Carceral Geographies

Carceral geography provides a valuable, spatially informed view on confinement and closed spaces, while at the same time attempting to make efforts toward social change. Carceral geography provides a new angle on wider human-geographical debates and highlights how closed spaces show broad societal issues with a heightened intensity, providing a background for discussions on issues of security, safety, and surveillance. In an attempt to conceptualize carceral geography, Philo described the subfield as one of three strands of geographical security studies dealing with “the spaces set aside for ‘securing’—detaining, locking up or away—problematic populations of one kind or another” (p. 4). While at first many studies in carceral geography have solely focused on prisons, rather than examining different types of closed institutions under the umbrella of carceral geography, research on a wider array of spaces and practices has become increasingly common, such as migrant detention, nursing homes, children’s homes, and the military. Carceral-geographic research touches upon broader issues such as gender, mobility, or the more-than-human aspects, but also wider societal discussions on labor, security, and state power. With a landmark monograph Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration Dominique Moran defined carceral geography along three lines of investigation that fold together studies of incarceration with an examination of their implicit geographies: (1) the nature and experience of carceral spaces, (2) spatial and distributional characteristics of carceral systems, and (3) the relationship between the carceral system and an increasingly punitive state. These areas within carceral geography overlap with other geographies of security, namely research on landscapes of defense and critical geopolitics. While much carceral-geographic scholarship originates in an Anglophone context, research can be found in many more languages and countries.