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Among many of the activities concerned with the "collateral consequences of incarceration," visitation has been quite a challenge. In particular, women visitors face several challenges while visiting a carceral space. Using semi-structured interviews with women having a family member incarcerated, we explore the experiences of women visitors visiting a prison in Kashmir. The paper employs a qualitative methodology to understand the experiences of these women visitors. The paper tries to understand the ways in which the prison regime dictates and directs their lives. The paper emphasizes the fact that the effects of incarceration are tremendously bore by these women who jeopardize their own economic and social capital in order to maintain ties with an incarcerated individual. These women are claimed to be the "other victims of crime" and are treated as quasi-inmates inside the carceral spaces. These women live lives marked with stigma and suspicion as they are often assumed to have known about the crime. Thus, they suffer from courtesy stigma and the taint of being equally involved in the crime. The findings reveal that these women face difficulties in visiting their incarcerated kin, endure emotionally intense experiences, and the traumatic experience of prison visitation, ironically, acts as a blessing in disguise. They become increasingly absorbed into the correctional facility, suffer the anxiety of waiting and frustration to meet institutional dictates, and elation or despair that stays with them after spending time with their loved ones in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, no scientific literature on the issue of religion in prison has been published in Muslim countries. There, religious practice in prison does not seem to have received specific normative attention. The new political context after the so called "Arab Spring" has given new importance to religion in the space of state institutions. Under the pressure of security concerns, we are witnessing the emergence of new forms of religious intervention in prisons. On the basis of a multi-year research project in Europe, which was recently extended to the context of Muslim-majority countries, this article intends to take stock of the reality of the case of Tunisia, where the essential elements of this theme intersect, by calling on initiatives of state institutions, but also the development that has taken place in civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, no scientific literature on the issue of religion in prison has been published in Muslim countries. There, religious practice in prison does not seem to have received specific normative attention. The new political context after the so called “Arab Spring” has given new importance to religion in the space of state institutions. Under the pressure of security concerns, we are witnessing the emergence of new forms of religious intervention in prisons. On the basis of a multi-year research project in Europe, which was recently extended to the context of Muslim-majority countries, this article intends to take stock of the reality of the case of Tunisia, where the essential elements of this theme intersect, by calling on initiatives of state institutions, but also the development that has taken place in civil society.

Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in the UK, comprising 20 staff interviews and 20 photo production interviews with patients. We use John Law's 'modes of ordering' to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit. We identify two 'modes of ordering': 'keeping safe', which we argue tends towards empty, stultified and static spaces; and 'keep progressing' which instead requires filling, enriching and ingraining spaces. We discuss ways in which tensions between these modes of ordering are resolved in the unit, noting a spatial hierarchy which prioritises 'keeping safe', thus limiting the institutional capacity for engendering progress and change. The empirical material is discussed in relation to the institutional and carceral geography literatures with a particular focus on mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), as an exemplar of “heterotopias of deviation”. Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault’s heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into “Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts”. Tai Kwun (“Big Station” in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun’s spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault’s original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present.

This article provides an analysis of sonic protest strategies used by anti-carceral feminist coalitions in Melbourne, Australia. Our research demonstrates that sound is a particularly powerful boundary-crosser that can challenge the exclusionary spatial ordering of the prison. Under certain political and geographical conditions, the carceral soundscape, which increasingly restricts 'who gets to hear what', can be temporarily breached, altered and re-made by protest noise, rhythm and music, and radio technology. Counter-carceral acoustemologies create alternative 'soundtracks' of resistance that both reveal and momentarily displace carceral-spatial control, re-patterning the aural environment of the prison. Such breaches can be countered, however, by various modes of boundary fortification over time. We propose that a more nuanced understanding of carceral space and soundscapes—as relational and in flux—provides greater opportunities for denaturalizing the prison and challenging its seeming permanence in our political and cultural landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies of precarious work are advanced through an eight month qualitative study of prisoners nearing release from HMP Brixton in London, providing a spatial rendering of working uncertainty. This builds on geographical scholarship highlighting the porosity of prison walls such that carceral space is understood as non-totalising yet extensive. Release on Temporary License (ROTL) is examined as a mechanism of such porosity, allowing offenders to undertake work outside prison. Within the context of the rehabilitation agenda in England and Wales that emphasises the generative function of prison time, we frame the ROTL as a flow mechanism that anticipates both the end of the custodial sentence and precarious work. Experiences of such precariousness emerge through prisoners' processes of planning for future work through states of suspension, compulsion and experimentation. The focus on planning work contributes to understandings firstly of the porosity of carceral space and secondly of labour precarity. Firstly, it highlights the frictions in the flow mechanism of the ROTL, such that the porosity of carceral space cannot be understood as seamless mobility. Secondly, these frictions indicate how the structural condition of labour precarity can be lived through forms of mundane stability that might be generative as well as exhausting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances geographies of absence by considering the multiscalar, overlapping, ambiguous and reciprocal absences inherent in incarceration, and the compound nature of the experiential and embodied absences characteristic of prison visiting. It progresses extant literatures by considering as absent a group which differs from those previously thus conceptualised, and by postulating absence even when whereabouts are known and co-presence is possible. Drawing on a major RCUK-funded study of the socio-spatial context of prison visitation in the U.K., it brings carceral geographies and geographies of absence into productive dialogue, demonstrating that attention to the felt presence of absence in the context of prison visiting is highly revealing of the poignant and bittersweet nature of family contact during incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the enactment and evolution of article L.126 of the Code of Construction and Housing (CCH) in France and demonstrates the careful ways lawmakers have redefined ‘common areas’ in social housing estates as carceral spaces. It argues that such transformation has inserted these areas into a ‘carceral continuum’ that facilitates the arrest, prosecution and confinement of young people ‘hanging out’ in ‘common areas’. Drawing on the work of legal geographers on the co-constitutive relationship of law and space, and urban and carceral geographers exploring the criminalization of urban space and the extension of the carceral state, the paper illustrates how the pathways of confinement are legally constituted. The legal process documented here seeks to highlight the law’s meaning-making capacity and the complex legal practices - by actors and institutions located at multiple scales - which significantly condition urban practices and relationships. The analysis suggests, finally, that law’s constitutive power has limits that are brought to the fore by anti-police violence struggles. Pathways of confinement are, thus, fragile networks dependent upon the ongoing enactments, discourses, and practices by lawmakers and law-enforcers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prisoners increasingly appear in court from spaces of incarceration, linked by video technologies, and remote from the physical courtroom in which the legal proceedings take place. During these video-linked court appearances, prisoners are immersed within the oppressive aesthetics of detention, rather than in the dignified courtroom we idealize. This article examines prisoners’ sensorial experience of prison video studios and the impact such space has on their encounters with law. Video link technologies are examined as symptomatic of the sensory bias to sight that ignores the significance of the other senses, diminishing prisoners’ opportunities for engagement with and expressive participation in legal procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of mass incarceration, services for the homeless often involve mechanisms of confinement and discipline. Over the past decade, homeless communities in cities across the US have developed large-scale encampments in which residents survive outside the purview of official homelessness management systems. Most cities have responded by evicting campers and destroying their tents and shanties. Yet some local governments have instead legalized encampments, while imposing varying degrees of spatial control and surveillance on camp residents. In so doing, they have created unique new spaces for managing homelessness. This article terms these spaces “tent wards” to reflect their dualistic functions of both care and custody. Based on secondary sources and ethnographic research from 2013, I analyze nearly a dozen tent wards in cities across the US, and engage a more in-depth study of the development of such spaces in Fresno, California. I argue that the rise of tent wards calls attention to the need for a renewed focus on the relationship between incarceration and welfare in the US, and the ways in which a diverse range of spaces function together to isolate and discipline entire segments of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This essay examines the rhetorical and structural divides between the “inside” and “outside” carceral world as they exist within the intersections of racialized state violence and biopolitics. It is also a reflection on my embodied experience, as a volunteer and activist, inside penal and correctional facilities, not in an attempt to center my “freeworld” body as more important than the embodied experiences of incarcerated people, but rather to trouble that binary altogether and to use my experience as a perceived outsider to illuminate what I call the compounds of projected deviance. I will use my experiences working in jails as well as my experiences teaching yoga in an addiction correctional facility to argue for prison abolition and transformative justice, particularly in relation to resettlement. Drawing on the work of prison and queer studies, I argue that space, race, and sexuality interlock in significant ways in historical and contemporary prisons and jails. I will also use my reflections to argue that the feminist project of sexual liberation and autonomy must start with a rejection of sexual Othering for the most marginalized members of society: incarcerated people.

This paper contributes to the criminology of genocide through examination of settler colonial destruction within the broader context of what we term ‘genocidal carcerality’. We employ this term to examine the ways in which space is implicated in the physical, biological, and cultural destruction of group life. In this paper, our purpose is not to create a typology of genocidal carcerality, but rather to demonstrate the multiplicity of spatial strategies at work within any genocidal context, with specific focus on Indian Residential Schools. In so doing, we critique attempts to reduce genocidal carcerality to a single spatial form, such as the camp. We illustrate our main points through a case study of the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba, Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spaces of human trafficking can be perceived as “total,” akin to those of the prison and the detention center, because of the intense surveillance, bodily compliance through discipline, removal of freedom, and restricted mobility they create. Although Foucault's panopticon and Goffman's related concept of the total institution have some merit in conceptualizing these situations, geographical scholarship on institutions and regimes of incarceration has advanced important critiques of prisons as total institutions, arguing among other things for the potential of incarcerated subjects to resist and express agency. Drawing on de Certeau, these arguments focus on agency that is expressed through manipulating and subverting the disciplining gaze of power in highly embodied ways. This article examines these everyday expressions of agency in the context of bars and clubs located around U.S. military bases in South Korea, where many of the female migrant laborers are trafficked entertainers. Despite the growing scholarly engagement with human trafficking, comparatively little research attends to everyday resistance and agency in such situations or what spaces of human trafficking might tell us about the nature and geography of incarceration. In response, this article advances a perspective that centers on shadow play in everyday spaces of incarceration to illuminate the operations of resistance and agency in situations of human trafficking. It also draws attention to some of the limits in understanding resistance in such situations through the models and practices of labor activism derived through a consideration of ostensibly free laborers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, 'Of Other Spaces' (1967), as an exemplar of "heterotopias of deviation". Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault's heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into "Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts". Tai Kwun ("Big Station" in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun's spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault's original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carceral or prison space and the techniques that make prison punishment possible shape Black living and working space and in turn influence Black masculine performance. This essay uses the Robert Taylor Housing Projects—a notorious project on Chicago's South Side—and South Africa's mining compounds, as case studies. It exhumes the carceral logic that underwrote these spaces by highlighting how the project and the mine compound drew on containment, policing, surveillance, and restrictive architecture to fix Blacks spatially. It also explores how the prisonization of these quotidian spaces profoundly shaped Black male subjectivity, thus giving rise to a carcerally inflected Black masculinity, made visible through the performance of prison masculinities, embodiment of carceral aesthetics, and transference of sexual politics from prisons to other carceral sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]