Siting Prisons, Sighting Communities: Geographies of Objection in a Planning Process

Abstract

This article reviews the planning process for a Scottish prison located near a former mining village. Analysing the letters of objection submitted by residents offers an opportunity to explore local views about prison and community and to relate these to the unique social and spatial history of the area. The planning process itself structured how residents were able to express themselves and defined what counted as a relevant objection. After deconstructing this process, the article then restores and uses as a framework for analysis three geographies of objection stripped from local responses to the development proposal: the emotional, temporal and spatial. Emotional expressions of objection added intensity and gave meaning to claims about the historical decline of the region and also conveyed a deep sense of the proposed building site as a lived space. Particular grounds of opposition -over fear of strangers, the fragility of a local orchid, and the pollution from mining -provide an opportunity to explore the complex nature of place meaning and community identity, ultimately leading to a conclusion that the meaning of place is always in flux. The paper srgues that Simmel's classic concept of the Stranger, as the outsider who comes to stay, offers a useful analytic in understanding how the quality of proximal remoteness that prisons and other unwanted developments constitute participate in a constantly evolving sense of the local.

The spatial and temporal development of British prisons from 1901 to the present: The role of de-industrialisation

“…Similarly, Armstrong (2014), focusing on the Scottish context and using document and discourse analysis, articulates the struggles local communities faced to have their opinions recognised by the prison planning process, and thus identifies some of the processes whereby prisons come to be sited on former industrial land. This paper does not touch on how groups or individuals felt about the growth of local prisons or the social and economic repercussions of prison proliferation, but such routes of enquiry are clearly a worthy focus of future research.…”

“…We do this by examining the prison building programme that took place in England, Scotland and Wales during the 1980s and in the period since. Notably, a number of studies have linked the uneven process of de-industrialisation with crime (Matthews et al, 2001), deprivation (Beatty and Fothergill, 1997), and more recently – albeit in the USA – prison building (Beale, 1998; Eason, 2017; Huling, 2002; Schept, 2022; Taft, 2018) and we contribute to those literatures. We also reflect on why prisons in Britain have become spatially concentrated in former-industrial areas, and what this means for other countries in terms of the processes of de-industrialisation and prison-building.…”

“…The reverberations of industrial closures and high levels of unemployment in the UK after 1979 have been charted by numerous scholars (Beatty and Fothergill, 1997; Dorling, 2014; Goodman and Webb, 1994; Hay, 1996; Jennings et al, 2012; Showler and Sinfield, 1981). Shipyards, steel, and coal-mining industries and parts of the British automotive industry were heavily affected by de-industrialisation (measured as the relative decline of manufacturing or the decline of manufacturing employment, Kitson and Michie, 2000).…”

Securing Prison through Human Rights: Unanticipated Implications of Rights‐Based Penal Governance

“…Those who can articulate and document the 20 exceptions to the basic principle of wearing one's own clothes in prison are harnessing the power of the technical, which is a characteristic quality of policy settings. Policy settings, moreover, render a lay discourse of rights, with complaints handwritten on paper and appealing to holistic concerns about care and compassion, as amateurish and lacking relevance compared with highly detailed and lengthy paperwork appealing to recognised rules (see Armstrong ); it is no wonder that Calavita and Jenness () observed prison inmates on the losing side of administrative complaints more than 90% of the time. Human rights efforts have produced major infrastructures of compliance and enforcement in prisons, as well as become reflected in some penal system mission statements, without generally altering the basic situation of prisoners.…”