Reassessing the camp/prison dichotomy: New directions in geographic research on confinement

Abstract

What separates camps and prisons as distinct institutions of confinement? This question has important implications for geographic research, and particularly for current and potential intersections between “camp studies” and other contiguous fields in geography. Here, I conceptualize camps and prisons as historical formations, whose distinction varies at specific junctures. I compare confinement sites in reference to their temporal equilibriums and changes over time, so as to highlight possible convergences among them. To demonstrate my argument, I take legal developments concerning the Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an empirical reference point, and I examine the camp’s progressive normalization within the US carceral circuit.

Prison geographies: Nine disciplinary approaches

“…While the evils of prison detention, including solitary confinement, life in prison, and what Gilmore (2007, p. 28) identifies as “vulnerability to premature death,” are oft‐conjured in the geographical literature (Asoni, 2022; Herbert, 2019; Story, 2015), the political mandate to immediately end life positions prisons in their starkest contrast from the rest of the carceral political landscape. In fact, we point out, capital punishment is the apotheosis of American law and politics.…”

Geographies of storage

“…Unlike the other terms discussed above, confinement is not frequently deployed as a synonym for storage. Rather, within popular discourse and the carceral geographies literature alike, the term is typically invoked to signal the racialized practices of restricting human movements, particularly through incarceration (Asoni, 2022; Gilmore, 2007; Martin & Mitchelson, 2009; Peters & Turner, 2017). As Orenstein notes in her account of the warehousing industry, the unspoken assumption of such categorical separation becomes evident when abolitionist critics characterize mass incarceration as an unconscionable form of “human warehousing” (Orenstein, 2019, p. 34; see also Herivel & Wright, 2003).…”

Urban military geographies: New directions in the (re)production of space, militarism, and the urban

“…Nevertheless, such 'geographies of resistance' remain largely under-researched, particularly at the urban scale. An in-depth study of the formal and informal dynamics of contestation would allow an examination of how military landscapes are also spaces of counter-representation, where militarism, the militarisation of places, and preparations for war are both reproduced and contested, as exemplified by studies linking military and carceral geographies (Asoni, 2022;Moran & Turner, 2022). This review has focused on the different features of urban military geographies in 'peace contexts', following Woodward's proposition that 'military geographies are everywhere.…”