an exercise yard were also located off this corridor, all constructed with hard concrete surfaces and detention-grade fixed metal furnishings.

At both Dillwynia and MNCC, small video link studios were usually used for legal conferences and sometimes for court appearances. These acoustic-foam-tiled rooms were tight and narrow, barely larger than a broom closet. ⁴⁵ There was one chair placed in front of a timber console fitted with a camera lens, screen and desk area. This space affected prisoners, with some commenting on the features of the small studio and how it made them feel. F09 said the room was “a little scary ’cause I get claustrophobic.” F01 told me: “I didn’t expect it to be as small as it was, it’s only a very tiny room and I didn’t expect it to be that small.” M14 also found the studio too small and suggested: “I reckon you need more space, to walk around and that.” However, others were happy with the space. M07 said it was “good enough, does the job” and F05 described the space as:

It’s only just like a little room … a little box and you sit there and then it’s got the … prison name banner behind you … then the screen’s virtually in your face … the officers are out there so they’re not interfering, and they kind of give you your own little privacy and yeah, I was pretty much happy with that.

Larger video studios were used as “courtrooms” and had a telephone on the console to allow prisoners to speak to their remote lawyer throughout court proceedings. During my fieldwork at MNCC, I was given permission to observe three court proceedings. I sat at the back of the “courtroom,” a utilitarian space furnished with a simple desk and two chairs that faced a video camera and split screens, while the prisoner sat at the desk. The prisoner’s backdrop was a paper notice attached to a wall identifying the correction center. The prisoner was presented with a split screen showing four views of the distant courtroom – the judge, an empty witness stand, the bar table and a section of the public gallery. The view of the remote courtroom was partial and delineated by the pre-determined camera angles, devoid of natural peripheral vision. During my fieldwork interviews, prisoners raised issues concerning the restricted view. For example, I asked F09 if she could see her family in the remote courtroom:

I couldn’t see, I could only see a little tiny bit, I was told they were coming but I could not see them, which was, umm, depressing to me ’cause I would’ve loved to see my children.

Several prisoners mentioned that they could not even recognize their legal representative, did not know when they were “live,” or when they were being addressed by anyone in the remote court.

Conceptualizing the prison video studio as a part of the courtroom was challenging for me as an observer, given the lack of courtroom ambience or signifiers, and the overwhelmingly oppressive aesthetic of incarceration. The prison video studio is phenomenologically distinct from the physical courtroom in which the prisoner’s legal proceedings take place. My time interviewing prisoners and observing the system revealed a world far removed from the somber ambience of a courtroom. The video link studios I visited in NSW were located within the inner boundaries of the correctional facilities; inside the sterile zone and accessible only via several security measures and many heavy doors. This means that prisoners, who appear by video link for their legal procedures, are immersed within the severe aesthetic of incarcerating space, instead of within the relatively dignified and communal courtroom. Penal architecture is functional but harsh: “By definition [prisons] have a rigid architectural determinism built into their fabric.” ⁴⁶ Of course, I acknowledge that not all courthouses provide the dignified space we idealize for legal proceedings. However, the expression of dignity and humanity in the administration of justice remains a legitimate aspiration. This is reflected in the extensive historical and contemporary discourse on courtroom design, and the highly symbolic role that courthouses have had in the Australian civic landscape. Prisons, on the other hand, are increasingly hidden from public view.

VII. Carceral Space

Prisons are “closed environments,” ⁴⁷ encompassed by high perimeter fencing and rolls of razor wire, fabricated with hard surfaces and fitted with detention-grade furnishings. These institutions are highly symbolic in the sense that they manifest the power of the state and prosecutorial forces to deny liberty to citizens, an apparatus concerned with power relations and intended to render individuals docile. ⁴⁸ In the historical shift of punishment regimes from public torture or shaming to private incarceration, ⁴⁹ prisons are the most hidden part of criminal justice. ⁵⁰ Extremes of power and powerlessness are apparent in prisons. Carceral space constructs an environment of surveillance and control creating a sense of inferiority and disempowerment. ⁵¹ Powerlessness is reinforced through the daily regimes, constant surveillance, the presence of uniformed officers and regulated communication within prison and to the outside world. Many of my interviewees expressed a fatalistic resignation to their situation. For example M10 stated: “You’re literally a nothing … you’ve got no authority … whatever happens to you, happens … it’s literally like you’re a ghost in here.” Some found video links added to their loss of agency. F07’s comment addresses the powerlessness of many prisoners during video link appearances: “They didn’t even give me a say … I usually just sit there and just sit there, motionless.” The possibilities of agency in such a coercive space are questionable. ⁵² The compressed and cellular built environment of prison impacts on behavior through sensorial deprivation: the “anaesthetics” of incarceration blunt the senses, and reinforce criminality. ⁵³ It is “the fabric of the buildings” ⁵⁴ that determines behavior and identity, and within prison there is a profound connection between spatiality, corporeality and human experience.

The common purpose of a prison is for the segregation of perceived transgressors from society ⁵⁵ and the institution itself can be seen as a complete autonomous universe ⁵⁶ or carceral archipelago. ⁵⁷ Goffman examines “total institutions” – those places where like-situated individuals reside, isolated from society, and together lead an enclosed, controlled and administered life. ⁵⁸ The ideological underpinnings of prisons vary: to punish, deter, rehabilitate and for the protection of society, ⁵⁹ with a shift in emphasis from rehabilitation to punitiveness in some jurisdictions. ⁶⁰ In NSW, CSNSW manages adult and juvenile inmates, both remand and sentenced as well as offenders in the community. In expressing its purposes, CSNSW seeks to maintain “required standards for a safe, secure and humane environment” and provide inmates with opportunities for rehabilitation, work skills and health programs. ⁶¹ Despite these positive aspirations, correctional buildings are nevertheless an evocative form of non-public architecture: enclosed and breach-resistant. A prison presents a highly controlled, surveilled, dehumanized and taxing environment that impacts on the spatial experience of prisoners who use video technology within the carceral world to interact with remote courtrooms and lawyers.

VIII. Video Links and the Hegemony of Vision

While video conferencing transmits audio, it is overwhelmingly a visual medium and an “ocularcentric” technology that privileges the sense of sight, constructs images, and reinforces the “hegemony of vision” ⁶² that various theorists challenge. Video conferencing vendors such as Polycom and Tandberg emphasize the visual communication and video qualities of their products. Polycom refers to the “life-like video,” “life-like appearance in court,” ⁶³ and “true-to-life,” ⁶⁴ while Tandberg stresses “justice communication must be visual.” ⁶⁵ Here I examine video links as a manifestation of the sensory bias towards sight – a technology that facilitates a basic visibility of a prisoner and the download of spoken content, but one that militates against the transmission of nonverbal communication, and diminishes prisoners’ sensorial engagement and sense of immersion in legal proceedings.

Since the ancient Greeks, Western philosophy has privileged the sense of sight spawning a domination, or hegemony, of the visual. This predominance of sight is deeply embedded in philosophy and language. ⁶⁶ Levin interrogates this “ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centred interpretation of knowledge, truth and reality.” ⁶⁷ How do these concepts relate to video link technologies? Several theorists and historians of technologies have investigated the extension of human vision through optical devices, much of this “imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era.” ⁶⁸ Virilio interrogates regimes of the visual, those visual protheses and technologies that have extended the reach of natural eyesight and modes of perception. Through the accelerating speed of emergent vision machines and optical devices, distances collapse and material space evaporates. State institutions, law enforcement, judiciary, military and the media increasingly seek to control individual subjects’ viewpoint of the world. ⁶⁹ The mediation of perception is being facilitated through new technologies and optical devices that “encourage us to perceive the world as if it were entirely made up of nothing more than appearances on a screen.” ⁷⁰ These technological changes have wrought repercussions for criminal justice with virtual images and telepresence once again provoking the question of habeas corpus. ⁷¹ There is an “industrialisation of vision,” ⁷² and visual technologies are replacing “the human sensorium.” ⁷³ Furthermore, technologies are “relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer” and new technologized modes of visualization are becoming dominant. ⁷⁴ Foucault examines the hegemony of vision through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Panopticism is an optical metaphor for a disciplinary mechanism that controls vision and visibility through enclosed, hierarchical and partitioned space, and constant surveillance: ⁷⁵ “vision has become supervision” intimately related to a hegemony of power. ⁷⁶ Surveillant vision is asymmetrical and lacks reciprocity – it normalizes, disciplines and renders populations docile. ⁷⁷

From a phenomenological perspective, vision is treated as embodied and entwined with all the senses. ⁷⁸ With a focus on architecture, traditionally regarded as an art form of the eye, the hegemony of vision may be critiqued as suppressing multi-sensorial engagement, particularly the haptic sense, as architecture “articulates the experience of our being-in-the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self.” ⁷⁹ In contrast, computer images flatten our multi-sensorial experiences. Screens frame and focus our vision, denying natural peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is important in enveloping us in “the flesh of the world,” integrating us spatially and corporeally as immersed participants. ⁸⁰ Focussed vision, such as presented by a video link screen, makes us mere spectators, distanced, detached and isolated, and devoid of empathy.

IX. The Impacts of Ocularcentrism

Video links reflect the concept of ocularcentrism in myriad ways. Video conferencing systems in the justice sector are purchased by the state from major international companies, revealing an “industrialisation of vision” ⁸¹ and the control of individual subjects’ perceptual experience. The embedding of video link technology into prison infrastructure imposes a strict hierarchy of spatial relationships between those deemed worthy of being physically enveloped in the “flesh” of the courtroom world, and those who must remain incarcerated.

X. Conclusion

While the basic content of legal procedure by video link may be the same as physical proceedings, the trend towards prisoners appearing by video link from prison is problematic.

In this article I have also sought to examine how video links are symptomatic of the sensory bias to sight that ignores the significance of the other senses. Video links enable a framed view of each video endpoint, as well as the download of verbal content. However, the technology profoundly alters how prisoners experience and access criminal justice. Many of the prisoners I interviewed expressed feelings of disengagement and isolation, becoming spectators rather than immersed participants in their own legal proceedings.

When video conferencing technologies become embedded into the infrastructure of prison, they fundamentally change the site of adjudication, the spatial dynamics and human interactions, and impact on prisoners’ embodied encounters with the law. I have examined how video links act as a conduit between the conceptually linked but the non-contiguous locations of prison and courtroom. In this, video links effect a conflation of the custody dock with the space of prosecution and punishment, compromising the perceived impartiality of proceedings, ¹⁰⁷ and amplifying the hierarchical space for the prisoner. Notions of “equality of arms,” neutrality and impartiality are implicated when the defendant appears on a screen in court, locked firmly within the enclosed space of state control. Conflating the sealed space of state prosecution and incarceration with the administration of justice renders legal procedures opaque. The disparity between the court space and the taxing environment of prison is great in terms of aesthetics, acoustics and architecture. To conceptually collapse these spaces is fraught: prisoners should be afforded a just space, a civic and public space, not one contained within a regime of punishment.

Prisoners are increasingly appearing in legal procedure from these symbolic spaces of incarceration with their particular hardships, penal architecture, and oppressive carceral aesthetics. The prison video studio is phenomenologically distinct from the courtroom space. There is a significant variance between open, civic and relatively dignified courtroom space, versus the closed conditions of incarcerating space. In comparison with prison video studios, courtroom spaces exude a level of neutrality and transparency in their openness and accessibility to the public, and relative dignity in their furnishings. Human experience and behavior are intimately influenced by spatial settings and architectural features, and the environment itself may cue particular behaviors. ¹⁰⁸ To be located within a particular space generates reactions, and there is “space consciousness or the sensation of space.” ¹⁰⁹ On this basis, it is not surprising that “the space in which justice is done shapes what we think it means.” ¹¹⁰ For the video-linked prisoner, the experience and meaning of criminal justice is formed by the fabric of the prison. The traditional symbolic separation of the prisoner in the courtroom custody dock has become a literal banishment as prisoners appear from carceral space. If every engagement with architecture is a multi-sensory experience, then the prison video studio reinforces expulsion from the human world, exacerbates prisoners’ sensorial impoverishment, and diminishes opportunities for expressive participation in legal procedure. The prison video studio, as an ersatz courtroom, must symbolically express the ultimate demeaning spatial position in the criminal justice system.