Confinement: Spaces and practices of care and control
The 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography was held in Melbourne, Australia (and online) between 13th and 15th December 2022. The conference was hosted by the University of Melbourne and supported by the Carceral Geography Working Group (CGWG) of the Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG).
The local conference organising committee was led by Dr Claire Loughnan, Dr Diana Johns and Dr Bree Carlton. Congratulations to the organisers on this inclusive, engaged and engaging gathering of interdisciplinary scholars, students, practitioners and people with lived experience of living and working in confined settings.
If you missed any of the sessions and/or you’d like to revisit any of the excellent conference presentations, please browse the agenda – below – and click on the links to access paper abstracts and recordings.
A PDF summary of the conference programme is available to download here.
Day 1: Tuesday 13th December
17:30 Welcome to Country: Smoking ceremony & Djirri Djirri dancers
17:45 First Nations Plenary
Veronica Gorrie, Tarneen Onus Williams, Amelia Telford
Chair: Crystal McKinnon
Day 2: Wednesday 14th December
09:20 Welcome: Claire Loughnan, Diana Johns, Bree Carlton
09:30 Plenary: Tabitha Lean, Debbie Kilroy
Chair: Diana Johns
11:30 1a. Harms of Confinement 1: Violence and ‘Non-care’
Chair: Emma Russell
- Guy Aitchison Immigration detention and induced self-violence
- Raffaella Cresciani Beyond domestic binaries: Mapping violence and carcerality across disability homes
- Pan Karanikolas ‘…the treatment is looking too much like punishment’: Revocation of community treatment orders and policing madness through mental health law
- Sarah Turnbull Reforming immigration detention in Canada and the United Kingdom: Learning from critical prison studies and abolitionist perspectives
11:30 1b. Dark Histories 1: Dark History – Memorialisation
Chair: Poppy DeSouza
- Bree Carlton, Crystal McKinnon Yarra Bend Colonial Carceral Complex
- Jacqueline Wilson “Get your facts straight, girlie!” Academic activism and the total institution
- Dave McDonald Visions of justice? DIY memorialisation as counter-archive in the wake of institutional child abuse and neglect
- Holly Randell-Moon The carceral geographies and tourist consumption of heritage prisons in Dubbo and Dunedin
11:30 1c. Cultural Resistance 1: Prison Radio, Creative Disruption
Chair: Claire Loughnan
Dwayne Antojado, Ryan Conarro, Marietta Martinovic
Inside Wire: Exploring the porosity of prison spaces through prison radio, and transforming spaces of dehumanisation and isolation to inclusion and public engagement
11:30 1d. Monitoring, Rights and Justice 1: Compliance with the Convention against Torture
Chair: Bronwyn Naylor
Panel: Bronwyn Naylor, Steven Caruana, Laura Grenfell, Deborah Glass
Protecting human rights in places of detention in Australia: National and international rights-based monitoring
14:00 2a. Harms of Confinement 2: Architectures of Harm and Control
Chair: Andrew Burridge
Panel: Ian Warren, Emma Ryan, Tatiana Corrales, Scott Welsh
Harmful structures, silenced voices, decolonisation, abolition and repair
14.00 2b. Dark Histories 2: Women, Memorialisation, Activism
Chair: Linda Steele
Panel: Poppy De Souza, Bonney Djuric, Justine Lloyd
Resistance, reclamation, and repair: The Parramatta Female Factory Precinct and Peat Island
14.00 2c. Cultural Resistance 2: Art, Performance and Protest
Chair: Dwayne Antojado
- Helen Farley, James Mehigan Art as resistance in Aotearoa New Zealand
- Caitlin D’Gluyas Transformation through time: Exploring the temporality and liminality of a nineteenth century juvenile convict prison
- Cate O’Neill, Constance Thurley-Hart Mapping sites of care and confinement of children and young people in Australia
14.00 2d. Spatiality, Care and Control 1: Beyond Prison
Chair: Tatiana Corrales
- Jessica Collins, Richard Carter-White, Claudio Minca The camp as a custodian institution: The case of Krnjača Asylum Centre, Belgrade, Serbia
- Debasreeta Deb Endless captivity: Detention centres as sites of confinement in Assam
- Julia Manek From open access to confinement camps: Countermapping un[care] and the construction of harmful spaces in Samos’ hotspot camps
- Manas Raturi Freedom through incarceration: Care and confinement in a leprosy home
16:00 3a. Harms of Confinement 3: Health and resistance
Chair: Ian Warren
- Ben Barron “You couldn’t hide from it”: Incarceration and vulnerability to environmental hazards in Colorado, USA
- Andrew Burridge Non-care in the detention hotel: 20 years of Australia’s use of ‘alternative places of detention’, 2002-2022
- Andreea Lachsz, Monique Hurley Why practices that could be torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment should never have formed part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons
- Katrina Ward, Aurelius Francisco Carceral control and resistance in Oklahoma: A protest oral history
16:00 3b. Dark Histories 3: Institutionalised Care
Chair: Dave McDonald
Panel: Nell Musgrove, David McGinniss, Dee Michell
Child welfare – ‘caring’ or criminalising? Historical perspectives
16:00 3c. Cultural Resistance 3: Word and Image as Resistance
Chair: Pan Karanikolas
- Baljeet Kaur, CP Shruthi Micro-geography of letter writing by prisoners sentenced to death: An ecosystem of care, control and resistance
- Sue Jeong Ka The Banned Book List: A monument of in/justice and intellectual freedom for incarcerated readers
- Anna Goodchild One year – transcending prison walls
16:00 3d. Colonial Carcerality 1: Homes Not Prisons
Panel: Gabriela Franich (Chair) with respondents with lived experience
Stop prison expansion, fund housing for women and their children!
17:45 Film Screenings & Plenary: Behrouz Boochani, Hoda Afshar
19:30 Art Program Launch, Drinks and Reception
20:30 4a. Spatiality, Care and Control 2: Academic Allyship
Chair: Julia Manek
Panel: Dora Rebelo, Francesca Esposito, Lou Armitt, Aminata Kalokoh, Njideka Angela Obi, Charly Walters, Julia Manek, Moshood Olanrewaju
Academic allyship as monitoring and accountability tool in places of migrant confinement
20:30 4b. Carceral Continuum 1: The Harms of ‘Care’
Chair: Jennifer Turner
- Marina Richter Legitimising care and control: Insights from two different institutions (prisons and asylum centres)
- Becca Hudson Care as a strategy of confinement: Personality disorder, recovery and risk in UK prisons
- Lorena Gazzotti There, where none can see them: Confining care for migrant children at the southern Spanish border
- Claire Warrington Carceral care or state control of the ‘undeserving’?
22:15 5a. Cultural Resistance 4: Creative Resistance and Sensorial Politics
Chair: Christophe Mincke
- Sophie Lachapelle, Jennifer Kilty “Use your common sense to navigate, and you’re gonna get along okay”: Exploring the sensorial politics of survival and resistance in Canadian federal prisons
- Ros Liebeskind The erotics of abjection and queer proto-abolitionist formations in Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour
- Erin Power ‘A way to paint a nice, shiny gloss over that which is shitty’: Theatre practice as a site for care, control and resistance in the contemporary English prison
- Rachel Seoighe, Carly Guest ‘Wounded storytellers’: The potential of creative methods in facilitating women’s return to Holloway prison
22:15 5b. The Carceral Continuum 2: Global Insights
Chair: Lauren Martin
- Lauren Weber Redevelopment, crisis, and the real estate state: Carceral space as shelter in Portland, Oregon USA
- Jennifer Turner, Rosemary Ricciardelli, James Gacek The ‘pains of employment’? Connecting air and sound quality to correctional officer experiences of health and wellness in prison space
- Ariel Machado Godinho Carceral geographies and new urban frontiers: State-led gentrification and incarceration of homelessness in São Paulo’s central area
Day 3: Thursday 15th December
09:30 Plenary: Indigo Daya
Chair: Claire Loughnan
11:30 6a. Carceral Continuum 3: Beyond Walls
Chair: Bronwyn Naylor
- André de Quadros Scaling walls, dismantling asymmetries through the Arts
- Emma Russell ‘Seeing like a cop’: Visualising geographies of criminalisation and control
- Gabriela Franich I tried to be better than the systems that failed them: The experiences of service providers supporting women on remand in Victoria, Australia
- Liam Martin Carceral care: Prison re-entry and the long shadow of mass incarceration
11:30 6b. Spatiality, Care and Control 3: Immigration Detention Practices
Chair: Leanne Weber
- Amy Nethery Incarceration, classification, and control: Administrative detention in settler colonial Australia
- Samantha O’Donnell Immigration detention: A site of harm for migrant and refugee women who are victim-survivors of family violence
- Saba Vasefi Borders of exclusion: Gendered counter narratives
- Ebony Birchall Doctors in detention: Mapping the politics that make it ‘impossible’ to practice medicine in Australia’s immigration detention system
11:30 6c. Monitoring, Rights and Justice 2: Traces of Carcerality
Chair: Monique Hurley
Panel: Liat Ben-Moshe, Linda Steele, Phillipa Carnemolla, Jack Kelly, Nathan Sternberg, Susan Burch
Memories and futures of disability institutions: US and Australian case studies
11:30 6d. Cultural Resistance 5: Readers Beyond Bars
Chair: Caitlin D’Gluyas
Panel: Sue Jeong Ka, Sarah Ball, Joel Stoehr
Readers beyond bars: Weaving a network for carceral information exchange
14:00 7b. Colonial Carcerality 2: Safety, ‘Care’ and Accountability’
Chair: Maria Giannacopoulos
- Sarah Schwartz When prison health ‘care’ kills: Accountability and justice for Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
- Naama Blatman, Francis Markham Escaping prisons: The de- urbanisation of Australia’s punitive system
- Emily Ross Are good intentions enough?
- Lara Palombo Home and migrant women: Abolishing punishment and transforming safety
14:00 7c. Spatiality, Care and Control 4: Abolition and Prison Solidarity
Chair: Emma Ryan
Panel: Billie Cates, Kim Jackson, Angelee Porter, Gerty-B
Practices of coercive confinement: Confronting the carceral continuum, the membrane, and prison gossip
14:00 7d. Early Career Researcher Workshop
Facilitators: Dave McDonald and Diana Johns
Turning abstracts into articles
16:00 8a Carceral Continuum 4: Control At, and Within the Border
Chair: Amy Nethery
Panel: Leanne Weber, Anthea Vogl, Rebecca Powell, Alison Gerard
Care, control and exclusionary practices: Papers from the ANZSOC crimmigration and border control thematic group
16:00 8b. Spatiality, Care and Control 5: Questions of Power
- Julienne Weegels Carceral care: Comparing ‘soft’ control between Nicaragua and The Netherlands
- Cristina Güerri Prison officers, social support, and the exercise of power in Spanish prisons
- Bronte Alexander Care, comfort, and control; migrant mobilities in military-humanitarian spaces
16:00 8c. Architectures of Control
Chair: Naama Blatman
- Andriani Fili The continuum of violence in the Greek immigration detention system
- Mafalda Lucas Type and subordinate elements: Copy, stereotype and memory in prison architecture
- Marco Nocente The spread of videoconferencing: Testimonies of a technology that has become normality
16:00 8d. Coercive Control 1: Practices of Coercive Confinement
Chair: Lara Palombo
- Virve Repo Carceral riskscapes and working in the spaces of mental health care
- Ettore Asoni Guantánamo and the US penitentiary: The convergence between camps and prisons as institutions of confinement
- Camila Van Diest Carceral memorialisation in a context of urban change: The example of Valparaiso’s former prison
- James Little Agents of memory: Ireland’s literature of coercive confinement
17:45 Plenary: Amanda Porter, Maria Giannacopoulos
Chair: Bree Carlton
Discussant: Crystal McKinnon
20:30 9a. The Carceral Continuum 5: Landscapes of harm
Chair: Jennifer Turner
- Rachel Andrews Repair: Place (re) making and collective action at the unmarked children’s grave at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, Co Galway, Ireland 2014-2021
- Oliver Wilson-Nunn Remediating the geographies of justice and modernity in mid-twentieth-century Argentinean prison films
- Lauren Cape-Davenhill State surveillance, state support: ‘Alternatives to Detention’ in the UK
- Sarah Huque, Rebecca Helman, Joe Anderson Prison as a suicidescape: At the intersection of hostile environments and suicide discourses
20:30 9b Coercive Control 2: Carcerality Concealed as ‘Care’
Chair: Pankhuri Agarwal
Panel: Pankhuri Agarwal, Jennifer Musto, Sharmila Parmanand
The carceral logics of care: Evidence of anti-trafficking interventions from India, the Philippines and the US
22:15 10. Explorations in Carceral Geography
Chair: Anna Schliehe
Organisers: Anna Schliehe, Christophe Mincke, Franck Ollivon
Panellists: Francis Pakes, Kristian Mjåland
Interrogating ‘open carcerality’ and the geographies of open prisons
1a. Harms of Confinement 1: Violence and ‘Non-care’
Chair: Emma Russell
- Guy Aitchison Immigration detention and induced self-violence
There are certain cases of suicide and self-harm that look provoked to the extent that agents other than the victim themselves are morally responsible. We say in such cases that the victim was ‘driven’ to kill or otherwise harm themselves; that they were ‘pushed over the edge’ by the actions of others. This response looks especially pertinent to cases of suicide and self-harm in immigration detention. This paper unpicks the issues of responsibility and blame-worthiness at stake in such cases. I introduce the concept of Induced Self-Violence (ISV) to capture the ways that violence towards the self can be generated, produced and instigated by the powerful, without this necessarily meeting the classical definition of coercion. ISV takes place when one or more members of a social group engage in self destructive behaviour in the context of a degraded psycho-social environment imposed upon them by a more powerful institutional agent where it could reasonably be foreseen that such behaviour would result. I set out three conceptual criteria for identifying when self-violence is induced: dependency, objectification and voicelessness. In the case of immigration detention, I argue, the creation of a particular psycho-social environment that induces self-violence is integral to the contemporary functioning of border enforcement as a mechanism to deter irregular immigration and incentivise people to self-deport. An appreciation of this fact undermines the self-image of liberal states as political orders that abstain from (psychological and physical) torture.
- Raffaella Cresciani Beyond domestic binaries: Mapping violence and carcerality across disability homes
Criminology has tended to conceptualise the home through binaries – ‘private/public, safe/unsafe, feminine/masculine’ (Campbell 2022, 165), as well as personal/institutional. The ‘home’ for people with disability comprises a variety of sites – individual homes, family homes, mental health facilities, social housing, group homes, boarding houses, and other residential facilities – however these cannot be neatly categorised into dualisms of personal and institutional, or safe and unsafe. Paid support workers enter private homes, consensual intimate relationships are formed in residential settings, and violence against people with disability occurs across these domestic sites, manifesting in both diverse and at times indistinguishable ways, however often with the effect of keeping people with disability restricted to the domestic sphere and indeed to specific activities or locations within these dwellings. In this presentation, I explore the carceral nature of a continuum of housing for people with disability, mapping the way violence operates across domestic dwellings. Drawing on documents from media, civil law, and interviews with disability advocates and self-advocates, I consider how an assemblage of discourses surrounding the worthiness of disabled bodies, the routinised neoliberal operation of personal ‘care’, poverty, and ongoing practices of segregation and exclusion enmesh to render the diverse homes of people with disability sites of violence and constraint.
- Pan Karanikolas ‘…the treatment is looking too much like punishment’: Revocation of community treatment orders and policing madness through mental health law
This paper explores how civil mental health law contributes towards the carceral control and systemic criminalisation of people who experience mental distress through an examination of the revocation of Community Treatment Orders (‘CTOs’) under Victoria’s Mental Health Act 2014 (Vic) (MHA 2014). CTOs authorise compulsory mental health treatment while a person lives within the community. Despite revocation of orders being recognised as a significant aspect in the operation of CTOs globally (Maughan et al., 2014), the experience and process of revocation has rarely been examined or acknowledged in existing research or scholarship (Owens and Brophy, 2013). My analysis of in-depth interviews with user/survivors who had experiences of being on CTOs (n=5), and workers who support people on CTOs, such as lawyers, advocates, peer support and lived experience workers (n=11), revealed that revocation can often involving police intervention, the use of force and transport to a designated mental health facility (s 351 MHA 2014) and that the threat and fear of revocation for ‘non- compliance’ is a significant aspect of a CTO’s operation. I explore how interviewees experienced the impact of revocation and conclude that mental health law, via CTOs, provides a mechanism for making body/minds identified as Mad, mentally non-normative, ‘ill’ or disordered hyper- visible police, state agencies and mental health services for spatial surveillance and ongoing intervention and create avenues for trans-institutionalisation into the Revocation of Community Treatment Orders.
- Sarah Turnbull Reforming immigration detention in Canada and the United Kingdom: Learning from critical prison studies and abolitionist perspectives
Under conditions of mass migration and the increasing efforts of states to control their borders, there has been a growing reliance on immigration detention to deter and/or expel unwanted mi-grants. In some jurisdictions, the purported lack of detention infrastructures or appropriate conditions to detain migrants has led to calls for reform. In both Canada and the United Kingdom (UK), reform efforts are currently underway to refurbish and expand detention infrastructure and pursue alternatives to detention (Canada) and legitimise detention policy through a focus on vulnerability (UK). In conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic and social movements against systemic inequalities like racism and colonialism, the present governmental focus on reform offers important opportunities for critical engagement with how immigration detention is framed, justified, and re produced. Drawing on a range of institutional documents (e.g., government reports, Parliamentary debates, policy papers, etc.), this presentation examines recent reform efforts to the immigration detention systems in these two jurisdictions, drawing on the insights of critical prison studies and abolitionist perspectives and attending to intersections of gender, race, class, and other social relations of power. It argues that the critical scholarship on penal reform has much to offer scholars studying immigration detention and how to envision new possibilities for a world without detention.
1b. Dark Histories 1: Dark History – Memorialisation
Chair: Poppy DeSouza
- Bree Carlton, Crystal McKinnon Yarra Bend Colonial Carceral Complex
In the 1830s Yarra Bend Park was established as a government reserve to control and contain Aboriginal people. Upon this site a series of early institutions were installedfor these purposes including the Merri Creek Protectorate Station, The Native Police Headquarters, the Merri Creek Aboriginal School, the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum and much later the Fairlea Women’s Prison and the Venereal Diseases Clinic. Aside from an old pillar of the asylum, the remnants of the colonial past have been razed and some of the original structures have been buried deep beneath the earth and parklands. This project examines Yarra Bend as a focal point for the growth of carceral institutions and violence connected to the settler colonial project in Victoria. It examines the intersections between these first institutions and the ensuing histories of violence, displacement, dispossession and the desecration of a culturally significant place for the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Centering the ongoing sovereignty of the Wurundjeri people over this area,this projectwill locate and reconstruct subjugated accounts of place and space through telling the histories of Aboriginal resistance and the troubled violence associated with ongoing settler occupation of Aboriginal land. The aim is to trace historical continuums of a colonial carceral complex to the present. This is because it is impossible to redress ongoing violence and injustice, without an appreciation of how the violent colonial carceral state and its complex of contemporary institutions have evolved and reproduced over time within the specific contexts of place and space.
- Jacqueline Wilson “Get your facts straight, girlie!” Academic activism and the total institution
The paper examines the author’s trajectory as an academic activist, beginning in 2000 with her research into the historical interpretation of the former Pentridge Prison, which had been sold to private developers. This research led to an examination of the social, cultural and historical significance of multiple former sites of incarceration across Australia, and from there to more general sites of confinement, including especially institutions of “care”. The author is a former ward of the State of Victoria and her brother had been an inmate of Pentridge. Her investigations came to focus on the intrinsic relationship between total institutions in general and State-mandated care regimes. The author traces her “activist” motivation to the resistance and challenges she encountered from certain quarters in the early years of her career: from former authority figures within the carceral institutions who had set themselves up as “gatekeepers”; and from influential academics who showed neither understanding of, nor interest in, the connections she was making between mandated State wardship, care regimes, and institutions of confinement. A further moment of resistance arose when she found herself briefly in the firing line of Australia’s “History Wars”. The author’s activism began as an effort to restore the hidden voices and narratives of myriad anonymous former inmates; from there it evolved to contribute to the establishment of official inquiries into the experiences of those who had been in State “care”, and culminated most recently with the creation of ongoing projects within the academy to improve opportunities for care- leavers.
- Dave McDonald Visions of justice? DIY memorialisation as counter-archive in the wake of institutional child abuse and neglect
Since the 1990s, child sexual abuse has come to be recognised as a pervasive form of cruelty experienced by children in institutional ‘care’. Alongside other forms of physical abuse and neglect, this ‘discovery’ has precipitated a wave of public inquiries throughout much of the western world. While these official responses have drawn significant interest from a diverse field of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, unofficial forms of memorialisation that have arisen in response to institutional sexual abuse have been less remarked upon. This paper investigates a diverse range of DYI memory practices that have appeared throughout western Victoria in recent years as an accompaniment to official modes of recognition. These informal and unofficial practices range from artworks, memorials, museum artefacts, and other responses to institutional violence. Echoing rising activist and scholarly interest in counter-monuments and counter-memorials, I consider how these publicly situated practices function to generate counter-archives of institutional violence against children, and in doing so, raise ethical questions about collective responsibly in the aftermath of such abuse.
- Holly Randell-Moon The carceral geographies and tourist consumption of heritage prisons in Dubbo and Dunedin
This paper analyses the role of heritage prisons in contemporary tourism in Dubbo, Australia and Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite the material presence of settler colonisation in the tourist sites and built landscapes of Dubbo and Dunedin, city-branding works to discursively and institutionally forget these cities’ violent and racist settler colonial histories. I analyse the Old Dubbo Gaol and Dunedin Prison and contextualise these sites within the historical and contemporary carceral geographies and practices of the two cities. InDubbo recent tourist initiatives and municipal planning seek to emphasise First Nations culture and heritage. Despite this, the city still largely reiterates settler colonial landscapes in dominant tourism branding. The Old Dubbo Goal is promoted as an opportunity to pantomime detention in a carceral experiencescape which works to occlude the segregation and detention of First Nations. In the case of Dunedin Prison, the refashioning of Dunedin’s carceral past into an experiencescape present occurs though highlighting the apparently distinctive aesthetic features of the prison. This aesthetic focus disaggregates settler coloniality from the architecture of the prison and surrounding landscape and constitutes an apparatus of forgetting (in the Foucauldian sense). This apparatus is reproduced by city-branding which forecloses an engagement with the role of prisons in dispossessing Māori from land and the role of Māori prison labour in building the city. Focusing on these case sites illustrates how the afterlives of colonial prisons continue into the present amidst attempts to overwrite Indigenous landscapes and histories.
1c. Cultural Resistance 1: Prison Radio, Creative Disruption
Inside Wire: Exploring the porosity of prison spaces through prison radio, and transforming spaces of dehumanisation and isolation to inclusion and public engagement
Chair: Claire Loughnan
Dwayne Antojado, Ryan Conarro, Marietta Martinovic
Colorado Prison Radio is the first state-wide prison radio station in the United States, broadcasting from all state prisons and reaching every prison cell across Colorado. It broadcasts 24/7 from inside prison to the public, accessible anywhere via its web stream and the Inside Wire app. The content is created by incarcerated producers in collaboration with media producers and formerly incarcerated collaborators at University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative. This session shares original audio from Inside Wire producers in order to demonstrate how, as a broadcast media platform and a network of creative studio spaces, Inside Wire offers sites and practices of resistance against the extreme and dehumanizing isolation that is inherent in the design of carceral settings. It also provides a story centred path toward actualising the values of restorative justice. Through the collaborative production of prison audio stories, inside-to-outside amplification of voices and the auditory experience of synchronous daily broadcasts, the prison space can be seen as a porous environment seeping out in the general community, echoing the fundamental bedrock of carceral geography. As a result, prisons are transformed from dehumanising and isolating spaces to inclusive environments which promote public engagement. Inside Wire also flips the script on carceral surveillance,shifting from an auditory panopticon of listening in/on incarcerated people, to a space of mutual understanding in which prison staff and the public listen to incarcerated people, and hear them and their stories, first-hand, creating an important counter-current to discourses purveyed through mainstream platforms.
1d. Monitoring, Rights and Justice 1: Compliance with the Convention against Torture
Protecting human rights in places of detention in Australia: National and international rights-based monitoring
Chair: Bronwyn Naylor
Panel: Bronwyn Naylor, Steven Caruana, Laura Grenfell, Deborah Glass
People in detention risk abuse, and the violation of many of their human rights. Robust independent monitoring can provide vital protection for people held in detention. This Panel will examine the effectiveness of monitoring regimes across Australia in protecting the rights of people in detention. Australia has a range of monitoring agencies, most of which function in the absence of formal state human rights instruments. There is no national Human Rights Act, and only three jurisdictions – Victoria, the ACT and Queensland – have such legislation in place. In 2017 the federal government ratified the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT). Australia is now 1 of 91 countries that have ratified the OPCAT. The treaty outlines a comprehensive regime for monitoring all places of detention, aimed at preventing torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. It requires the establishment of independent National Preventive Mechanisms to conduct rigorous inspections and monitoring across all jurisdictions. The Australian government was to have implemented the OPCAT by January 2022 but obtained an extension of time to January 2023. Implementation has to date been patchy and the two most populous states have made little progress. Thousands of people are held every day in Australia in places they are not free to leave, such as prisons, youth justice detention, immigration detention, and psychiatric, disability and aged care facilities. Panel members will evaluate monitoring across several of these sectors, and in particular the opportunities offered by the full implementation of OPCAT.
2a. Harms of Confinement 2: Architectures of Harm and Control
Harmful structures, silenced voices, decolonisation, abolition and repair
Chair: Andrew Burridge
Panel: Ian Warren, Emma Ryan, Tatiana Corrales, Scott Welsh
This panel encourages using carceralism as a frame for promoting interdisciplinary critique and inquiry to pursue transformative justice. While intended to promote security, carceralism and control ideologies stifle open, transparent and accountable governmental and social care practices designed on principles of minimal intervention. They manage risks through surreptitious processes of surveillance and punitive control. Non-transparent modes ofenforcing compliance via carceral surveillance in certain zones or spaces are often based on the fear of individuals and groups who are oppressed by state practices, and function by promoting control, containment and exclusion. They are also characterised by a profound reluctance to confront the reality that complex social problems require equally complex understandings of their systemic nature. Structural dimensions of carceralism fail to acknowledge the harms and dehumanisation of oppressed groups within society these systemic processes can cause. Instead, carceral practices treat people as data signifying a violation, omission or marker of risk, rather than rights-holders who are entitled to and should demand treatment with dignity, individual autonomy and self-worth. The papers in this session emphasize that carceral systems can be revolutionised by understanding their harmful impacts along with the value of abolitionism in the politics of repair to reconstruct concepts of human need and understanding. The papers highlight the centrality of subaltern voices and methodologies to empower homeless people, children and families in the child protection system, or those seeking accountability for state misconduct. Jurisdiction provides an overarching framework for questioning carceral power and the exclusionary geographies it promotes.
- Ian Warren Questioning jurisdiction, territory and space
Jurisdiction gives form to the power of law (Dorsett & McVeigh 2012). It is also inherently carceral and geographic. I argue jurisdiction is central to many contemporary carceral practices driven by surveillance and questionable forms of government control. Specifically, jurisdiction is commonly underpinned by a binary philosophy of inclusion and exclusion within the legal order. For example, criminal jurisdiction is predicated on determining how behaviours in certain spaces are to be deemed as either orderly or warranting removal. Anglo English legal traditions promote such binary approaches to manage people, spaces and conduct through forms of territorial control and the sanctioning of enforcement power. The links between legal power and geography are crucial for critiquing many prevailing jurisdictional claims that are tied to harmful carceral practices. Moving beyond these issues is important for promoting non-territorial and controlling forms order, through principles such as belonging, cultural affiliation and communitarianism.
- Emma Ryan Tasers on trains: Expanding the carceral landscape
Tasers have proliferated policing globally despite minimal independent evaluation of their efficacy. This paper examines their introduction and use across Australian policing jurisdictions with a focus on Victoria, where the weapons are soon to be made general issue weapons for all patrolling police and also for Protective Services Officers (PSOs) whose role is to enhance public safety on trains and around transport precincts. Arming PSOs with Tasers exponentially expands opportunities for state control of people considered deviant or risky through the threat of coercive and potentially lethal force. This paper suggests there is an urgent need for vigilant monitoring of Taser carriage by PSOs patrolling on trains and train stations in Victoria and the absence of such monitoring (and transparent reporting of use mode and frequency) will magnify systemic harm and dehumanisation of vulnerable public transport users, adding to the geography of carceralism in metropolitan Melbourne.
- Tatiana Corrales Punishing trauma: Child protection, risk and the control of motherhood
Child protection systems in most Anglo Celtic nations increasingly mirror the logics and patterns of carceralism. The focus on predictive risk modelling, the erosion of judicial discretion when making decisions on the permanent removal of children, and the prioritization – in policy, practice and funding structures – of the out-of-home care system over early intervention or family preservation services, reflects two dominant ideologies: risk mitigation through surveillance and the control of certain types of mothers through certain forms of mothering. Intersecting forms of disadvantage, including race, class, and disability, simultaneously raise the visibility of mothers who are perceived as ‘dangerous’ and ‘neglectful’, while rendering their experiences of trauma within multiple carceral systems as invisible. This presentation argues that the harms caused by the child protection system are disproportionately felt by marginalized and disenfranchised mothers, whose extensive experiences of structural abuse, neglect and violence are repositioned as evidence of risk and failed motherhood.
- Scott Welsh Intersections of human, non-human and animal captivity
The experience of homelessness constructs an identity that internalises society’s carceral responses to the socially deviant. Ironically, these responses attempt to practice social control over behaviours they cannot understand or empathise with. The self is transformed and criminalised by experiences beyond the control of the individual. The dehumanisation of ‘disposable people’ or ‘human trash’ is internalised by the person who experiences being disposed of, and socially transgressive behaviour follows due to engagements with transgressive cultures, which destroys, and then remakes one’s subjectivity and social identity. This paper is an autoethnographic exploration in the form of a reflection on the creative process of making a play. The theatrical production is based on the experience of homelessness embodied in a stray cat, his desperation, criminalisation, and incarceration. The remaking of his subjectivity has mirrored my own journey from criminalisation to emancipation.
2b. Dark Histories 2: Women, Memorialisation, Activism
Resistance, reclamation, and repair: The Parramatta Female Factory Precinct and Peat Island
Chair: Linda Steele
Panel: Poppy De Souza, Bonney Djuric, Justine Lloyd
Focusing on two state-run institutional sites of punitive confinement and coercive control, the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct (PFFP) and Peat Island, this Panel will bring together lived experience and scholarly contributions which engage with complex and fraught histories and legacies of institutional harm, while also attending to transformational possibilities for repair and care on sovereign Indigenous lands. The Panel will explore the politics of memorialisation and contested narratives; struggles for previously silenced voices to be heard; survivor-led and ‘insider activism’ (Wilson and Carlson, 2022); feminist archives and reparative media practices; and institutional transformation, accountability and justice, and social repair. Informal presentations were followed by discussion across the panel, before opening out to Q&A.
2c. Cultural Resistance 2: Art, Performance and Protest
Chair: Dwayne Antojado
- Helen Farley, James Mehigan Art as resistance in Aotearoa New Zealand
This paper presents a brief survey of the role of arts programmes in Ara PoutamaAotearoa Department of Corrections New Zealand. It will investigate the facilitation and advocacy role of Arts Access Aotearoa in the carceral space which has resulted in securing funding for a range of arts initiatives and a fellowship for someone recently released. It will examine how resistance was articulated through Project Auaha, an Ara Poutama initiative that enabled people in prison to find a larger outlet for their art, and the barriers encountered to bring those artworks to light. People in prison are hidden from view. The population at large makes assumptions about who they are, where they come from and what they have done. Given that over half of people in prison in Aotearoa New Zealand are Māori, with a further 17 per cent being Pacifika, being hidden from view takes on a cultural focus, grounded in the systemic racism of public institutions.In the face of this systemic othering, Ara Poutama Aotearoa have released their strategy, Hōkai Rangi that places an emphasis on ‘Humanising and healing.’ Though the frontline application of the strategy is stalled largely by the consequences of the global pandemic, some arts programmes have been able to endure, providing an outlet for people in prison to vent their frustration of constant lockdowns, suspended whānau visits, and a dearth of information about the outside world. From the hands of the artist comes the angst of confinement in an unjust and uncaring system.
- Caitlyn D’Gluyas Transformation through time: Exploring the temporality and liminality of a nineteenth century juvenile convict prison
Criminal youth formed a notable part of the convict population transported to colonial Australia. Within Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) these juveniles were sometimes separated from adult convicts and sent to Point Puer, a reform and trade training prison that operated between 1834 and 1849. The archaeology of this carceral landscape highlights how all reform practices, whether moral, scholastic, religious or labour focused, were designed to create independent workers. This paper examines how the site embodied liminality to select, reform and re-integrate young workers in an early nineteenth century carceral setting. Point Puer was, however, extremely varied in its transformative practices; there was no set age for arrival and no defined skills or standards required to depart. This paper argues that time was a central factor in the transformative agenda of the prison and that the certainty of its passing eliminated the need for standardised or successful reform methods. Further, since it targeted young convicts and their future value, it was able to avoid wider colonial carceral standards of productivity, punishment or economic gain. Despite a rhetoric of reform, Point Puer was a ‘holding cell’ for prisoners awaiting adulthood. The adolescent occupants could reject or comply with the liminal environment forced upon them, but had no choice in the temporal changes that altered how they were perceived. This paper uses archaeological methods to explore how Point Puer functioned differently to contemporary adult convict establishments because of its juvenile occupants and their growth over time.
- Cate O’Neill, Constance Thurley-Hart Mapping sites of care and confinement of children and young people in Australia
This paper will explore how the Find & Connect Map of Children’s Homes represents and commemorates the history of sites of ‘care’ and confinement of children and young people. Launched in 2019, this interactive map was the culmination of 18 months of research, technical development, and usability testing. The map was developed collaboratively with people who grew up in out of-home care and their support services. Care Leavers, including Joanna Penglase and Jacqueline Z Wilson, have written about how all children’s institutions – not only reformatories and training centres -are carceral spaces. The map shows the locations of over 2000 institutions in Australia from 1795-1990. Most of these sites are not protected by heritage mechanisms, and many of them no longer exist in the physical world. The map validates the years of advocacy and work by Care Leavers and makes visible the network and system of children’s Homes that spread across Australia following colonisation. The Find & Connect map is a powerful visual representation of the extent and reach of the Australian child ‘welfare’ system and puts these institutions back into the history and landscape of nearly every locality across the nation. It shows that this history of
confinement has left traces everywhere in our urban landscapes, just as it has left traces of trauma in the bodies and minds of Care Leavers.
2d. Spatiality, Care and Control 1: Beyond Prison
Chair: Tatiana Corrales
- Jessica Collins, Richard Carter-White, Claudio Minca The camp as a custodian institution: The case of Krnjača Asylum Centre, Belgrade, Serbia
Care and control are concepts frequently invoked within Camp Studies, often as a means of characterising the varied logics of institutional camps. This article builds on recent geographical literature by going beyond care and control and proposing a renewed focus on the idea of custodianship within a range of historical and contemporary camp contexts, from colonial and totalitarian concentration camps to present-day refugee camps. The notion of the camp as a custodian institution, that is, a sovereign authority whose biopolitical interventions imply both the preservation and curtailment of life, provides an effective means of apprehending the complex nature of camp governance, and in particular the shifting intensity of power relations between management and camp residents. We develop this conceptual discussion via existing literature on concentration camps, before grounding our analysis in the case study of Krnjača Asylum Centre, a refugee camp along the so-called Balkan Route migration corridor in Serbia. Our empirical discussion of Krnjača indicates that the concept of custodianship can be useful in understanding seemingly distinct and even contradictory modes of camp governance as part of a single coherentregime of power, from the imposition and negotiation of everyday rules and regulations to the strict containment measures put into place during COVID-19.
- Debasreeta Deb Endless captivity: Detention centres as sites of confinement in Assam
‘I feel a part of me has been taken. The part that could feel warmth, happiness, and desire’, said 42 year-old Sabeda Khatun (name changed) on her release after spending 10 years in a detention centre in Assam. Sabeda’s narrative portrays the precarious existence of captive subjects inside the detention centres in Assam – those who are suspected of being ‘foreigners’ are condemned to live – under extremely inhuman conditions.Detention centres in Assam are meant to be institutions for short-term ‘imprisonment’ of undocumented immigrants and refugees. However, today, they have become synonymous with the idea of endless captivity for them. The problem with detention centres in Assam cannot be viewed in isolation. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, aimed at identifying and expelling individuals not possessing requisite documents pertaining to their citizenship, has resulted in the construction of approximately 1.9 million potentially stateless individuals, who are being sent to these detention centres. As many as twenty-five deaths have occurred in these detention centres, and the authorities have failed to take responsibility for the same. These detainees have been living a “bare life” or “naked life” devoid of any political status, or human rights, and are being permanently subjected to a state of exclusion (Agamben,1998), causing their socio-political and cultural death even if they are biologically alive. The detention centres thus become a dystopian variation of Michel Foucault’s (1977) panopticon, the circular model put forward by Jeremy Bentham (1791) for the building of eighteenth-century prisons, where prisoners were constantly observed from a central tower within which resided the power of the observer. Likewise, in Assam’s detention centres, the individuals lead a highly regimented life being constantly policed, disciplined and punished by the State. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in Assam since 2019, the study provides an exploration into the detention of illegalized non- citizens in Assam. The fabric of everyday life and the lived experiences of the detainees are the focus of examination. The paper, through the narratives of these now released ex-detainees, depicts their stories of suffering caused by their loss of citizenship which has led them towards a highly precarious ontology. It also attempts to unravel their experiences of confinement. Findings highlight the oppressive qualities of detention and its ripple effects on people’s life spaces.
- Julia Manek From open access to confinement camps: Countermapping un[care] and the construction of harmful spaces in Samos’ hotspot camps
The entanglements of care and control shape border regimes. Although they often remain invisible, they manifest in the dispositive of refugee [confinement] camps. While these camps differ in their (e.g. legal, political and spatial) configurations, empirically, they share features: they reduce care to humanitarian questions; they turn more and more into securitized places of confinement; they cause harm to their inmates.In the context of the EU’s border regime, this contribution analyses how “care” is crucial for the construction of confinement sites. In 2021, the inauguration of the first newly constructed remote and closed EU hotspot camps in the Aegean took place in Samos. While the “old” camp in the city of Vathy had been criticised for its inhuman condition, the “new” so-called Multi-Purpose Reception and Identification Centres (MPRIC) promised neat humanitarian conditions. Following the proposal of scaling detention from the global to the intimate, this contribution builds on Human Rights reports4 and on psycho geographical countermappings, a novel approach derived from feminist geography and critical migration research. The countermappings of [former] camp inmates and the human rights reports unanimously dismantle a veritable system of [un]care. What significance does it have for the camp’s construction as a material environment and social space? What are its relations with the subjectivation of [potential] inmates?
- Manas Raturi Freedom through incarceration: Care and confinement in a leprosy home
Several institutions structurally combine practices of care and incarceration – highlighting deep entanglements between the welfare and the penal state. This paper engages with one such institution in India through tracing incarceration experiences of men formerly detained in Delhi’s Tahirpur Leprosy Home. Pathologising people with leprosy as infectious agents of the disease, the state sought to segregate leprosy-affected beggars by detaining them in the leprosy home built under the Delhi Prevention of Begging Rules, 1960. However, the paper shows how the leprosy-affected beggars – bereft of any economic, medical or familial support – voluntarily engaged in a cycle of arrest and incarceration to secure state support inside the leprosy home. Over the years, through designating specific spots in the city to ‘beg’ at a particular time and place, the men periodically got themselves arrested to receive guaranteed food, shelter and medicine. Further, they criticise the 2018 Delhi High Court judgment striking down prosecutions under the 1960 law as unconstitutional – instead using terms such as azadi (freedom), suvidha (comfort) and bhaichara (brotherhood) to describe life in confinement. Relooking at the totalising imagery of incarceration as inescapably destructive to its inmates, the paper engages with literature on how vulnerable populations come to consider incarceration as ‘care of last resort’ – a phenomenon insightfully termed ‘jailcare’ by Carolyn Sufrin. Based on fieldwork data collected for the author’s doctoral thesis in sociology, the paper is set against the ongoing global shift in leprosy care from institution-based rehabilitation to community-based rehabilitation models.
3a. Harms of Confinement 3: Health and resistance
Chair: Ian Warren
- Ben Barron “You couldn’t hide from it”: Incarceration and vulnerability to environmental hazards in Colorado, USA
As climate change creates conditions that make environmental hazards and disasters more likely, more frequent, and more severe, vulnerable populations are disproportionately exposed to the harmful impacts of these events. Incarcerated people are no exception. This paper shares findings from focus groups and semi structured interviews conducted with formerly incarcerated people who endured heat waves, cold spells, and the air quality impacts of wildfires during their incarceration in prisons and jails in Colorado, USA. Our paper provides a platform for formerly incarcerated people to share their experiences with these events, and in particular their physical, emotional, and psychological impacts. We explore how the physical infrastructure and the emergency communication infrastructure of carceral facilities impacts the vulnerability and risk exposure of the people incarcerated within those facilities to the harmful impacts of environmental hazards. We leverage engineering and architectural knowledge as a forensic frame, accruing evidence that the way carceral facilities are built and operated impose environmental harms on their occupants – harms that are additional to the punishments imposed during sentencing, and that will intensify as climate change continues, putting yet another consequential burden on those who come under the surveillance of the U.S. criminal justice system. We contend that these harms push incarceration beyond the bounds of a just and proportional response to social wrongdoing. We encourage abolitionist and decarceral academics and activists to strategically employ forensic engineering and architectural assessment of environmental vulnerability – for example, in helping to identify the most egregious facilities as candidates for decarceration.
- Andrew Burridge Non-care in the detention hotel: 20 years of Australia’s use of ‘alternative places of detention’, 2002-2022
This presentation focuses upon the use of hotels by the Australian government to detain and contain asylum seekers, refugees and immigration deportee, as part of its wider detention landscape. I examine the development and implementation of APODs within the broader Australian detention landscape since 2002, initially in efforts to remove women and children from detention centres, and to supposedly provide access to additional medical or other care within the community. I then turn to detainee accounts, media reporting and independent inquiries and inspections of these sites, to demonstrate how APODs can be understood as sites of non-care (Inda, 2022). The use of hotels has proven to be a long-term and durable form of detention that has created significant harm through practices of cramping and choking, often hidden within the urban fabric of cities and local communities. Hotels and other ad hoc buildings used to incarcerate, therefore form an integral part of the wider detention landscape, locally, nationally, and globally. To date, no comprehensive study of Australia’s use of APODs has been conducted, considering the longer historical trajectory and purpose, and connection to the broader onshore and offshore detention landscape. Further, no publicly available comprehensive documentation of APODs exists – their location, number of detainees held, and other information remains difficult to trace. It is the hidden nature of the hotels, coupled with outsourcing of security and minimal independent oversight, I argue, that further contributes to practices and outcomes of non-care for detainees.
- Andreea Lachsz, Monique Hurley Why practices that could be torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment should never have formed part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, state and territory governments across Australia were quick to implement restrictive measures in prisons. Already unacceptable prison conditions were, and still are, compounded by the widespread use of practices such as ‘quarantine’ and ‘lockdowns’, which place people at increased risk of being detained in conditions that amount to solitary confinement. By way of example, in response to COVID-19, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland introduced mandatory 14-day quarantine for all new prison admissions. In light of the well documented harm that solitary confinement can cause, it is a practice that should be prohibited by law and should never have formed part of the public health response to COVID-19. Safer alternatives exist, like reducing the number of people detained in prisons. The pandemic also presents an opportunity to rethink detention policies generally, and to fully realise the vision of the UN’s anti-torture treaty – the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) – regarding best practice oversight of places of detention. January 2023 looms as the deadline for OPCAT implementation, and it is crucial that there is increased transparency and accountability of prison practices to ensure that solitary confinement and other disproportionately restrictive practices are not used as part of the ongoing response to COVID-19 and beyond.
- Katrina Ward, Aurelius Francisco Carceral control and resistance in Oklahoma: A protest oral history
Oklahoma has a long history of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism dating back to statehood with Black and Indigenous communities sharing a similarly long history of protesting for their humanity to be recognized and respected. Contemporarily, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, conservative residents reacted to protests with dehumanization and violence and the Oklahoma State Legislature introduced and passed multiple bills to curb the right to assembly and ambiguously label most acts of protest as “riots,” theracialized language of which is clear, allowing for harsher criminalization. The racist beliefs held by government officials that shaped these bills shows the attempt to control spaces of protest is both racially motivated and violent.The Black and Indigenous led efforts that aim to call out historic harms in both the cultural and physical landscape of Oklahoma with the intention of demanding justice and repair have created spaces –physical and figurative– however brief, where the violence of control enacted by these bills and policies are visible. This direct resistance to state violence is an act of presence, wherein resistance is found in the action of being physically present and in staking claim to a space for your people. These confined spaces of protest elicit the opposing forces of the state and the people oppressed for all to see. This project explores the dynamics of dualism of joy and violence present in these spaces and moments of resistance as a way of making plain structural violence and harm through presence.
3b. Dark Histories 3: Institutionalised Care
Child welfare – ‘caring’ or criminalising? Historical perspectives
Chair: Dave McDonald
Panel: Nell Musgrove, David McGinniss, Dee Michell
For more than two centuries, Australia has been institutionalising children, and from as early as the 19th century there was social commentary about children in ‘care’ (to use more modern terminology) being on an inevitable path to the prison. This stigmatisation of children in ‘care’ as future criminals quickly became accepted as fact, yet little research has been done to test this ‘truth’ or to explore the complexities of the connections between historical out-of-home ‘care’ systems and criminal justice systems. The conventional wisdom that dominated public rhetoric in the 19th and 20th centuries was that the children themselves were inherently predisposed to criminality, and that child welfare systems were a reformatory force. This panel draws on research undertaken as part of the project “Care Leaver Activism and Advocacy: From Deficit Models to Survivor Narratives” and argues for inverting this understanding—systems that described themselves as ‘caring’ for children were, often, themselves responsible for criminalising the children they claimed they were ‘reforming’ and ‘protecting’.
3c. Cultural Resistance 3: Word and Image as Resistance
Chair: Pan Karanikolas
- Baljeet Kaur, CP Shruthi Micro-geography of letter writing by prisoners sentenced to death: An ecosystem of care, control and resistance
This paper examines the micro-geography of over 700 letters exchanged between death row prisoners in India and the authors, over 20 months from 2020 – 2022. The need to regularly exchange letters emerged with the onset of aggravated forms of ‘abandon’ during the pandemic. The sociology of prisons reveals the highly carceral confinement endured by bodies of these prisoners leaving scars of ‘death row phenomenon’, turning them docile. Carceral geography controls this ecosystem through tools of the panopticon, power and stigma of the death sentence. But when a new dimension of communication through letters is introduced into their carceral space, how do these bodies respond? We argue that the flow of letters inside and outside of prison blurs carceral boundaries and allows prisoners to experience an ecosystem of care that provides information, aids mental wellbeing and propels their growth. The violence of prison life often results in obstruction in communication and, ultimately, the dehumanisation of prisoners. And when this system of care gets caught in the carceral web, the prisoners resist, and deploy strategies to protrude out of the culture of death row. The artwork that often accompanies these letters illustrates their longing to keep up with time lost, and create an alternate universe of joy, where they participate in societal norms and relive memories of the past. In defying potential sanctions, prisoners exercise agency and personalise these spaces resulting in spatial modification and beginning a journey towards regaining their personhood and rebuilding the identity lost in the carceral space.
- Sue Jeong Ka The
BannedBook List: A monument of in/justice and intellectual freedom for incarcerated readers
The Banned Book List is a socially engaged media art project that critically maps American prison’s banned book data while exploring its epistemic injustice in the racial carceral state. This project on banned books deals with the analogy between epistemic supremacy and prison censorship on publication and printed materials. To this end, my study will draw on banned book datasets that show how censorship policies’ colorblindness and other related discrimination persist in carceral systems. The structure of this database carries statistical, geographical, and architectural layers for the user to zoom into and learn about the unreliable nature of the data provided holistically from the bigger unit (i.e., a country) to the smaller unit (i.e., a correctional facility) within each state in the US. Further, the data is designed to reveal book titles when the user acts following an additional hover interaction to symbolize once again the cumbersome process of requesting and receiving this data from each facility, specifically in the US, cleverly hidden from the public eye. For the 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography, The Banned Book List will present carceral censorship’s troubling patterns of discrimination. It has done so by analyzing American prisons’ banned book datasets based on the authors’ races and ethnicities and each book’s content—especially as this content pertains to sexually liberal perspectives. At this stage, the project is focused on Asians and Asian Americans behind manga, a genre of comics and graphic novels. Most of its content creators are East Asian and Japanese in particular.
- Anna Goodchild One year – transcending prison walls
This project explores the mismatch between a British prison reality depicted by the mass media via television documentaries, press articles, advertising, prison genre images and political rhetoric, and that described by criminologists, prisoners, lawyers, artists, therapists, prison governors, writers and sociologists. The theory underpinning this exploration is Michel Foucault’s concept of the prison as a heterotopia, a world-within-a-world in which those in it are not there by choice. The Latin motto above the entrance to HMP Dartmoor where the subject of this essay was held, Parcere Subjectis, translates as ‘take care of the prisoners’. It is pivotal in this work in determining who has to do that. The investigation of the relevance to 21st Century carceral systems of the motto, traced back to a 1st Century BC epic poem, throws up interesting connections. Finally, this project uses the work of contemporary photographers Edmund Clark, Jennifer Wicks, Broomberg and Channarin and Donovan Wylie to shed light on the miss-match of messages relating to incarceration in 21st Century Britain. The findings reveal that, although a motto cannot contain all that is done in a prison, given that this motto faces outwards, who has to care for the prisoners becomes obvious. The surfeit of prison genre images has, interestingly, opened a debate on the representation of incarceration. It finds, furthermore, that there has to be a wider acceptance that the days of seeing prisoners and ex-prisoners as a sub species of humanity should be relegated to history.
3d. Colonial Carcerality 1: Homes Not Prisons
Stop prison expansion, fund housing for women and their children!
Panel: Gabriela Franich (Chair) with respondents with lived experience
Homes Not Prisons is a campaign calling on the Victorian Government to stop the violent colonial policy of prison expansion, and reallocate the budget for prison building to public and Aboriginal community controlled housing, to provide “housing first” – especially to support criminalised women and their children. Each panellist is involved in the campaign and each has survived the harms of the (in)justice system, including criminalisation and incarceration. They are here to speak to their experiences of systemic harm, the fight for prison abolition, dwelling justice, and safety for all.
Film Screenings & Plenary
Films: Remain, Agonistes
In Conversation: with Behrouz Boochani, Hoda Afshar
Chair: Claire Loughnan
4a. Spatiality, Care and Control 2: Academic Allyship
Academic allyship as monitoring and accountability tool in places of migrant confinement
Chair: Julia Manek
Panel: Dora Rebelo, Francesca Esposito, Lou Armitt, Aminata Kalokoh, Njideka Angela Obi, Charly Walters, Julia Manek, Moshood Olanrewaju
Using empirical evidence, arts-based interventions and collection of testimonies gathered in different areas of the world (Europe, Africa, Central America and the US), we propose different methods of scholar allyship with people on the move trapped in sites of confinement. We envision allyship as a form of “accompaniment” (Farmer 2013), i.e. standing with someone, to be present on a difficult journey. There’s an element of openness and trust, in accompaniment, whereby the ally sticks with “the task” until it’s deemed completed by the person being accompanied (Farmer, 2013, p. 234). It’s a compromise of solidarity, where the allies can use their presence as means of monitoring and accountability for migrant injustices. All panellists are activists and/or activist scholars, direct witnesses to a series of border violences being produced by a combination of colonial, racist, and capitalist structures and relations working to maintain global inequalities. Our papers, complemented and enriched by evidence and resistance produced by transnational solidarity groups, show multiple possibilities of allyship between activism and academia, to support migrant justice.
4b. Carceral Continuum 1: The Harms of ‘Care’
Chair: Jennifer Turner
- Marina Richter Legitimising care and control: Insights from two different institutions (prisons and asylum centres)
Care and control are central elements of institutions that operate through confinement. In very general terms, by confining people, the institutions take control of their lives and their decisions, structure their everyday and reduce their opportunities in everyday life but often also in their future lives. At the same time, because they deprive people of the possibility to decide and to act freely, they ultimately restrict their ability to take care of themselves. The institutions therefore also have an obligation to care. The ambivalence of care and control – on the level of institutional rules as well as on the level of everyday practices –is well documented and debated for prisons. For other institutions this has been less researched. In a broader research project, we therefore seek to understand conditions of care and control and their spatiotemporal articulations in various types of institutions. For this presentation I focus on prisons and asylum centres, as they present two examples of institutions where statal power over individuals is strongly exerted, while at the same time following very distinct legitimising logics – at least this is what one could expect. The analysis will address the following questions: How do rules and practices of care and control differ among prisons and asylum centres? And how are these rules and practices legitimised in each institution accordingly? The aim is to deepen the understanding of how control and coercion are legitimised in different institutions and how this islinked to notions of care.
- Becca Hudson Care as a strategy of confinement: Personality disorder, recovery and risk in UK prisons
People subject to imprisonment in the UK are routinely invited and/ or coerced into mental health based interventions as part of their sentence. From ‘trauma informed’ prisons, to behaviour-change programmes, to criminal justice pathways aimed at managing people with particular mental disorders or elemental ‘traits, the UK prison system has within it an elaborate mental health infrastructure. This paper is grounded in the concerns of prisoners and mental health workers caught in this situation, and based on ethnographic research. It begin with testimonies of ambivalence: when your therapist is assessing your need for captivity, what trust is produced? Do caring interventions continually return to the worst thing you have ever done? How can an institution so notoriously traumatic be ‘trauma informed’? From here, it is argued that these increasingly merged systems of care and punishment are emblematic of a broader historical pattern, in which appeals to care for mental ill health drive carceral development. The ambivalence experienced by research participants is correlated with UK justice and health strategy, wherein appeals to include and care for troubling disorders like PD have driven the expansion of penal infrastructure, and the recruitment of mental health workers into the assessment of criminal risk. Concurrently, comparable mental health support outside prison walls has been emaciated. This imperative of inclusion and care, then, ultimately folds prisoners and mental health workers into prisons, institutions that act as engines of social harm and exclusion.
- Lorena Gazzotti There, where none can see them: Confining care for migrant children at the southern Spanish border
Since the 1970s, Western countries have increasingly sought to control migration flows. A wide array of border control instruments has therefore been developed to select, filter and deter the arrival of unwanted migrants. As vulnerable people, migrant children have rights which oblige states to grant them protection and care. Existing scholarship has widely documented the contradictions emerging when an unaccompanied minor is detected on the national territory of a European country, as state sovereignty is actually trapped between a political will of removal and a legal duty to protect. However, less attention has been paid to how such contradiction materializes in the infrastructure of protection that the statesets up to tend to migrant children. Building on literature on welfare geography and border carcerality, this paper addresses this gap by exploring the creation and development of an infrastructure of child protection centres in the Spanish enclave of Melilla and in the archipelago of the Canary Islands since the late 1990s. I build on archival and empirical research conducted between 2019 and 2022 in both sites to argue that the creation of an infrastructure to tend to migrant children testifies of the caring duty that the State is legally obliged to fulfill. However, the location, venue, and conditions of such centres is symptomatic of the confining reflex of the security state, which tries to distance undesirable foreigners from public scrutiny, not facilitate their integration into society, and remove them as soon as they are no longer protected by child protection law.
- Claire Warrington Carceral care or state control of the ‘undeserving’?
In 1963 England became one of the last countries to decriminalise suicide, which remains one of the biggest killers worldwide, notwithstanding the global pandemic. Nowadays, a compassionate response to the desire to die is almost universally advocated, however, the UK has retained a response more easily located within control, which at times can serve more to perpetuate dangerous cycles of recurrent suicidality than ultimately to protect those at risk, as this presentation will illustrate. The World Health Organization has this year called for mental health care to move away from custodial settings and a deeper consideration of the impact of the structural and social environment, indicating that the use of coercive responses to vulnerability extends far beyond solely the UK. Drawing on findings from an ongoing programme of research on suicide and police mental health act detention, this paper will interrogate some of the assumptions and consequences arising from the use of carceral spaces as the default, and often only, mechanism of caring for those deemed defacto underserving of compassion or non-punitive measures. This paper will begin by demonstrating how legislation has maintained carceral spaces as the sites of care of certain groups of vulnerable people since the 18th century, before proceeding to discuss the inherent impact on mental health that emerges in the contemporary context from failure to question or restructure the continuation of coercion as a proxy for care.
5a. Cultural Resistance 4: Creative Resistance and Sensorial Politics
Chair: Christophe Mincke
- Sophie Lachapelle, Jennifer Kilty “Use your common sense to navigate, and you’re gonna get along okay”: Exploring the sensorial politics of survival and resistance in Canadian federal prisons
What does prison feel like? This question has generated a theoretically and epistemologically innovative body of literature known today as sensorial criminology. However, due to the bureaucratic barriers researchers experience in trying to access prison spaces and incarcerated people, much of this literature is written about/from the privileged experiences of prison ethnographers, undoubtedly missing many of the sensorial nuances of prison life. Using qualitative data gleaned from 57 semi-structured interviews with former federally incarcerated people in Canada, our paper contributes to the sensorial criminology literature by examining the sensory dynamics of prison life as they are grounded in incarcerated people’s lived experiences. To concentrate our discussion, we focus our analytic attention on the sensorial politics of survival and resistance, highlighting how incarcerated people must become affectively and sensorially attuned to the prison environment to survive and resist the state-sanctioned violence of incarceration. After contextualizing our project – Feeling the Carceral – we analyse what many incarcerated people describe as the shocking and tumultuous process of affective attunement to the contemporary prison environment. Next, we demonstrate how incarcerated people use their sensorial interpretations of prison spaces/events to both protect themselves from, and resist, state-sanctioned violence, ultimately questioning the ethics and usefulness of carceral intervention. Specifically, we contend that attending to the ways incarcerated people sensorially decipher and interpret the prison environment not only demonstrates the intelligence and resourcefulness of criminalized people, but it also reveals more subtle, yet nonetheless totalizing, forms of prison violence that have been previously overlooked in the literature.
- Ros Liebeskind The erotics of abjection and queer proto-abolitionist formations in Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour
This paper will present my undergraduate research exploring queer methodologies for prison abolition through an analysis of the extent to which Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour(1950) troubles carceral ideology. Despite the wealth of scholarship on Genet and his body of work at large, there is comparatively little engagement with Un Chant d’Amour, his first and only film. This paper endeavours to draw together the disciplines of art history and carceral geography, while addressing the art historical lack of engagement with carceral studies and abolitionist perspectives. A short, silent black and white film, Un Chant d’Amour depicts a homosocial/homoerotic prison space that inverts the process of disciplinary power, drawing those who enter (further) into criminality, queerness, and abjection. This inversion of the process of disciplinary power via expressions of (deviant) sexuality and desire demonstrates the possibility that queerness possesses to provide methodologies for prison abolition. This paper argues that though Un Chant d’amour troubles the operation of the prison, it fails to undermine carceral ideology further due to the film’s fetishistic approach to race, which compounds the ideology of racial capitalism that underpins the prison. However, I argue that queerness renders these failures generative and invigorating, as their limitations encourage further developments in the queer abolitionist imagining, as demonstrated by the 2002 film Criminal Queers. Abolitionist futures, like queerness, are horizons that we are constantly moving towards. The work of troubling carceral ideology taken up in Un Chant d’Amour remains unfinished and continues to demand the contribution of us all.
- Erin Power ‘A way to paint a nice, shiny gloss over that which is shitty’: Theatre practice as a site for care, control and resistance in the contemporary English prison
Within theatre and performance literature, it is widely accepted that theatre practice, particularly within prisons, has the potential to offer a space of escape, transformation, hope and joy (Shailor 2011, Gallagher 2014, Lucas 2021). This paper situates this potential within the context of the contemporary neoliberal prison, drawing upon ideas of soft power (Crewe 2011) and responsibilisation (Vreugdenhil 2017) to explore the potential of the prison theatre space to foster enactments of care, control and resistance simultaneously. Drawing upon narrative interviews and poetry created with men who had participated in prison theatre projects, this paper highlights the potential for prison arts to act not only as a space of escape, resistance and care but also as a varnish that thinly covers the harms of the contemporary prison. It explores opportunities for connection and interdependence offered by prison arts, which juxtapose rhetorics of individualism perpetuated by the neoliberal prison, and situates this within a funding landscape which limits opportunities for long-term, reliable access to arts in prison. In doing so, this paper draws attention to the complexities of attempting to create spaces for resistance and care in a carceral space.
- Rachel Seoighe, Carly Guest ‘Wounded storytellers’: The potential of creative methods in facilitating women’s return to Holloway prison
In this presentation we reflect on our evaluation of a forum theatre and documentary project by the production company Power Play. As part of the project, six women formally incarcerated in HMP Holloway, Lon on returned to the now-empty building and participated in interviews, walkabouts and forum theatre workshops. As evaluators of the project, our research approach includes analysis of rushes of each stage of filming, preparatory documents and our pre- and post-participation interviews with the women taking part. In addition, we ran art workshops, led by graphic novelist Una, with some of the women, resulting in collage, reflective texts and self-portraits. We consider in this paper how women experienced returning to this prison space, in the context of a project founded in a trauma-informed practice of care. We analyse the process of returning –with careful support and using creative workshop methods –to a decommissioned prison which was experienced and remembered very differently by each woman. The themes that emerged in the rushes, workshops and interviews included: ghosts and haunting, the changing pace and sound of the prison, reclaiming one’s power in a space of powerlessness, and breath, grounding and healing. We consider how these themes suggest that the women return to the space as ‘wounded storytellers’ (Frank, 1995), whose wounds afford them narrative power and for whom returning to and remapping space can be part of the process of recovery and repair.
5b. The Carceral Continuum 2: Global Insights
Chair: Lauren Martin
- Lauren Weber Redevelopment, crisis, and the real estate state: Carceral space as shelter in Portland, Oregon USA
This paper focuses on the case of a never-opened jail in Portland, Oregon that was purchased by a local real estate developer, leased out to a non-profit, and run as a shelter and navigation center nearly twenty years after the building’s construction. Using a conjectural analysis of news media, legislative documents, and interviews, I investigate the narratives of the housing emergency that not only led to the push to open the jail-as-shelter, but also the racialized narratives of crisis that contributed to the jail’s construction in the first place – leading to questions about changing governance structures, racialized systems of housing and labor, and (in)visibility of the housing crisis. Drawing upon literature on the real estate state, abolitionist geographies, and queered conceptions of crisis, I argue that new actors taking part in shelter and service provision, such as real estate developers, are resulting in new spaces and models of both housing and shelter provision, blurring lines between care and carcerality. Moving forward, I aim to understand the evolving relationships between the real estate state, the non-profit industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex.
- Jennifer Turner, Rosemary Ricciardelli, James Gacek The ‘pains of employment’? Connecting air and sound quality to correctional officer experiences of health and wellness in prison space
Drawing upon interview data with Canadian federal correctional officers (n=60), each with less than two years of occupational tenure, we investigate how recently-hired correctional officers make connections between sensory engagements with their physical working environment and their mental health and wellness. Using a semi-grounded emergent theme approach, we examine two themes within the data: (1) air quality and (2) sound quality. Findings highlight how air quality and sound quality generate physical feelings that create concerns for CO workspaces, especially if they can potentially lead to long-term respiratory and auditory problems for COs as well as prisoners. These outcomes, which we term the ‘pains of employment’, support a clear call to improve prison space to support correctional officer (and prisoner) in this environment. However, sensations of the prison environment are also embroiled with perceptions of spatial experience, further shaped by the prisoners within the space, that collectively impact CO constructions of health and wellness. This generates problematic sentiments that the prisoners, and not specifically prison infrastructure, is the root cause of poor air quality and sound quality. Such perceptions appear to influence COs approaches to the management of prisoners, informing vigilance and risk negotiation. To that end, we highlight how the physical quality of both air and sound in the prison environment is not only a factor in CO constructions of health and well-being but also have the potential to influence how they discharge their role.
- Ariel Machado Godinho Carceral geographies and new urban frontiers: State-led gentrification and incarceration of homelessness in São Paulo’s central area
This paper discusses the interconnectedness between gentrification, criminalization of racialized poverty, and incarceration of homeless residents in São Paulo’s central area. Inspired by the notion of “gentrification-to-prison pipeline” (HAMILTON, 2017), it aims to trace the lines connecting the “new” urban frontiers and carceral landscape—focusing on São Paulo’s Provisional Detention Centers (CDPs). Fieldwork alongside grassroots movements and documentary research materials will be mobilized in this direction. For at least three decades, the Luz region has been distinguished by concentrating low-income dwellings—as tenements and single-room occupancy hotels—and a transient population framed as crack users, composed mainly of homeless people and associated arbitrarily with drug sales and minor crimes. Gradually, this local dynamic began to be treated by the public authorities as an obstacle to the urban restructuring and revitalization projects conceived for the central area. Amidst the current round of systematic evictions, interdiction orders, and expropriation for land concession, pre-trial detentions seem to function as a way to neutralize visible homelessness (MARCUSE, 1988), closely articulated to urban security architecture and exceptional policing practices. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of poor and homeless people arrested for carrying small amounts of drugs, making most of São Paulo’s CDPs known as “crackhead’s jails” within the prison system (BIONDI, 2014; MALLART, RUI, 2017). On the other side of the walls. confinement for indefinite periods causes them to “go out of circulation” temporarily, accelerating the social cleansing and state-led gentrification.
Day 3: Thursday 15th December
Plenary
Indigo Daya
Chair: Claire Loughnan
6a. Carceral Continuum 3: Beyond Walls
Chair: Bronwyn Naylor
- André de Quadros Scaling walls, dismantling asymmetries through the Arts
The prison wall is an obstacle through which numerous arts educators and artists have passed through, for fieldwork, to teach, and to make art, sometimes collaboratively. In my observation, the patterns of such activity have mirrored the scholarly, artistic, and educational work outside prison. However, the asymmetry of power is amplified in prison, where participants have less agency over their learning and artistic outputs. There is a further dimension, that of trauma, which, although present in the general population, (see, for example, Maté 2021), is heightened in incarcerated settings. In this paper, I argue that Eurocentric and colonial pedagogic practices (de Quadros, 2019) favor the perpetuation of asymmetrical practice, while more dialogic practice, (Freire, 1970/2000) offers possibilities for transgression, liberation, and borderlessness. The term “borderlessness” is framed within Mbembe’s concept in which he presents a utopic vision of egalitarian practice. I will argue for such a practice (de Quadros & Amrein, 2022) that dismantles and supersedes more traditional forms of arts making. As a microcosm of a decolonial and empowering practice, I will present musical and artistic illustrations from incarcerated men, as well as position statements from them. This paper is in dialogue with these questions: How can we imagine and enact a future in which the border of the prison,as well as the border between scholar and “subject” or educator and student be collapsed in the carceral context? Is such a borderless future possible?
- Emma Russell ‘Seeing like a cop’: Visualising geographies of criminalisation and control
Building on extensive work on mass incarceration, abolitionist scholars are increasingly attending to the problems of policing and ‘mass criminalisation’ (Porter & Cunneen 2020; Richie & Eife 2021; Vitale 2017). The growing emphasis on criminalisation reorients abolitionist attention away from the ‘backend’ of the carceral system (i.e., the prison) to the ‘frontend’, which encompasses not only the police but also criminal lawmaking, bail regimes and more. These aspects of carceral continuums are integral to examine and yet, compared to detention and imprisonment, the spatialisation of carceral power through policing has received relatively little attention within carceral geography (Jefferson 2020; Linnemann & Turner 2020; Massaro & Boyce 2021).In this paper, I explore how carceral power is visualised and spatialised through criminalising practices of ‘seeing like a cop’ (Guenther 2019), such as police stop-and-searches, licence plate scans, and intervention order applications. I draw on research examining the policing of women who experience various forms of interpersonal, state, and structural violence, to highlight the ways of seeing and governing spaces that facilitate racial criminalisation and gender entrapment, and to point towards alternative frames.
- Gabriela Franich I tried to be better than the systems that failed them: The experiences of service providers supporting women on remand in Victoria, Australia
My project documents the experiences of service providers who support women on remand in Victoria, Australia. Remand refers to being imprisoned without being sentenced, either before a bail hearing or awaiting sentencing (Corrections Victoria, 2019; Russell et al., 2020). I conducted semi-structured interviews which addressed service providers’ professional experiences and their perspectives on issues related to women’s remand incarceration in Victoria. Preliminary thematic analysis results have demonstrated that service providers supporting women on remand often feel frustration in the face of a convoluted service sector, including unpredictable court and prison operations. Participants also spoke about how these frustrations have been compounded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, many participants felt that the harmful bail laws, combined with a lack of funding and resourcing for criminalised women, meant that remand was a missed opportunity to engage supports for women. Instead, women often sat in prison feeling bored and hopeless. The transient nature of remand also meant that booking appointments and making plans was difficult, and participants reported that clients often ‘disappeared’ after being suddenly released. In addition, service providers also offered a cross-sectional perspective about how women come to be imprisoned on remand. Interviewees reported working with women who experienced housing instability, domestic and family violence, and life-long narratives that ‘led’ to criminalisation. Moreover, many interviewees feel that there are inherent injustices built intoVictoria’s criminal-legal system, which compound disadvantage for women.
- Liam Martin Carceral care: Prison re-entry and the long shadow of mass incarceration
This paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to examine the tensions of care and control at a halfway house in Greater Boston. Staff and volunteers describe the program as a charitable service and alternative to the punitive treatment residents receive elsewhere in the criminal justice system. Yet the house is also integrated within this same system: funded in part by the state Department of Corrections and charged with managing men forced to live there under parole and probation conditions. The dual construction of the program as both criminal justice sanction and site of social service delivery creates institutional frictions with important implications for the daily rounds inside. I develop the concept of carceral care to analyze the experience of residents accessing housing and other social supports at a halfway house where they are also subjected to curfews and drug testing within a regime of carceral confinement.
6b. Spatiality, Care and Control 3: Immigration Detention Practices
Chair: Leanne Weber
- Amy Nethery Incarceration, classification, and control: Administrative detention in settler colonial Australia
Administrative detention, a form of non-judicial incarceration, was a powerful tool of settler colonialism. Administrative detention enables governments to incarcerate whole categories of people, often indefinitely and under unregulated conditions, to manage perceived threats to national identity, integrity, or security. In Australia, various forms of administrative detention have been implemented almost continuously since British settlement. By treating different forms of administrative detention as variations of the same category of governmental power, this paper depicts this form of incarceration as fundamental to the creation and character of settler colonial societies. The presentation develops a history of Australian administrative detention by identifying the striking similarities between three historical forms – Aboriginal reserves, quarantine stations, and enemy alien internment camps – and immigration detention in the present day. Administrative detention has been used to establish order and hierarchy in the settler colonial state by classifying populations into subgroups, and has contributed to the character of its culture: in particular, the precarious sense of belonging afforded to some categories of non-citizen, and the primacy of executive power in controlling these categories. The paper offers an endogenous explanation for the entrenchment of immigration detention policy, despite its flaws and harms.
- Samantha O’Donnell Immigration detention: A site of harm for migrant and refugee women who are victim-survivors of family violence
The violence of Australia’s harsh border control regime is well-documented. Within scholarship and advocacy there has been a particular focus on the harms produced through the indefinite and mandatory detention of refugees and asylum seekers without a valid visa in immigration prisons both onshore and offshore. Despite this focus there has been limited attention given to the gendered impact of Australia’s immigration detention regime and no dedicated exploration of the impact of immigration detention on victim-survivors of family violence. In this paper I draw on in-depth interviews from a broader PhD research project with, migrant and refugee women in Australia who have experienced family violence and whose migration status is precarious, and key support workers from community-based organisations. I focus specifically on the narratives of migrant and refugee women impacted by immigration detention. In so doing, I explore immigration detention as a site where harm is both reinforced and newly-created for women whose migration status is precarious and who have experienced family violence. I also suggest that a gendered analysis is critical in light of previous governmental rhetoric that uses family violence to justify harsh and restrictive immigration practices. By exploring immigration detention as a site of harm for migrant and refugee women who are victim-survivors of family violence, this research also supports and echoes the calls of many activists and scholars who demand the abolition of Australia’s immigration detention regime.
- Saba Vasefi Borders of exclusion: Gendered counter narratives
Women living under authoritarian regimes such as the Iranian government and Australia’s extraterritorial asylum regime on Nauru are exposed to a carceral culture and to structural exclusion. This paper is concerned with the gendered counter-narratives under these regimes. In regimes like Iran, women’s voices are often unheard in settings marked by the dominant voices of men. Ironically, it is also evident in sites where women have sought freedom from such domination, like in Australia’s immigration detention regimes. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘subaltern’ and reflecting on the concept of “reterritorialization”, this paper examines how subaltern women exert cyberspace as terrain of resistance, employing their phone to not only deterritorialize masculinist norms, but also to empower themselves by engaging in counter-narratives to subvert the subjugation and invisibility of their stories and bodies. This research arises out of my reporting as a scholar-journalist on women on death row in Iran, and amongst refugee women from diverse backgrounds, ages, and social classes who arrived in Australia by boat between 2013-14 and subsequently were forcibly transferred by Australia to Nauru. Focusing on state practices and violence targeted against these women, I explore how marginalized women’s claims and resistance challenge the borders of exclusion, which persist well beyond their departure from Iran.
- Ebony Birchall Doctors in detention: Mapping the politics that make it ‘impossible’ to practice medicine in Australia’s immigration detention system
The medical profession (the profession) working within Australia’s immigration detention system (the system) has long vocalised their struggle of working in the tension between ‘care’ and control. Existing scholarship on the profession’s struggle comes mainly from the bioethics field and is yet to analyse systemic forces like politics and power, and how these forces impactthe profession and their ability to perform their professional role. This paper aims to fill this gap and draws from an interdisciplinary, theoretical and empirical analysis of publicly available statements made by professionals engaged with the system. The paper concludes that professionals engaging with the detention system find it impossible to perform their role because of ideological and power struggles that are generated at the systemic level. These struggles lead to an altered relationship between the profession and the Government, and they generate personal impacts that burden individual professionals.While there are several systemic forces at play, the paper will focus on the Government’s ideology of deterring people seeking asylum who come to Australia via boat. As the profession is pressured to conform to the system’s ideology of deterrence, the profession’s struggle can be reframed as a conflict between ‘care’ and deterrence.
6c. Monitoring, Rights and Justice 2: Traces of Carcerality
Memories and futures of disability institutions: US and Australian case studies
Chair: Monique Hurley
Panel: Liat Ben-Moshe, Linda Steele, Phillipa Carnemolla, Jack Kelly, Nathan Sternberg, Susan Burch
Many people with disability lived in institutions, and some people still do. Over the past 50 yearsin Australia, deinstitutionalisation has resulted in the closure of many large residential settings for people with intellectual disability. Despite the ongoing impacts of institutionalisation on many people with intellectual disability and their families and communities, the public knows little about these places and the people who lived there. Increasing public awareness about disability institutions and the experiences of people with intellectual disability who lived in these institutions provide a way to transformcommunity attitudes, reform policy and service delivery, and heritage and planning practices, andmight also be a means forredressing some ofthe injustices of institutionalisation. This presentation reports findings of a project that focused on a vital first step to engaging with the history and materiality of former disability institutions -to listen to people with intellectual disability about what, why and how remembering and learning about disability institutions should occur, and how to approach any specific future initiatives in ways that are respectful and ethical and centre the lived experience and leadership of people with intellectual disability. This project was undertaken in partnership with People with Disability Australia and Council for Intellectual Disability. The presentation will share insights from focus groups with people with intellectual disability on their perspectives on disability institutions, and how this research project supported a campaign by CID to oppose tourist rezoning of an island that operated as a state-run disability institution for 99 years.
6d. Cultural Resistance 5: Readers Beyond Bars
Readers beyond bars: Weaving a network for carceral information exchange
Chair: Caitlin D’Gluyas
Panel: Sue Jeong Ka, Sarah Ball, Joel Stoehr
As of June 25th, 2021, the New York City Department of Correction resumed their in-personvisits after halting them for 15 months to curtail the spread of COVID-19 in correctional facilities. This “no visitation allowed” period in jails and prisons was akin to the lockdown period in the free world, but worse. While free people were reinventing digital tools to communicate with each other, incarcerated people’s access to communication was even more restricted and controlled. Limited televisits and mail services, which often experience extreme delays, were their only means of connecting to the outside world. Similarly, incarcerated people’s access to information became much more constricted. Safety precautions cut off public libraries and books-to-prison organizations from those behind bars. During this crisis, information in the carceral system was far from fluid. Readers Beyond Bars is a social practice art project on American prisons’ banned books and started in the middle of the pandemic to remobilize and revive recently suspended supportstructures for people within this system. The project seeks to protect the intellectual freedom of incarcerated people whose limited access to reading materials deepens their oppression. This panel will present the collaborative processes to create a space with care in the US carceral system and experiment with methodologies from different fields–art, architecture, design, and information and library science. We will also explain how the collaboration has evolved, what challenges we have faced, and what each of us envisions to provide knowledge and increase access to information necessary for incarcerated people to take back their rights to read within this space.
7b. Colonial Carcerality 2: Safety, ‘Care’ and Accountability’
Chair: Maria Giannacopoulos
- Sarah Schwartz* When prison health ‘care’ kills: Accountability and justice for Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
Veronica Marie Nelson was a proud and strong Gunditjmara, Dja DjaWurrung, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman.Veronica died in custody at Victoria’s maximum security women’s prison on 2 January 2020, after days of crying out for help over her cell intercom; her only lifeline. She is just one of a number of people to have died in custody in the ‘care’ of Victoria’s main prison healthcare provider, Correct Care Australasia, a subsidiary of a global prison-healthcare conglomerate, WellPath. The State of Victoria is unique in outsourcing all prison healthcare to a suite of private providers under multi-million-dollar contracts. Despite the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, calling for culturally safe healthcare in prisons, private for-profit healthcare providers are increasing their reach throughout Australia. This paper will first examine the history and growth of private prison healthcare providers in Australia. It will then examine the impact of for-profit private healthcare providers on the quality of healthcare in prison, on systemic racism within the prison healthcare system, and on accountability for deaths in custody. In doing so, the paper will foreground the experiences of Aboriginal people who have died in the ‘care’ of private prison providers and their families’ fights for justice and accountability.
*The author acts for family in the Coronial Inquest into the death of Veronica Nelson and the families of two other Aboriginal people who have died in the ‘care’ of Correct Care Australasia in the last two years. This article will be guided by them.
- Naama Blatman, Francis Markham Escaping prisons: The de-urbanisation of Australia’s punitive system
Over the past three decades, imprisonment rates in Australia have nearly doubled and are currently at a 100 year high. As of June 2020, more than 40,000 people were imprisoned in Australia, 29 percent of them Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is a hugely expensive system to maintain, costing the Australian taxpayer $5.2 billion in the year 2019-2020 alone (Australian Government Productivity Commission, 2021). A good portion of this cost goes towards building new prisons or expanding existing ones. Yet much of this construction takes place away from the public eye, in regional towns and remote areas. This is a significant change in the carceral landscape of Australia where, since the 1980s, prisons are being continuously deurbanized. Comparing the location of Australian prisons in 1981 and 2017, the paper makes two moves. First, using prison location data, we describe a multiscalar relocation of prisons away from urban centres. Second, we use demographic data to point out that while Australia’s punitive system is becoming less visible to settler Australians, its impact on Indigenous people is growing, not only because they are over incarcerated but also because prisons are built and expanded in areas with a higher percentage of Indigenous population. Taken together, the paper offers a new lens for understanding the racial injustices perpetrated by and through Australia’s carceral geographies.
- Emily Ross Are good intentions enough?
As we conduct the 2022 Carceral Geographies conference at the University of Melbourne on stolen Wurundjeri land, I take this paper as an opportunity to highlight the violent past (and present) of knowledge production within the carceral geography space. As a criminology PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, I discuss the role of disciplines such as criminology, sociology and the political sciences in enabling and ‘normalising’ carceral logics across diverse sites of confinement and control. More specifically, I highlight the complicity of ‘the academy’ in perpetuating intersecting systems of ableist and colonial violence, not only within overt sites of confinement like the prison, but in spaces typically represented as sites of ‘care’ such as the home, (neo)institutional contexts and medicalised settings. I assert that all researchers, particularly within in the carceral geography space, must actively and continuously reflect on the intersecting legacies of violence that undergird our systems knowledge production. In doing so, I do not give researchers a ‘free pass’ nor do I reject the potential for research to contribute to meaningful social change. Rather, I consider the impacts of academic knowledge production on the worlds that our work creates.
- Lara Palombo Home and migrant women: Abolishing punishment and transforming safety
During the lockdown in Sydney, I was living within a zone that had been partly identified as an area of growing concern (see NSW Health), more restrictions were posed on daily movements so that my home took an alimentary and life sustaining infrastructural role (Cowen & La Duke, 2020). As a migrant, it was the exchanges with other migrant/diasporic women in my neighbourhood that created a safe home and community for me. This response co-existed and contrasted with the ways the settler state localised and distinguished neighbourhoods and homes as unsafe, vulnerable (Burton, 2021), yet, as criminal. The reconfiguration of historical racial andsettler colonial tropes negated the ways intersectional relations embody the living with Covid (i.e. Carrasco, Faleh, Dangol, 2020). Despite community calls for non-punitive and intersectional health-based responses, migrant women homes were massified as locations of unsafe living, noncompliance, hesitancy, suspiciousness necessitating policing, surveillance and enforced home-based incarceration. It is during the lockdown that the transnational psycho-thriller film Greta (2018) was released. Its grotesque transnational imaginary examines the chance encounter between young Frances and a monstrified accented Greta in post 9/11 New York (Giuliani, 2020). This criminalizes and ethnicizes gender by configuring Greta as a lonely and deceptive accented Hungarian diaspora passing as French; her home is imagined as a dangerous and carceral space for white younger American women. Yet, the police are shown to be a failing institution that is replaced by the (sovereign) violence exercised by the white female citizen in self-defence. In this paper I want to create a feminist transnational diasporic reading of the film as part of a critical reflection on the embodiment of migrant women at home during the pandemic. I introduce abolitionist and transformative justice approaches to critique the ways the film and the settler state during the pandemic share imaginaries of migrant women homes that are locked into serving punishment. I argue that the creation of safe homes for migrant women requires the transformation of punitive imaginaries.
7c. Spatiality, Care and Control 4: Abolition and Prison Solidarity
Practices of coercive confinement: Confronting the carceral continuum, the membrane, and prison gossip
Chair: Emma Ryan
Panel: Billie Cates, Kim Jackson, Angelee Porter, Gerty-B
Panellists are members of Joint Effort, a feminist, abolitionist prisoner solidarity group where some have been imprisoned and some work as allies. Our panel represents a collaboration across differences -together we theorize carcerality in its various dimensions. We start with an historical analysis of the proliferation of institutions within the carceral continuum that frame the lives of poor people and puts them in a place of coercive confinement with the prison providing the dominant logic. Then we move to a close up examination of the lived reality of a former prisoner within the carceral continuum. That poor peoples’ whole lives tend to be captured within the continuum is demonstrated through the mapping of the panelist’s life of chronic institutionalization and its impacts. This is supported by an analysis of the carceral membrane: how carceral spaces are enclosed by an identifiable yet permeable membrane that contains and controls the flow of people, communication, ideas, power, and material objects etc. between the inside and outside worlds. The membrane is theorized to extend well beyond the prison and into the relational web of carceral society itself. The final panel takes us back into the prison where gossip among prisoners and guards creates a toxic environment of social control, a part of the intentional design of prisons. In response, the panelist recounts that outside educators and students who cross the membrane of the prison walls to form relationships of care and knowledge sharing in a post-secondary context displaces gossip and interrupts statist social control.
7d. Early Career Researcher Workshop
Turning abstracts into articles
Facilitators: Dave McDonald and Diana Johns
This workshop was designed for current postgraduate students, early career researchers and any others thinking about how to turn an idea for a conference paper into a high-quality abstract that can form the basis of a future journal article. It was an opportunity to discuss how to translate overarching research projects into self-contained pieces of scholarly writing, and receive useful tips in pitching work to relevant audiences. The workshop provided a platform to exchange ideas and share constructive feedback with other participants. Participants were encouraged to bring an idea or abstract to be discussed and developed during the workshop.
8a Carceral Continuum 4: Control At, and Within the Border
Care, control and exclusionary practices: Papers from the ANZSOC crimmigration and border control thematic group
Chair: Amy Nethery
Panel: Leanne Weber, Anthea Vogl, Rebecca Powell, Alison Gerard
This panel presents a selection of research being conducted by members of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Criminology thematic group on Crimmigration and Border Control and their collaborators. The session will feature inter-disciplinary work on bordering technologies ranging from deportation to welfare-based surveillance and control targeted at diverse groups such as asylum seekers, convicted non-citizens and First Nations peoples. Collectively, the papers interrogate a range of official practices united by their intention to socially and/or physically exclude group membersthrough the manipulation and merger of systems of both ‘care’ and control.
8b. Spatiality, Care and Control 5: Questions of Power
- Julienne Weegels Carceral care: Comparing ‘soft’ control between Nicaragua and The Netherlands
This paper is a first attempt to compare the workings of ‘carceral care’ in Nicaragua and the Netherlands, two countries often lauded for their putatively progressive penal politics. While the former has slid down an authoritarian path since protests erupted against the government in 2018, my long-term ethnographic research in and around its prison system informs my ‘asking the other question’ in the Netherlands. Drawing here from ongoing research conducted in Amsterdam about the ways in which the criminal justice system reproduces and/or mitigates the development of spatial, social and legal inequalities in the city, I examine how ‘the urban’ is invoked in both policy documents and the spatial planning of the criminal justice chain. Who is projected as excludable or in ‘need’ of intervention? Where are criminal justice interventions deemed necessary? Why there, and why in this way? Alongside extant welfarist politics, an explicit securitization of care efforts can be discerned, which produces new forms of ‘carceral care’ expressed through both state and non-state institutional chains. In parallel, by reeducating ‘anticommunitarian elements’ through the prison system in Nicaragua, carceral care is similarly expressed through criminal justiceinterventions, yet to different ends. In their ideas about the enactment of care through imprisonment, both systems exacerbate particular gendered, aged, classed and racialized inequalities. Juxtaposing these findings from a Southern-informed, critical and decolonial perspective, I propose a framework for understanding the moral economies of carceral care, and tentatively explore how we may go about fighting these seemingly ‘better’ systems.
- Cristina Güerri Prison officers, social support, and the exercise of power in Spanish prisons
The role of the prison officer is usually associated with theprimary tasks of maintaining order and safe custody. However, previous research has evinced that some prison officers provide practical and emotional assistance to inmates even when they are not required to. What’s more: helping inmates has been frequently described as a conflicted, non-rewarded task that is sometimes met with hostility by colleagues. Thus, some authors have discussed why prison officers perform this supportive or caring role. This paper contributes to the referred discussion by using the framework of social support (Cullen 1994) to examine the human service values and power dynamics present in prison officers’ accounts of their provision of assistance to inmates. Drawing on 40 interviews to prison officers about their role in Spanish prisons, this article first examines whether Spanish prison officers provide social support to inmates and the kinds of assistance they offer. Then, it goes on to analyse their reasons to help inmates, focusing on both the expressive and instrumental dimensions of such interactions. Results show that some Spanish prison officers expand their role through the provision of instrumental and expressive supportto inmates. Notwithstanding, although human service values are important for many prison officers, the maintenance of order was an underlying theme in most interviews. More specifically, this paper identifies three mechanisms – coping assistance, reciprocity, and personal authority – by which prison officers prevent the appearance of conflict and exercise power through the provision of social support.
- Bronte Alexander Care, comfort, and control; migrant mobilities in military-humanitarian spaces
This paper examines the spatial and temporal infrastructures of Brazil’s military humanitarian response to Venezuelan migration. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2019, this paperinvestigates carceral processes of care that weaponize comfort in the management of migrant mobility. Focusing on a transit centre at Brazil’s border with Venezuela and an urban overnight dormitory, this paper argues that comfort is used as a means of controlling mobility and maintaining the temporary nature of these sites. In discussing the relationship between confinement and containment, tensions emerge between the aims of confining a population inplace, while urging them to continue onward. Rather than being understood as spaces of exception, I explore the complex social and spatial relations that transpire at these sites. This highlights the carceral geographies that extend beyond detention camps and into everydayspaces of humanitarian care. In so doing, this paper illustrates the importance of considering theelement of comfort when addressing the care andcontrol nexus of humanitarian borderwork.
8c. Architectures of Control
Chair: Naama Blatman
- Andriani Fili The continuum of violence in the Greek immigration detention system
Immigration detention has been a core aspect of border policing in Greece since 1990s, as successive governments have sought to deter irregular migrants and secure the nation’s borders. Yet, the few accounts of detention in the country rarely explore the early years and seem to take as a starting point the period after 2010, when detention undeniably became a key measure for policing migration. While these reports from inside detention often describe the physical and psychological violence exerted against foreign nationals in detention centres in Greece as routine and systematic, they fail to explain why the amount of violence has reached such high levels and how this has remained unchallenged over the years. Taking a historical approach, this paper seeks to understand why and how Greece ended up creating and nurturing such a violent institution by exploring in detail the mechanisms through which the detention system in Greece has been insulated against any possible threats to its survival and thriving; thus, deliberately allowing for a continuum of institutional racism and harmful practices. In doing so, I will argue violence inside Greek detention centres is not an accident attributed to some rogue officers but the product of a range of actors, both governmental and non-governmental, that keep detention knitted together.
- Mafalda Lucas Type and subordinate elements: Copy, stereotype and memory in prison architecture
The evolution of prison architecture in its morphology, spatial organization, architectural elements, and materiality is wrapped in deep cultural values, strongly linked to political and social tactics chiefly as a means to assert power and control. Although the “how”, “why” and “to whom” may have suffered time discrepancies from one country to another – sometimes making it hard to accurately recognize the originality of designs –, a set of innovations and peculiarities contributing to the modelling of space and its habitability are clearly recognizable, characterizing the typology even today. In this sense, we highlight copy as a blatant action, perpetuating the “best” (the ideal, at a particular time period) of each prison type. This paper focuses on the 19th-century Radial design (a kind of morphology quite replicated) and on its subordinate elements –which, independently of form, do play a role in the definition of a specific environment. Factors which we believe to be at the origin of a set of stereotyped images of prison (in the common imaginary), but also in real ambiance (for those who live in), even if the penal intentions (contemporary) are disconnected from the original architectural proposals. Through this study, we aim to highlight the intersection of antagonistic intentions, such as care for rehabilitation, and control for subjugation, given the experience of imprisonment placed under a similar set of architectural vectors. Questioning: whether it is the intention to assign new functions to prison, with what elements should be (re)designed the typology.
- Marco Nocente The spread of videoconferencing: Testimonies of a technology that has become normality
New practices and technologies have flourished in Italian prisons during the Covid-19 pandemic. With this contribution, I examine the spread of videoconferencing in criminal trials as a technology to prevent physical contact and contagions. Prior to the pandemic, videoconferences were restricted to trials concerning charges of terrorism or organized crime (the mafia). Today, they have become widespread across the country as an instrument for medical prevention. The genealogy of care and control underpinning the spread of this technology to the rest of the prison population deserves some serious examination. My contribution examines this topic through a series of written testimonies from Italian prisoners that were collected in a letter archive from 2006 to 2021. Here, videoconferencing appears as a tool to disembody prisoners and reduce their presence to a simulacrum: an assemblage of images, sounds, and glances captured by cameras and microphones. Attending the trial from the prison room, the defendant is deprived of glances and greetings from family and friends, and the very right to an effective counsel is weakened because of the difficulty in communicating with defence attorneys. Thus, the efficiency and security that is provided by the technology is accompanied to the growing distancing between the judge, society, and the accused. Videoconferencing surfaced as a control technology and then spread through the ‘care’ imperative. Therefore, I want to discuss how this process have characterized its configuration and effects in the context of a depersonalizing and deterritorializing prison continuum.
8d. Coercive Control 1: Practices of Coercive Confinement
Chair: Lara Palombo
- Virve Repo Carceral riskscapes and working in the spaces of mental health care
This paper focuses on the concept of carceral riskscape. Since there is a strong, but less studied connection between risk and the carceral, this study combines these concepts to provide a new viewpoint on the mechanisms that create carceral spaces. Riskscapes represent spaces embedded with risk and they are usually referred to in connection with health or environmental hazards. The emphasis in this study is on the carceral riskscapes that working communities face in institutional premises. The study analyses the working culture of a geropsychiatric ward in Turku, Finland. Some of the staff members allegedly mistreated the patients and some of the carceral practices were also targeted at co-workers. The research is qualitative in nature and analyses documents from the inner reports to the trial documents. The findings of the study suggest that the relationships between staff members are significant in the context of carceral riskscapes. Furthermore, the carceral riskscapes cause inequalities and have influence on the well-being of the staff members as well as the quality of care.
- Ettore Asoni Guantánamo and the US penitentiary: The convergence between camps and prisons as institutions of confinement
This contribution describes 20 years of history of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, by focusing on Guantánamo’s transition from a “camp” outside the US legal system to its reintegration as a specific form of preventive detention within the domestic legal circuit. The goal of the analysis is to examine the historico geographical distinction between “camps” and prisons as separate institutions of confinement. I argue that Guantánamo exemplifies the historical fluidity between the two concepts, and how their distinction may vary at different junctures. How camps and prisons differ from one another is a significant question for geographic research on confinement, and particularly for the relations between the field of camp studies and other geographic subdisciplines, most notably carceral geography. More specifically, while carceral geography and camp studies often intersect and interact across the literature, the prison remains somewhat external to the work of camp scholars because of the conceptualization of the “camp” as an exceptional site, which remains ontologically different from the prison as a modern institution. Here, I argue that Guantánamo provides a useful case study for examining how camps and prisons tend to blur their boundaries in the present epoch, and despite their separate historical origins. This in turn could lead to productive dialogues between prison and camp studies in geography.
- Camila Van Diest Carceral memorialisation in a context of urban change: The example of Valparaiso’s former prison
No abstract supplied.
- James Little Agents of memory: Ireland’s literature of coercive confinement
Recent state reports have revealed systemic abuse in Ireland’s carceral institutions. Alongside this official discourse, a body of literary work has explored historical and contemporary institutional abuse as a key topic: it seeks to raise awareness among the broader public as well as using confinement as an aesthetic resource. What role has Irish literature played in reshaping public knowledge of carceral institutions? Is it accurate to call such literature an ‘early-warning system’ for institutional abuse? (Kiberd 2017). Drawing on the concept of ‘coercive confinement’ as a means of considering the similarities – and key differences – between various experiences of institutional incarceration (O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan 2020), this paper focuses on twoliterary works about confined women: Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail(1964; translated as On Trial: A Play) is the story of an unmarried mother who spends time in a Magdalene laundry, while Melatu Uche Okorie’s ‘This Hostel Life’ (2018) centres on women in direct provision, Ireland’s system of detention for migrants.Both works share a sharp attention to the politics of language: some have suggested that Ní Ghráda was free to say more about confinement due to her composition of the play in Irish (Meaney 2020, 15), while Okorie uses a mixture of Nigerian Pidgin alongside various registers of English to recreate the heteroglossic environment of direct provision. In doing so, they act as ‘agents of memory’ (Budrytė 2010; Aguilar 1999; see also Latour 2005, 63–86), allowing ‘the small voice[s]’ of Irish institutional history to be heard (Guha 2002).
Plenary: Amanda Porter, Maria Giannacopoulos
9a. The Carceral Continuum 5: Landscapes of harm
Chair: Jennifer Turner
- Rachel Andrews Repair: Place (re) making and collective action at the unmarked children’s grave at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, Co Galway, Ireland 2014-2021
Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland are former carceral sites, where women and their children were hidden from society. These women and their children have also not been remembered in death, as evidenced by of the discovery of the unmarked children’s grave of around 800 children at the former Tuam Mother and Baby Home, Co Galway, Ireland, in 2014 (Corless, 2012). Since this discovery was officially confirmed, in March 2017, former residents and relatives of those of the Home have sought opportunities to create a series of amateur memorials and interventions at the gravesite, (re)asserting their rights to a space (Jonker and Till, 2009) that has been described by former inmates as “a prison” (Barry, 2017). The presentation will consider the silent vigil in Tuam, on 26 August 2018, held to coincide with the first papal visit to Ireland in nearly 40 years. The vigil, which involved the speaking aloud the names of the dead children (Irish Times, 2018), represented an act of public reclaiming at the Tuam site, and a critical act of memory work (Till, 2005) with those who were once forgotten now allowed to be remembered and found.
- Oliver Wilson-Nunn Remediating the geographies of justice and modernity in mid-twentieth-century Argentinean prison films
In this paper, I explore how Argentinean filmmakers both reproduced and resisted the spatial discourses and practices of prison reform during the first presidency of Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955). In traditional approaches to prison films, film scholars and criminologists aim to highlight the ‘inaccuracies’ of prison images in relation to prison realities (Wilson and O’Sullivan 2005). In this study, meanwhile, I develop an interdisciplinary approach grounded in film history, cultural theories of modernity, and prison-abolitionist geography to show how cinema may performatively elucidate, hide, and produce unequal socio-spatial relationships of control between the people and spaces of the prison, the neighbourhood, the home, and the movie theatre. Moving beyond a purely representational analysis, I bring the films Apenas un delincuente [Hardly a Criminal] (Fregonese 1949), Deshonra [Disgraced] (Tinayre 1952), and La encrucijada [The Crossroads] (Torres Ríos 1952) into dialogue with theories of ‘useful cinema’ (Wasson and Acland 2011) that highlight cinema as a material, often institutional, practice, to show how new practices of producing and exhibiting cinema inside real prisons may reveal the shortcomings of the official Peronist discourse of ‘bringing the revolution to the prisons’. Ultimately, I argue that, despite superficial subservience to official statist narratives, these films dramatize the role of prisons—be they cruel or ‘humanized’—in reproducing the classed and gendered spatial inequalities of urban modernisation and, in doing so, undercut the teleological temporal logics underpinning dominant discourses of modernity and prison reform.
- Lauren Cape-Davenhill State surveillance, state support: ‘Alternatives to Detention’ in the UK‘
Alternatives to Detention’ (ATDs) extend both borders and the boundaries of the carceral into the everyday lives of people subject to immigration control. Whilst attention is often drawn to the indefinite nature of immigration detention in the UK, ‘Alternatives to Detention’ are also indefinite, with people subject to onerous restrictions such as reporting requirements or work and residency restrictions for months, years and sometimes decades. The increasing prevalence of ‘Alternatives to Detention’ raises important questions about the meaning of confinement and incarceration, and how these are experienced, when restrictions are implemented in the community and experienced as part of everyday life rather than within specific carceral institutions. Both the implementation of ‘Alternatives to Detention’, and people’s ability to comply with Home Office conditions, are also deeply interconnected with state support including the provision of accommodation and benefits. The state may provide accommodation and financial support to enable the transition from detention to community-based alternatives; whilst conversely, a lack of state support can severely compromise people’s abilities to adhere to community-based conditions. This paper contributes to the emergent critical ATD literature through exploring how ‘alternatives to detention’ function as a form of confinement in the community; and unpacking the complex relationship between care and control in how ATDs are implemented and experienced. It draws on preliminary findings from PhD research with people subject to ATDs in the UK.
- Sarah Huque, Rebecca Helman, Joe Anderson Prison as a suicidescape: At the intersection of hostile environments and suicide discourses
Suicide Cultures: Reimaging Suicide Research is a sociologically informed, interdisciplinary project exploring how culture, social structures, and inequalities shape experiences and responses to suicide in different communities across Scotland.As part of this project, we have developed the concept of ‘suicidescapes’ –drawing from work on geographies of death – to explore complex, spatially-grounded, affective social ‘landscapes’ of suicide. We consider the ways in which suicide (as both practice and discourse) occurs within particular social geographies, constituted by local, national, and international relations of power – including those, like prisons, that create a hostile environment and disrupt the liveability of lives.Drawing on narrative analysis of Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) reports of suicides within the Scottish prison system, this paper explores the construction of prison suicides in official public reports. We imagine prisons as particular suicidescapes, constituted by the specific nature of prison environments, as well as discourses and practices from ‘beyond’ the prison walls. This paper demonstrates how incarceration, coercion, and social control interact with broader narratives about suicide to construct discourses about prison suicides. We argue that the FAI reports focus on prison suicides as bounded, discrete, medicalised tragedies, separated from place, and considered both ‘inevitable’ and ‘unforeseeable’. Using the idea of suicidescapes, we challenge this reporting, which attempts to absolve the prison system of both its duty of care for prisoners and any blame for suicides in custody, creating an impossible to meet burden of proof for any failings of a hostile system designed to create unliveable lives.
9b. Coercive Control 2: Carcerality Concealed as ‘Care’
The carceral logics of care: Evidence of anti-trafficking interventions from India, the Philippines and the US
Chair: Pankhuri Agarwal
Panel: Pankhuri Agarwal, Jennifer Musto, Sharmila Parmanand
Globally, interventions to address human trafficking and child sexual exploitation have contributed to the growth of a carceral apparatus that blurs the boundaries between care and control and unsettles clear distinctions between state and non state authority. As critical trafficking studies research illuminates, a range of interventions have emerged that promise to combat human trafficking and redress child sexual exploitation, yet most rely on carceral strategies like policing, punishment, and surveillance. The carcerality of anti-trafficking efforts are not limited to formal sites of punishment like prisons, however. Humanitarian and faith-based vigilante rescue operations and the creation of shelter homes, to offer a few examples, signal the extent to which carceral logics suffuse anti-trafficking interventions beyond the criminal legal system. Just as carceral logics extend beyond prisons, carceral control concealed as care reveals the ways in which punishment, surveillance, and coerced rescue are integral to efforts to protect and “empower” people vulnerable to exploitation. This panel features interdisciplinary social science research from various settings and contexts including human trafficking in India, online sexual exploitation of children in the Philippines and trauma-informed anti-trafficking efforts in the US. Highlighting the punitive strategiesfueling state and non-state anti-trafficking and child protection efforts in three distinct national contexts, the panel considers: What are the effects of carceral strategies? What intersectional vulnerabilities do such strategies produce? How might anti-carceral feminist insights be leveraged to resist carceral protection, paternalism, and prosecution-driven efforts and generate alternative visions of care and justice.
10. Explorations in Carceral Geography
Interrogating ‘open carcerality’ and the geographies of open prisons
Chair: Anna Schliehe
Organisers: Anna Schliehe, Christophe Mincke, Franck Ollivon
Panellists: Francis Pakes, Kristian Mjåland
Highlights from our Arts Program
One Year by Anna Goodchild
Using photography, film and poetry, One Year explores the real life experiences of an inmate who spent 2016 in HM Prison Dartmoor.
© 2022 Anna Goodchild

Sculptural work by Indigo Daya
Feel free to learn more about Indigo’s work here.
30 years since the Fairlea Wring Out
The conference featured exhibits of archival material relating to the 1990s closure of the Fairlea Women’s Prison. Feel free to take a glimpse at example material