Policing and Incarceration

Investigates relations between policing (narrowly and broadly understood), incarceration, and the production of space and spatial knowledge. Borders, criminalized neighborhoods, detention centers, heavily securitized areas, internment camps, jails, prisons, rendition sites, and the spatial relations that they rely on and produce are explored as sites of power and subversion.

related magazine articles

related journal articles

Latency, uncertainty, contagion: Epistemologies of risk-as-reform in crime forecasting software

Through analyses of interviews with developers, industry professionals and law enforcement as well as published statements, this article offers a detailed examination of how the function and premises of ‘data-driven’ policing are altered by this turn to epistemologies of risk. I argue that the latent presence of ‘disorder’ supplements visible aberrations of ‘order.’

By

Liz Calhoun

Automating gentrification: Landlord technologies and housing justice organizing in New York City homes

This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement.

By

Erin McElroy, Manon Vergerio

Becoming fugitive: Prison breaks and the space of punishment

Guided by a prisoner’s narrative of escape from a Guatemalan prison, evasion, exile, and re-capture, this essay brings the phenomenon of prison escape into conversation with carceral geography’s exploration of essential connections and reflections between the prison and other social, institutional and geographic spaces, highlighting how multiple actors and forces beyond the carceral state collude in fixing vulnerable bodies in place.

By

Anthony W Fontes

Peripheral recovery: ‘Keeping safe’ and ‘keep progressing’ as contradictory modes of ordering in a forensic psychiatric unit

Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. We use John Law’s ‘modes of ordering’ to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit.

By

Laura McGrath, Steven D Brown, Ava Kanyeredzi, Paula Reavey, Ian Tucker

The racial environmental state and abolition geography in California’s Central Valley

This paper analyzes the abolitionist struggle to transform the carceral geographies of California’s Central Valley through a campaign to stop the construction of a prison in Delano, California. This case study shows the importance of recognizing race and environment as interconnected systems of domination and resistance. It also highlights the possibilities and limitations of engaging the state in the abolitionist fight for freedom.

By

Keith Miyake

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