This article is based on our first experiences visiting prisons, and being surprised by the ways in which the inside and outside often seemed indistinct. One of our narratives comes from England, the other from Norway. Our analysis emerges from a recognition that, despite visiting prisons for different research projects in different countries, our experiences in prison spaces shared striking similarities. We had each expected prisons to have clear and demarcated boundaries between inside and outside, consistent with Goffman's binary distinctions in the total institution model. However, this model was not a good fit with our view of prisons, since it did not capture the importance of indistinction. The inside and outside were often entangled and fused with one another, having both distinctions and indistinctions simultaneously. The seemingly incompatible juxtapositions between inside and outside were consistent with the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, as a better fit with our ideas. Our observations improve our understanding of confinement as a dynamic and often contradictory state of betweenness. After exploring our personal narratives from visiting prisons, some theoretical implications of the concept of heterotopia within institutional research are discussed and contrasted to that of total institution.

While conducting my first research project on prisons, I noticed that some prisoners decorated their cells with massive quantities of bathing products and air freshener. I wondered why. This led to an impressionistic study that drew from visits to six young offender institutions and interviews with 11 prisoners in England. Prisoners and staff gave numerous explanations for such decorations, including: the commodification of everyday items, such as shower gels; social status; the creation of a home environment; the need to fill space; boredom; illegal activity; and the effect of sentence length on the personalisation of space. Michel de Certeau's idea of tactics is applied to the findings as mundane activities used by people in a position of weakness. Other visual imprints in the everyday surroundings of prisoners could also have numerous explanations. This study serves as a beginning for future research on the personalisation and meanings of prison spaces. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

International medical graduates do help reduce rural physician shortages, but interstate variation points to the role of state policies in influencing international medical graduates' distribution in rural, underserved areas. Such variation also can come about from many different causes, so there is a need for further research to determine why international medical graduates help compensate for physician shortages more so in some states than in others.

Researchers usually examine therapeutic landscapes, spaces that have or are felt to have healing properties, in positive terms. We reconsider the therapeutic landscape notion by applying it to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye . The main character, Holden Caulfield, is sickened by his transition between childhood and adulthood, and he relies on therapeutic landscapes as an imaginary escape. Yet his therapeutic landscapes are oversimplified and unrealistic. Through examples from Holden's experiences, we explore therapeutic landscapes as ambivalent, nuanced spaces. We argue that therapeutic landscapes should be considered beyond exceptional cases, in everyday experience.