(Un)seeing like a prison: Counter-visual ethnography of the carceral state

Abstract

While prisons proliferate in the rural landscape and sites of penal tourism expand, the carceral state structures the available visual and analytic vantages through which to perceive this growing visibility. Using examples from fieldwork in Kentucky, including Appalachian prison communities and a site of penal tourism, this article proposes 'counter-visual' ethnography to better perceive the ideological work that the carceral state performs in the spatial and cultural landscape. A counter-visual ethnography retrains our eyes to see that which is not 'there' but which structures the contemporary empirical realities we observe, record, and analyze: the ghosts of racialized regimes past, the sediment of dirty industry that seeps into and imbues the present, and the transhistorical and trans-local circulation of carceral logics and epistemologies. In addition, this article suggests the important role images play in shaping alternative vantages from which to better perceive the carceral state with historical, spatial, and political acuity.Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central and whose vision is synoptic. State simplifications of the kind we have examined are designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their society, a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like the US highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy Article Schept 199 a quasi-monopolistic picture of the selected aspects of the whole society. This privileged vantage point is typical of all institutional settings where command and control of complex human activities is paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor, and the administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many state like functions and often mimic its information structure as well.

Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘Malopticon’

“…In the next section, I discuss the wider research and knowledge exchange projects (respectively 'Supervisible' and 'Mass Supervision: Seen and Heard') through which Teejay's creative representations of supervision were produced. These projects are analysed as an attempt to develop a 'counter-visual criminology' (Schept, 2014) of mass supervision.…”

‘She’s White and She’s Hot, So She Can’t Be Guilty’: Female Criminality, Penal Spectatorship, and White Protectionism

“…To address these gaps, we situate our study within cultural criminology's burgeoning interest in the politics and power of crime-related images (Hayward & Presdee, 2010;Young, Ferrell, & Hayward, 2008) and a visual criminology that critically examines the ways 'the "story" of crime is told as much today through the visual image as through the written word' particularly with the explosion of new media and proliferation of digital images (Brown, 2014;Carrabine, 2011Carrabine, , 2012Francis, 2012, p. 10;Hayward, 2009;Schept, 2014). Finally, we seek to take up the much-needed work of providing an intersectional analysis that pays attention to whiteness and femininity, in line with critical criminologists and feminist criminologists who have long sought to understand power and its attendant privileges (Barak, Leighton, & Flavin, 2010;Burgess-Proctor, 2006;Chesney-Lind, 2006;Crenshaw, 1991;Daly, 1993;Daly & Stephens, 1995;Henne & Troshynski, 2013).…”

The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory

“…In pursuing the work that images do, the field of visual criminology expresses unique possibilities for a kind of critical criminology that can better illuminate the social relations that cause harmnot just in the conventional sense of legal categories of crime, but of processes that produce criminalization and interpersonal, legal, state and structural violence. For instance, visual criminologists seek to disrupt the dyad of crime and punishment by way of analyses of the visual that challenge common sense assumptions that punishment leads to a reduction in crime (Schept, 2014;Story et al, 2017;Hunt 2017). The visual is also a powerful means through which to map the production of control: policing, prisons, surveillance and their counterpoints; the production of transgression and resistance against old and new categories of criminalization; the historical resurgence of insurgencies, justice campaigns, social movements, and uprisings.…”