Labour, carcerality and punishment: ‘Less-than-human’ labour landscapes

Abstract

This paper brings together carceral and labour geographies to highlight new research avenues and empirical gaps. Despite valuable engagements with unfree and precarious work by labour geographers and substantial developments within carceral geography around carceral circuitry and intimate economies of detention, punitive aspects of work remain largely under-theorised within labour geography, while the political economy of carceral labour is relatively side-lined within carceral geography. The paper calls for two interrelated research agendas – the first a punitive labour geographies agenda, and the second a more sustained political economy lens applied to carceral geography in the context of labour and work.

Carceral economies of migration control

“…Seen as a 'fix' for surplus, risky, and racialized populations, incarceration's expansion has relied upon the linking up of different circuits of value (Gill et al, 2018;Gilmore, 2007). Imprisonment has become a go-to policy response for social problems, as carceral punishment and labour regulation are mutually embedded (Cassidy et al, 2019). Noting the mobility of carceral tactics, carceral geographers have called for a broader conceptualization of carcerality to include electronic monitoring, post-release reporting requirements, and other punitive approaches to poverty and social risk (Moran et al, 2018).…”

Gendered disciplinary apparatuses and carceral domesticities in Singapore’s labour-migration regime

“…While largely US-and Euro-centric, there has also been important scholarship which explores the practices and processes of colonisation, and the ways in which punishment, discipline, and carceral governmentalities have shaped societies historically and contemporarily (Legg, 2014(Legg, , 2023Radics, 2023;Sen, 2000Sen, , 2012. However, Cassidy et al (2020) point to the significant and somewhat surprising theoretical and empirical gaps at the intersection of carceral and labour geographies. They suggest that labour geographers' engagement with carcerality and punishment can offer important (and currently lacking) insights into embodied and everyday labour experiences.…”

Carceral and military geographies: Prisons, the military and war

“…The scope of such work is now too extensive to provide an exhaustive list but includes carceral examinations of urban and city spaces (e.g. Fraser and Schliehe, 2021); education and labour practices (Cassidy et al, 2020) and even beyond landed spaces, to islands, ships, 'carceral seas' (Peters and Turner, n.d.) and, simply, the 'carceral wet' (Dickson, 2021). In sum, carceral geography has done much to bring the prison to the attention of critical human geographers, but also to challenge the primacy of this type of institution in conceptualisations of carcerality.…”