Stuit, H, Turner, J, & Weegels, J. (Eds.). (2024). Carceral worlds: Legacies, textures and futures. Bloomsbury.
Reviewed by Virve Repo, Tampere University, Finland
Carceral Worlds is an edited collection that gathers together eleven chapters addressing the contemporary field of carceral studies. The book shows how the carceral has spread beyond prison borders to encompass everyday life. While the origin of the term “carceral” comes from the Latin word carcer, referring to the ancient state prison in Rome (Moran et al., 2018), Foucault (1977) illustrated many centuries later how carcerality has penetrated all of society. The carceral can currently be seen in various scales in different places beyond the prison, with societies now “characterized by unprecedented fluidity between forms of confinement, be they state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, ad-hoc, illicit, spatially fixed, mobile, embodied or imagined” (Moran et al., 2018, p. 668). Neoliberal policies have expanded this punishment regime even further: private agents (like employers and landlords) now have the ability to adjudicate behavior and impose sanctions, sometimes in excess of their public counterparts (Varner, 2024, p. 5). As the editors of Carceral Worlds state in the introduction, there are still recognizable roots from which the carceral arises, for example coloniality, prison policies and everyday precarity produced by neoliberal conditions. It is clear that the normalization of the carceral within our everyday life and language, from multiple viewpoints, requires the kinds of rigorous examinations contained in this collection.
One of the strengths of the book is that the case studies examined are global in nature while highlighting differences across diverse societies and situations. Author contributions focus on examples from Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, Australia and Africa. The book is divided into four parts: Legacies, Textures, Futures, and Provocations. The first part examines the legacies of colonialism, which are examined in chapters about prison history, the biopolitics and colonial logics in Caribbean prisons, and how scientific traditions and carceral logics in urban environments are connected to carceral city management. Weeks uses the concept of carceral imaginary to interpret Chilean literature, discussing what it reveals about violence during the Pinochet dictatorship but also during neoliberal modernity. In the second part, the authors explore how carceral language and terminologies start to feature in everyday language and narratives. Grassi, for example, uses rap lyrics to describe the carceral features of a Milanese neighborhood. This part of the book extends an analysis to the use of the carceral motifs during the COVID-19 curfews, providing insights into the everyday life of houseless people during this crisis. The third part of the book explores ‘carceral futures’, including how urban control and digital records of marginalized populations succeed in carceralizing the everyday lives of certain populations. The final part brings together European carceral studies with abolitionist studies by US scholars, notably the chapter by Philo and Schliehe on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which is a major strength of the book. The chapters contained in each part are chosen appropriately to illustrate their respective themes. The shorter texts by the editors at the end of each part are expressed in a less academic way, including poetry and short stories that creatively capture the essence of each chapter.
Carceral Worlds illustrates the limitations of conceptualizing the carceral as limited to institutions of visible control. Like studies examining the carceral dimensions of care (Loughnan 2020; Repo 2020), this collection explores those spaces and situations that are not obviously carceral. Reflecting on the need for a more expansive understanding of the carceral, the book introduces several new concepts, opening new possibilities for putting into the words how people feel and experience carceralities. As an example, concepts such as carceral metaphors, used by Fludernik, and carceral circumstances, used by Schneider, describe the carceral features of everyday life and how the carceral is felt and experienced in ways that are not always intentional. In their chapter, Fludernik explains carceral metaphors by describing how Covid-19 lockdowns and curfews were referred to as metaphoric prisons by the media in Germany, France and United Kingdom. Although this situation differed from actual imprisonment, the emotional responses to lockdowns were similar to those experienced during imprisonment. Schneider, similarly, illustrates the concept of carceral circumstances by using the example of houseless people who seek imprisonment to get off the streets. The question she raises is: “What happens to understandings of carcerality, aid and even society itself, if some rough sleepers experience northern European post-welfare systems with their neoliberal logics to be more detrimental and confining than prison itself?” (p. 128). Yet, as Nuttal suggests in her chapter about sensed, embodied, and legal entrapment, the carceral is not “just” something felt or experienced; it is a result of those structures of governance that enable social control and the placing of people into situations where they have little or no agency.
The versatile methodologies used in the collection are illustrative of the resourcefulness of the book. For example, the use of long-term ethnography—despite the time constraints of some research projects—enables a deeper understanding of everyday carceralities, as evident in the contributions by Biondi and Grassi on the neighborhoods of São Paulo and Milan, and by Schneider on houseless people in Leipzig. The variety of materials analyzed, ranging from archival materials to digital records, short stories and newspaper articles to rap lyrics, also speaks to the versatility of the methodologies used in the book.
This collection’s methodological and conceptual diversity offers a variety of opportunities for future research. For example, the rich methodological approaches on display might point to the need for a collection on carceral methodologies. Likewise, carceral scholars, including the authors included in this collection, have done remarkable work identifying different forms, scales, and levels or carcerality across social contexts. Following Andrew M. Jefferson, who spoke at a book launch event for Carceral Worlds, future projects might focus in more narrowly on how to de-carceralize our everyday living environments.
References
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.
Loughnan, C. (2022). The scene and the unseen—Neglect and death in immigration detention and aged care. Incarceration, 3(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.117/26326663221103444
Moran, D., Turner, J., & Schliehe, A. K. (2018). Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 666–686. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517710352
Repo, V. (2020). CONFINED TO SPACE: Perspectives on carceral geography. University of Turku.
Varner, D. (2024). From the courtroom to the boardroom: Privatizing justice in the neoliberal United States. University Press of Kansas.