Carceral circuitry

Abstract

Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This paper opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of D H teasing apart the emerging carceral landscape to provide a new critical epistemology for carceral geographies. In so doing, a meta-institutional agenda for critical carceral geography is derived, and possible ways to short-circuit carceral systems are revealed. KeywordsCarceral geography, circuit, circulation, counter-mapping, prison, institution. Nick Gill 1 , Deirdre Conlon, Dominique Moran and Andrew BurridgePlease note: the definitive version of this paper will appear in the journal Progress in Human Geography. This version is a pre-print, pre-proof version.1 Corresponding author, University of Exeter, UK. 2 Carceral Circuitry: Opening RemarksIn February 2016 the BBC (2016) reported the increasing use of drones to fly drugs, mobile phones and other contraband into British prisons. While no instances of smuggling by drones were detected in 2013, by 2015 33 instances had been recorded. The biggest find, in December 2015, featured a drone, drugs, a mobile phone, a phone charger and USB cards. Drone flights have reportedly become so common, especially during night hours, that prison staff find them unremarkable (The Guardian, 2016a). Dronedrops, alongside the stillincreasingly supplementing in-person smuggling such as during visits; with services on the outside.The rise of what the UK prison authorities call (The Guardian, 2016a) illustrates the unprecedented pressure that the prison boundary is under. The popular impression of prisons as impervious, closed-in on themselves and cut-off from the wider world is being challenged by rising prison populations and technological innovations that have precipitated all manner of mobilities and circulations both within prison walls and across them. Geographers have critically discussed G in order to call attention to this inter-connectedness of prisons and other carceral spaces (Moran, 2015;Fortes, 2015; although see Schliehe, forthcoming, for a recovery of Goff T intention has been to counter the imagination of a closed-off and sealed carceral institution, discussing instead the liminal spaces prisons (Moran, 2015: 90).These interventions beg the question of what an meta-institutional geography of the carceral would look like, meaning not simply a geography beyond them, combining supra-, sub-, inter-, intra-and extra-institutional imaginaries and perspectives. Carceral geography is in a strong positon to address such a question because, unlike prison studies, the subject of carcerality is not approached via an institutional lens at the level of the discipline itself. Rather, carceral geographers have already been at pains to emphasise the continuities that stretch across institutional boundaries (Allspach, 2010;Moran, 2015;Moran et al, 2014) providing an ideal foundation for ...

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