Searching prison cells and prisoner bodies: Redacting carceral power and glimpsing gendered resistance in women’s prisons

Balfour, Gillian

doi:10.1177/1748895817706719

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…While the notion that prisons are completely closed-off and ‘total institutions’ have been thoroughly challenged by carceral geographers (Gill et al., 2016; Moran, 2015; Turner, 2016), conducting prison research remains notoriously difficult. This is often because it involves ‘over-researched’ and vulnerable groups and because carceral systems are famously ‘risk-averse’ and non-transparent (Balfour, 2017). Yet, sound is particularly leaky and fluid, and technological advancements in sound recording, production, and dissemination make first-hand accounts of incarceration more accessible to ‘outsiders’ – should we choose to listen.…”

Section: Sound and Carceral Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

Russell

Rae

2019

Punishment & Society

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New technologies for recording, reproducing, and disseminating sound are increasingly accessible and provide important opportunities for listening to accounts of confinement. Through a politics and practice of ‘earwitnessing detention’, this article explores experiential patterns and distinctions between immigration detention and imprisonment. By ‘tuning in’ to radio and podcasting emerging from and through carceral spaces, we argue that both detained asylum seekers and Aboriginal prisoners in Australia narrate an experience of ‘indefinite stuckness’. Indefinite stuckness is an existential condition within a carceral continuum that is both spatial and temporal, and characterised by massive racial inequalities. For detained asylum seekers, indefinite stuckness manifests in the absence of a set release date, whereas for Aboriginal prisoners, it is a cycle of criminalisation and re-incarceration in the colony. This important distinction shapes how detention is represented: as torturous and abusive, or as an opportunity for respite from the ‘chaos’ outside. Linking these sometimes-divergent accounts of confinement are themes of friendship and community as forms of survival and resistance to the abjection that frequently accompanies indefinite stuckness.

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Section: Sound and Carceral Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

Russell

Rae

2019

Punishment & Society

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“…BFI requires health care staff discuss the importance and management of breastfeeding with pregnant women and their families [15]. Confident, well-informed, compassionate and creative encouragement and support for breastfeeding among incarcerated women is hampered because prisons are spaces of surveillance and control [19]. Breastfeeding is not included in the Guidelines for the Implementation of Mother-Child Units in Canadian Correctional Facilities [55].…”

Section: The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative Ten Stepsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This surveillance is gendered. For example, federally-incarcerated women have been found to be subjected to the practice of their bodies and cells being searched in a discretionary and unpredictable manner [19]. In the Western world, women prisoners’ health needs are disproportionately interpreted as unruly, or “mad”, and necessitating psychiatric control and observation [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Breastfeeding in public” for incarcerated women: the baby-friendly steps

Paynter

Snelgrove‐Clarke

2019

Int Breastfeed J

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Background Women are the fastest-growing population in carceral facilities in Canada. Most incarcerated women are mothers, with above-average parity. The incarceration of women has implications not only for women’s health, but for that of their children. For example, how is breastfeeding and access to human milk supported in the context of imprisonment? Both carceral and health services are publicly-funded and administered in Canada. Due in part to the well-documented ill-health burden of imprisoned women, health and carceral functions overlap in the spaces of confinement. This paper discusses “breastfeeding in public” in relation to imprisoned women: separated from the public, yet in publicly-funded spaces under public servant control. With increasing adoption of Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFI) Ten Steps in Canadian health centres, there is a need to consider the health centre spaces precluded from its application and make visible the women and children affected. This paper uses the BFI Steps as a lens to consider the environment of confinement for the breastfeeding incarcerated person. The exclusion of breastfeeding and access to human milk for imprisoned women and children extends the punitive carceral function beyond the experience of incarceration and beyond the experience of the convicted mother. Discussion Carceral facilities lack breastfeeding policies, foundational to breastfeeding support. Despite high fertility and parity among incarcerated women, carceral health care providers are not required to demonstrate maternity and reproductive health care specialization. The overarching mission of carceral institutions remains security, and support for breastfeeding among incarcerated women is hampered in spaces of conflict, punishment, surveillance and control. A minimal requirement to support exclusive breastfeeding is to promote the mother being with the infant and most incarcerated mothers are separated from their infants. Incarcerated women lack support, information, and community connections for extended breastfeeding beyond six months. Carceral facilities are not welcoming environments for breastfeeding families. Despite the incompatibility of breastfeeding with incarceration, BFI Step 10, coordinating discharge, demonstrates opportunity for improvement through community and health care provider engagement. Conclusion Incarceration challenges the reach and applicability of the BFI Steps to enhance breastfeeding and to problematize the idea of breastfeeding “in public.”

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“…Although the increasing reach of surveilling and criminalizing technologies might blur and extend its boundaries, the revival of the prison as a 'spatial fix' to neo-liberal insecurities and abandonment (Cunneen et al, 2013;Gilmore, 2007;Wacquant, 2009) suggests that it is in many ways lodged in our geographical, cultural and political horizons. At a micro-level, the power of the prison as a (not-so) total institution is elucidated through its ability to control the flow of (differentiated) bodies (Moran et al, 2012) and, to a lesser extent, the flow of information, ideas and material and emotional support (Balfour, 2018;Piché, 2011). In short, the prison has exclusive and silencing functions, but it is also 'partially open, allowing the passage of certain elements while acting as a barrier to others' (Schliehe, 2016: 32).…”

Section: Permeability and The Prison Boundarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We find that these experimentations with sound can breach the carceral boundary and displace carceral-spatial control through forms of political dialogue and creative exchange between imprisoned and non-imprisoned actors. These effects and formations are in some ways fleeting; resistant ‘breaches’ are countered by various modes of boundary fortification over time (Balfour, 2018; Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Scraton, 2016). An historical trajectory of penal expansion and securitization shows how the prison can ramp up and re-enclose carceral space when challenged.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counter-carceral acoustemologies: Sound, permeability and feminist protest at the prison boundary

Russell

Carlton

2018

Theoretical Criminology

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This article provides an analysis of sonic protest strategies used by anti-carceral feminist coalitions in Melbourne, Australia. Our research demonstrates that sound is a particularly powerful boundary-crosser that can challenge the exclusionary spatial ordering of the prison. Under certain political and geographical conditions, the carceral soundscape, which increasingly restricts ‘who gets to hear what’, can be temporarily breached, altered and re-made by protest noise, rhythm and music, and radio technology. Counter-carceral acoustemologies create alternative ‘soundtracks’ of resistance that both reveal and momentarily displace carceral-spatial control, re-patterning the aural environment of the prison. Such breaches can be countered, however, by various modes of boundary fortification over time. We propose that a more nuanced understanding of carceral space and soundscapes—as relational and in flux—provides greater opportunities for denaturalizing the prison and challenging its seeming permanence in our political and cultural landscapes.

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Searching prison cells and prisoner bodies: Redacting carceral power and glimpsing gendered resistance in women’s prisons

Cited by 18 publications

References 24 publications

Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

“Breastfeeding in public” for incarcerated women: the baby-friendly steps

Counter-carceral acoustemologies: Sound, permeability and feminist protest at the prison boundary

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