Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

Abstract

The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set‐apart spaces of enforced confinement for “wrong‐doers,” has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault's inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault's claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti‐prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID‐19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as “retrenching,” “reworking” or “reducing” the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic “emergency,” the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked “carceral state,” disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The “biological sub‐citizens” of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified.

Beyond compliance: Good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…The COVID‐19 pandemic is thought to have exposed and exacerbated some of these neoliberal citizenships. For example, Schliehe et al ( 2022 ) argue that British prisons used the emergency of the pandemic as an opportunity to retrench and rework the carceral, extending or introducing new population management strategies, micro‐spatial partitioning, extensive isolation, enforced segregation, and reduced association time.…”

“…In recent decades, it has been skewed a little towards women, older people, the middle classes, and England (Hinton, 2013 ). Certain groups and experiences are largely missed by the panel, e.g., the experiences of prisoners ‘locked down under lockdown’ during the COVID‐19 pandemic (on which see Schliehe et al, 2022 ). What can be said for the panel is that good citizens are well‐represented.…”

“…During 2020 and 2021, many such options were outlined in editorials in geography journals (e.g., Diaz & Mountz, 2020 ; Dodds et al, 2020 ; Sparke & Anguelov, 2020 ). During 2022, papers began to emerge taking up some of these options, not least in this journal (e.g., Herrick et al, 2022 ; Lin, 2022 ; Mould et al, 2022 ; Schliehe et al, 2022 ). In the present paper, we have touched on various geographical themes, including: rules governing geographical behaviour (e.g., ‘Stay Home’); coding of the home (as safe) and the outside world (as dangerous); technologies for protecting the home from the outside world (quarantine, sanitiser); and alternative imaginative geographies of the outside world as diverse (with more risky places, identified as crowded or dirty, and less risky places, identified as quiet and clean) or even the privileged location for certain goods (participation, sociality).…”

Mental Health of Nurses Working in a Judicial Psychiatry Hospital during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy: An Online Survey

“…On the other hand, healthcare professionals had higher workloads and professional responsibilities. The onset of this pandemic has highlighted the numerous criticalities at the organizational level involving both the national healthcare and the judicial systems [ 2 , 3 ]. Inside the prisons, inmates and staff share a confined environment that could act as a reservoir for epidemics.…”

Care for Transactions

“…This includes being care‐ full about care itself. As journal editors we have sought to be mindful about the uneven‐ness of the care burdens faced by authors and reviewers through the peer review process at the same time as we have sought to surface critical geographical work that highlights how such inequalities have been exacerbated across multiple care geographies impacted by austerity and the COVID pandemic (Clarke & Barnett, 2022; Gayle, 2020; Herrick et al, 2022; Mould et al, 2022; Reid, 2022; Schliehe et al, 2022; Sparke & Anguelov, 2020).…”