Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography

The dictionary definition of carceral is ‘relating to, or of prison’. The late-16th-century word comes from the Latin carceralis, whose origin is carcer, the name of the ancient state prison of Rome (Platner, 2015: 99). Carcer may also be connected with other Indo-European words for circle or round object, such as curvus [Latin], κιρκος [Greek] and hringr [Old Norse]. Intriguingly, ‘carcer’ is also the name of one of the geomantic signs in occult divination (see Figure 1). Described as the outline of an enclosure, a link in a chain, or a prison cell, wherever it appears it bodes ill, denoting delays, setbacks, or bindings. Although related to strength and willpower, it generally connotes restriction and immobility. According to occult scholar Heinrich Agrippa, it ‘raiseth enemies, detaineth in prison, and inflicteth many evils’, signifying hatred, wickedness and ‘great detrement’ (1655: 40). So synonymous is ‘carceral’ with ‘prison’ that ‘K.C. Carceral’ is even the pseudonym adopted by the prisoner-author of ‘Prison, Inc.’, an exposé of prison life in a privately-run US facility (Carceral and Bernard, 2006).

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Figure 1. Carcer in geomancy/occult divination – one of 12 geomantic signs.

Despite its archaic origins, ‘carceral’ has become a significant word for our times. Debate over the legitimacy of incarceration in all of its manifestations transcends and is differentiated by local and national cultural norms and practices. We now speak of living in a ‘carceral age’ (Bosworth and Kaufman, 2011; Brown, 2014b; Simon, 1998) characterized by unprecedented fluidity between forms of confinement, be they state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, ad-hoc, illicit, spatially fixed, mobile, embodied or imagined, and in which the scale of deployment of carceral techniques and infrastructures demands critical attention.

The sense in which carceral is inseparable from the prison is reinforced by the influential work of Michel Foucault. In the final chapter of Discipline and Punish (1977), entitled ‘The Carceral’, Foucault described a ‘carceral system’ that reaches far beyond the prison, drawing on disciplinary control that encompasses the most ‘coercive technologies of behaviour’ (Foucault, 1977: 293). Referring to Mettray – a 19th-century French reformatory for young boys (see also Driver, 1990) – five models of organizational control (family, army, workshop, school, judicial system) are suggested, which merge and intertwine wider society with the carceral in a diffuse way. This diffusion, he argued, takes place via ‘carceral circles’, which, like ripples in water, extend far from the prison. Mettray is chosen as an example of disciplinary control at its most extreme by combining diffuse and compact forms of discipline with corrective training – despite not having fences or walls around it.

Foucault identified colonies for the poor, almshouses, institutions for abandoned children and factory-convents flowing out from, and adopting aspects of, the ‘compact’, institutional, carceral model. Moving ‘still further away from penality in its strictest sense’, he argued, ‘the carceral circles widen and the form of the prison slowly diminishes and finally disappears altogether’ (Foucault, 1977: 298). Beyond the ‘compact’ institutions, then, lay the more ‘diffuse’ carceral models, such as charitable organizations, housing associations and moral improvement societies, which used ‘carceral methods’ that assisted but also surveilled. And beyond these still lay the ‘great carceral network’ that ‘reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society’ (Foucault, 1977: 298). This societal spread of the carceral is termed ‘carceral archipelago’, transporting the disciplinary techniques of the prison into the social body as a whole. Foucault’s influential ideas are recognizable in Baudrillard’s passing observation that ‘prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral’ (Baudrillard, 2001: 461).

Much in the way that Discipline and Punish is ‘now a work utterly familiar to human geographers’ (Philo, 2012: 500; see also Philo, 2001), the same work has dominated criminological engagement with Foucault (Valverde, 2008). It is thus unsurprising that this book, perhaps to the exclusion of Foucault’s wider oeuvre, has heavily influenced carceral geography inasmuch as it is yet to define the carceral, and thus obliquely adopts Foucault’s expansive definition. This is a significant point, notwithstanding Valverde’s (2008) criticism that terms drawn from Foucault are misused when they are turned into sociological ‘concepts’. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault largely focused on the disciplinary programs as being intended to normalize individuals – the ‘atomised’ human body, for Philo (2012: 500) – and ‘generate uniform, disciplined bodies of citizens’ (Valverde, 2008: 210). Looking beyond the individual towards the creation of ‘carceral’ populations, Philo argues that in this earlier work ‘we can readily see seeds…of Foucault’s subsequent turn to “biopower” – to matters of massed life, its vitalities, unruliness and demanding of “technological” responses’ (2012: 501). Foucault’s move towards concentration on practices of governance ‘developed by and for “free” subjects’ (Valverde, 2008: 214) took place in the latter two books of the History of Sexuality trilogy (Foucault, 1985, 1986), the Society Must Be Defended 1975–76 lectures (Foucault, 2003), and through the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality. All of which is to suggest that, whereas in Discipline and Punish the cast of his carceral net was indefinite, encompassing ‘all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society’ (1977: 298, our emphasis), perhaps in the light of his later writings, that which lies beyond the ‘compact’ and ‘diffuse’ carceral models can be considered to merge with the biopolitical. As Valverde argued, individualization and the formation of normal populations ‘are of course two sides of the same coin’ (2008: 214).

Reconsidering Foucault’s postulation of the carceral in this way, i.e. in relation to ‘compact’ and ‘diffuse’ models, and to what might lie ‘beyond’ them in the social body as a whole, perhaps presents an opportunity for carceral geography. Moran et al. (2013a: 240) alluded to the exponentially mounting possibilities of the carceral, and whilst on the one hand the increasingly diverse application of the term signals a productive expansion of analytical field, on the other, if the social in its entirety is carceral, then what, if anything, lies beyond the latitude of carceral geography? How should its subject matter be determined? What is ‘carceral’, and in which way(s)? Before we can address these questions of import for the future of carceral geography, it is useful to reconsider what it has already become – or, in other words, what elements of ‘the carceral’ are already its objects of study.

Carceral geography is in close dialogue with longer-standing academic engagements with the carceral, most notably criminology and prison sociology. Dialogue initially comprised learning and borrowing from criminology, but within a more general criminological engagement with spaces and landscapes (Campbell, 2013; Hayward, 2012, 2016; Kindynis, 2014) recent years have seen criminologists increasingly considering and adopting perspectives from carceral geography. Crewe et al. (2013), for example, have examined the emotional geographies of carceral spaces; Pickering (2014: 187) examined the micro politics of ‘new carceral spaces’ at border crossings; and Woolford and Gacek (2016) drew on carceral geography to theorize ‘genocidal carcerality’ in Indian residential schools in Canada. Discussions of carceral geography are now appearing in landmark criminological collections (e.g. Jewkes and Moran, forthcoming; Moran, forthcoming).

It is immediately apparent that the development of carceral geography has been characterized by a dual focus on compact and diffuse carceral models. Spaces of confinement are very broadly conceived, and a key area of interest is the relationship between the spaces of the institution and the embodied spaces of the self (Moran, 2015b). Scholarship has investigated diverse aspects of the prison, and of other compact carceral sites which resemble the prison both in functional form and in mode of operation, such as detention centres (e.g. Hiemstra, 2013; Mountz et al., 2013) and halfway houses (e.g. Allspach, 2010) or secure holding facilities for children and young people (Schliehe, 2015), with acute sensitivity to change and difference across space and time, space/time and between cultures and jurisdictions.

Of particular note is the breadth of empirical focus. A growing body of literature focuses upon compact carceral spaces, such as those of ‘mainstream’ incarceration of ‘criminals’ for custodial sentences imposed by prevailing legal systems, or spaces of migrant detention that confine irregular or non-status migrants pending decisions on admittance or removal. Dirsuweit (1999) explored women’s prison experiences in South Africa; in New Mexico, Sibley and Van Hoven (2009) and Van Hoven and Sibley (2008) described negotiation of material and imagined carceral spaces through ‘vision’. In the UK, Baer (2005) identified unique personalization of prison space, a notion further developed by Moran et al. (2013b) and Milhaud and Moran (2013) for prisoners’ privacy in Russia and France. More recently, Hemsworth (2015) explored the role of sound in historic prison sites and Michalon (2015) described micro-spaces inside migrant detention facilities in Romania. There is also scholarship of overlaps and synergies between spaces. In particular, Loyd et al. (2013) and Morelle (2015) have influentially demonstrated interactions between prisons, migration policing and detention, including in the Global South. Following Foucault’s rippling carceral circles, a variety of domestic, urban, and embodied sites have been theorized as spaces of surveillance and control reminiscent of the diffuse carceral model, with carceral geographers tracing the relationships between the prison as a compact but porous carceral institution and these other spaces. This scholarship has three complementary foci: on the ways in which the prison seeps into its surroundings; in relation to the porosity of the prison boundary itself; and with reference to a mobile and embodied carcerality.

Techniques and technologies of confinement leach into everyday domestic, street, and institutional spaces with which both former inmates and their loved ones (such as prison visitors) come into contact. Brown (2014a) and Fishwick and Wearing (2017) have worked on juvenile delinquency and youth justice, and Morin (2016a) on parallels between the treatment of animals and prisoners. Examples of work on the prison’s influences on communities both local to and distant from it, and on the impact of prison siting, include Bonds (2006, 2009), Che (2005) and Shabazz (2015a, 2015b); and Mitchelson (2014) provides an example of research into prison privatization as part of a wider state economy.

In relation to tangible and intangible things that cross the prison wall, Moran (2013a, 2013b) and Moran et al. (2016b) have undertaken substantial work regarding in-between spaces of the prison visiting room, and liminal spaces of prisoner transportation (Moran et al., 2012, 2013c). Baer (2005) and Schliehe (2017) have both explored prisoner possessions and their significance and movement in the prison setting. Baer and Ravneberg (2008) and Schliehe (2016) explored notions of inside and outside; Bony (2015) has studied continuity of social relations beyond the prison wall; and Turner (2016) has interrogated the notion of an absolute and Euclidean prison boundary. Conlon and Hiemstra (2014) outlined micro-economies in and associated with detention centres, and Moran (2015a) discussed animal geographies of carceral space with reference to animals as contraband that penetrates the prison.

Pertaining to the third focus on mobile and embodied carcerality, carceral geographers have argued that the carceral does not require a spatial fix – it can operate through ‘forms of confinement that burst internment structures and deliver carceral effects without physical immobilization’ (Moran et al., 2013a: 240). Increasingly recognizing ‘the carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective, they have studied the experiences of prison time inscribed on the body (Moran, 2012, 2014) and have paid specific attention to ‘trans’ carceral experiences – that is, of embodiment and transgender prisoners (Rosenberg and Oswin, 2015; Rosenberg, 2017).

Further pursuing the diffuse carceral model, carceral geographers have increasingly described spaces beyond prisons as ‘carceral’. Research focus has been trained upon sites beyond the traditional, landed prison by Mountz and Loyd (2014) regarding islands, and Peters and Turner (2015) and Turner and Peters (2016) in historical research on the convict ship. And beyond carceral geography, geographers have begun to suggest that other institutional settings have carceral features. Waters and Brooks (2015), for example, have suggested that the separateness and isolation of elite schools bear some comparison to more conventional carceral settings (see also Gallagher, 2010, for schools and panopticism).

‘Carceral’ spaces beyond prisons are sometimes denoted by prefixing carceral qualifiers, apparently to differentiate them from the compact model, and the use of such qualifiers suggests gradations of carcerality. Smith (2011) uses the term ‘graduated incarceration’ to describe microgeographies of occupation in the West Bank. Lock-down urban security around global mega-events (e.g. Coaffee, 2014: 208, drawing on Mike Davis’ deployment of the ‘carceral city’) and military prisons such as Abu Ghraib (Stevens, 2008: 200; also Gregory, 2007) are described as ‘hyper-carceral’. There are ‘transcarceral’ spaces in which freed inmates experience reconfinement (Allspach, 2010), using terminology that dates back to Lowman and Menzies’ (1986) characterization of Foucault’s portrayal of organized control as broader than imprisonment (Johnson, 1996). There are ‘quasi-carceral’ spaces: those for prisoners’ home-visits (Moran and Keinänen, 2012); day-release prisoners’ workplaces (Maddrell, 2000, 2017); as well as prisons that no longer function as such (e.g. Felder et al., 2014; Morin, 2013, 2016b; Morin and Moran, 2015; Turner and Peters, 2015). In their article on carceral circuitry, Gill et al (2016) identify the circuitous nature of carceral systems that involve these increasingly diverse institutions. Unrelated to ‘any objective rise in “criminality” per se’ (Gill et al., 2016: 2), these are instead based on neoliberal developments including the mobility of capital and expendability of locations and populations, as well as the criminalization of poor neighbourhoods (Jefferson, 2017). Gill et al.’s use of the Marxist ontology of circuits highlights a critical epistemology of understanding wide-ranging connections and flows in punitive policy and practices of risk containment, and the expansion of the carceral sphere.

Echoing Foucault, ‘carceral’ has been deployed as both adjective and noun – spaces and practices are carceral, but ‘the carceral’ also exists both within and distant from physical spaces of incarceration. But at what distance? How far from the prison must the carceral circle extend before the influence of the prison is lost? Is there utility in arguing that the disciplinary – the carceral – ends where the biopolitical begins? These definitional questions, although asked anew of carceral geography, are not unfamiliar. Every new subdiscipline has addressed them in one way or another, at a similar point in its development. Critique was levelled at the mobilities turn in geography, for example, with Adey (2006) contending that, ‘if we explore mobility in everything and fail to examine the differences and relations between them, it becomes not meaningless, but, there is a danger in mobilising the world into a transient, yet featureless, homogeneity’ (2006: 91). This is undoubtedly caution that we recognize. Although if, for the sake of argument, the scope of the carceral is limited to the compact and diffuse carceral models, then we reinforce the link between the carceral and the prison, with the challenges and opportunities that presents.

For Foucault (1977: 231), the prison was the centrifugal point – a complete or austere institution – from which carceral circles radiated. Although ‘the carceral’ exceeds the prison itself through ‘its diffuse and compact forms, its institutions of supervision or constraint, of discreet surveillance and insistent coercion’ (1977: 299), the prison is read as a constant touchstone. It is an eternal reference point; the centre which holds. As Harcourt (2006) argued in discussion of carceral continuities between prison and other forms of coercive confinement, over time the prison has come to replace other confining institutions in terms of their relative captive populations and has become a dominant subject of analytical focus. However, the apparently symbiotic nature of prison and the carceral is complex and significant in three important and related ways, worthy of discussion.

The first is that the prison as an institutional form is diverse: what it is varies across space, and what it has been has changed over time. Although, as Foucault argued, the prison as an institutional form is extremely stable in that it is central to the concept of punishment as well as the producer of delinquency, it is disciplinarily diverse. The nature of prison reflects the penal philosophy of the prevailing social system: its ideas about what prison is ‘for’; what it is considered to ‘do’; and the messages about the purpose of imprisonment that it communicates to prisoners, potential offenders, and society at large. Offensive conduct is sanctioned in different ways in different places. Punishment and crime have very little to do with one another, with imprisonment rates being ‘a function of criminal justice and social policies that either encourage or discourage the use of incarceration’ (Aebi and Kuhn, 2000: 66) rather than of the number of crimes committed. Prison is a conscious response to offending behaviour in light of prevailing understandings of what it is intended to achieve, both for society and offenders. If the carceral is anchored to the prison, then that anchor drifts with tides of prison policy, media discourse, and imaginative and fictional representations of the prison. In very practical terms, what we consider a prison to be – for the purposes of stating that something else is ‘like’ it – is by no means a given.

The nature of the prison is under question, both in terms of its theoretical purpose and intent and its effect and experience. Foucault’s (1977) now-familiar contention is that the prison replaced the public spectacle of punishment, as the gallows, the stocks, and public humiliation wrought against the body were replaced by internalization of the carceral regime. Regulation of space, segregation of individuals and unseen – but constant – surveillance moulded the subject into its own primary disciplinary force in a panoptic environment (Foucault, 1977). However, in the contemporary context of mass incarceration, Alford (2000) and Simon (2010) argue that Foucault’s ‘panoptic’ prisons have been replaced by institutions driven by ‘a logic of pure confinement’ (Martin, 2013: 498), functioning more like warehouses or waste management facilities, almost like a reverse-panopticon. Wacquant similarly claimed that ‘in lieu of the dressage (“training” or “taming”)’ intended to fashion ‘docile and productive bodies’ postulated by Foucault, the contemporary prison is geared toward brute neutralization, rote retribution, and ‘simply warehousing – by default if not by design’ (2010: 205). Conversely, Chantraine argued for the emergence of the ‘post-disciplinary prison’. Alluding to the well-articulated ‘gap between the modern disciplinary “program” decoded by Foucault and concrete daily life in prison’ (2008: 67), he described the post-disciplinary prison as being neither structured around the disciplinary principle nor an exercise in unconstrained violence. Instead, it is a pragmatic management of everyday life based on a system of individual and collective privileges featuring rewards rather than punishments, and explicit control of some over others through delegated power. This management system is ‘encouraging’ rather than disciplinary (2008). Despite an often-stated lack of fit between Foucault’s understanding of the prison and how it might work in practice, Martin (2013) contends that Discipline and Punish retains analytical purchase even though the purpose of prisons has changed; in the United States, the effectiveness of structures of punitive confinement ‘is intensified when interventions follow the logic of warehousing or exclusion rather than transformation’ (2013: 498). Armstrong and Jefferson (forthcoming) seek to ‘disavow’ the prison; that is, to dissolve what they call ‘the hegemonic and universalising idea of “the” prison’ which seems ‘ominously present however hard it is resisted’.

The second issue in relation to the apparent indivisibility of prison and carceral is that despite the diversity of the prison itself, it is commonly deployed metaphorically in ways that arguably dilute its potency as a concept and deflect attention from the details of its actual operation. In the use of metaphors, plausibility relies upon the extent of feature intersection between things being equated: the degree of overlap of words’ semantic fields. (In ‘life is a rollercoaster’, the metaphor relies on an immediately-apparent overlap between their characteristics.) Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, writing at the same time as Foucault, criticized the commonplace metaphorical usage of ‘prison’ in which understandings of the meaning of prison are projected onto a variety of situations considered to share its prominent features. Quite apart from the shifting and uncertain nature of the prison itself rendering the metaphor unstable, for Christie (1978) it was the ‘imperialist’ tendency ‘to call anything and everything prison’ that led him to warn against the ‘hollowing out’ of the concept, and the specificities of the actual prison being forgotten (cited in Jefferson, 2014: 47). Similarly, criminologist Pat Carlen later argued that

So whilst Foucault pointed to the ubiquitous presence of the prison (as itself, as institutions which physically and functionally resemble it or as widely-deployed techniques developed within it), Christie and Carlen’s concern was to retain focus on the prison in order to, in Carlen’s words, understand its power ‘both to promise and deliver pain as punishment’ (Carlen, 1994: 138).

Driven by cognisance of this pain and punishment, the third issue is that some (although by no means all) carceral geography aligns with an abolitionist movement seeking eradication of the prison and the systems that support it. From the US perspective, Gilmore’s (2007)Golden Gulag concerns the extreme growth of state prisons in California in the last decades. She argued that ‘prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crisis, organised by the state, which is itself in crisis’ (2007: 26); and some carceral geographers are aligned to the anti-prison movement comprising a variety of grassroots organizations, lobby groups, activist collectives, prisoner associations and student groups (Critical Resistance, 2016; Morris, 1995; Sudbury, 2008). Much of the intellectual inspiration for penal abolitionism is connected to critical theory on gender and patriarchy, class or political economy (West, 2000). The prison’s ‘total irrationality in terms of its own stated goals’ (Mathiesen, 1998: 9) is perhaps the main uniting element within a heterogeneous field of abolitionists, including some carceral geographers. Particularly embedded in critical discourse, abolition is viewed as a necessary step to address ‘racialised state violence that must be dismantled as part of a wider social justice agenda’ (Sudbury, 2009).

The term ‘prison industrial complex’, established as a concept for penal abolition, was first used by Mike Davis (1995) to underline the huge costs of imprisonment and the subsequent commodification of prisoners as ‘profit’ (see also Davis, 2003). Unsettling relationships between regions’ economic dependence on prisons, displaced prison labour and global restructuring of profit in relation to incarceration throws up wider questions of safety, security and social cohesion. Wider penal abolitionism theoretically evolved out of prison abolition; both essentially reject population segregation and imposed exclusion, which is seen as counterproductive in the context of community safety (Saleh-Hanna, 2000). Ideas of abolition co-exist (often in tension) with efforts to reform – a line of argument that has much resonance in the UK context. The Howard League for Penal Reform, for example, proposes abolition of imprisonment for certain types of offences (Ashworth, 2013). Abolition and reform have much potential from a carceral geography perspective, including a more activist-oriented ‘take’ on research itself (Gilmore, 2007). Imagining the downsizing of the prison industrial complex (with its expansive use of criminalization and ‘cages as catchall solutions to social problems’ [Gilmore, 2007: 2]), and changing public views about imprisonment as the only viable response to ‘offending’ behaviour, are the main aims of the anti-prison movement (Critical Resistance, 2016). In recognition of this body of work, the eventual outcome of carceral geography could be to render itself obsolete: to contribute to the eradication of its own subject matter. However, by contending that the carceral extends in various ways beyond the prison, carceral geography challenges any simple definition of what it is that abolitionism seeks to eliminate.

Rather than advocate a particular definition or delineation, the purpose of this article is to raise and think through some of the issues surrounding the adoption of the term carceral to define this subdiscipline. In remaining reflectively open on that point, there are perhaps some observations that may prove useful for its future development.

Carceral geography seems thus far to have adopted an expansive interpretation of ‘the carceral’, underscored by the closing chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; an approach that has yielded the diverse, multifaceted and interdisciplinary work surveyed here. However, whilst this interpretation has thus far been enabling, and the potentialities of this unboundedness are undoubtedly appealing, we must consider the possibility that it may prove debilitating in the future, insofar as it opens out ‘the social in its entirety’ as the purview of the subdiscipline, making its potential subject matter almost impossible to determine. At the same time, ‘the fantasy of a separate carceral sphere, whereby carceral and non-carceral are neatly segregated’ (Gill et al., 2016: 15) has already been widely problematized, not least by carceral geographers pointing out the blurring, porosity, liminality, and heterogeneity of carceral boundaries, and the various circulations that reach within and beyond them (Gill et al., 2016). There may be virtue in considering a delineation or consolidation of the subfield around the compact and diffuse carceral models described by Foucault; such a move perhaps offers different opportunities for carceral geography, in following the carceral ‘circles’ outwards from the prison.

Such an orientation might better enable carceral geography to continue to contribute to developing understandings of what the prison is; how this has changed in space and time; and how the prison continues to change and develop, including paying attention to the lives of the prison before and after it exists as such. Recent scholarship has already considered the ‘post-prison’ landscape – in particular ‘penal tourism’ and the transformation of carceral spaces (Felder et al., 2014; Morin and Moran, 2015; Morin, 2013, 2016b; Turner and Peters, 2015). Although work in this area is already underway (e.g. Moran et al. [2016b] interrogating the ‘architectural assembly’ of prison buildings), further attention could be paid to the production of other carceral sites and spaces, including conversion of other types of institution into prisons (e.g. Medlicott [2015] on the conversion of Shaker sites in the US).

The recognition of the prison as both the key reference point but not the full extent of carceral geography – i.e. the confirmation that this is not ‘just fancy prison geography’ – enables carceral geography to trace, after Harcourt (2006), the contours of both the compact carceral core and the carceral diffuse. Although Foucault’s description of compact and diffuse carceral models is inherently spatial – with its discourse of radiating circles, receding functional forms, and increasing distance – the spatiality of the relationship between these two carceral forms remains underdeveloped. The nature of the compact and diffuse forms in the contemporary era is unclear, when, as Harcourt (2006: 24) has argued, the prison dominates analysis. Carceral geography could delineate the contours of the carceral core, and trace the ways in which the techniques of the prison disseminated to more diffuse carceral forms. It could determine the spatial relationship between the compact and diffuse, and the extent of their overlap or mutual exclusivity, as well as their fluid or static nature, and the potential for the diffuse to intensify into a compact form, spatially and/or temporally, and vice versa.

In Foucault’s (1977) consideration of ‘compact’ carceral institutions, he was able to list types of institution that have since dramatically changed, although many studies point towards prevailing ideas of discipline (e.g. see Disney [2015a, 2015b] on the Russian orphanage). Alongside the prison, Foucault noted the orphanage, the reformatory, the disciplinary battalion, the almshouse, the workhouse and the factory-convent, institutions whose prevalence has arguably waned in the contemporary period. What are the other carceral institutions of the contemporary carceral core? The military? Nursing homes? Universities? Labour camps for migrant workers (e.g. Bruslé [2015] on such camps in Qatar)? Spaces of confinement for trafficked workers? Secret detention centres for extraordinary rendition (e.g. O’Neill [2012] on such sites in Romania)? And if we do consider such constructions, with their diverse spatialities and legal statuses, to be carceral, what is the analytical purchase of such a move?

Is a gated community, for example, carceral? In his study of prison constellations around US cities, Mitchelson compared prison and gated communities, arguing that ‘prisons are no less important to the urban fabric than are the suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities that similarly “orbit” large cities’ (2012: 155). Lynch (2001) has pointed out synergies between the two, with both proliferating at similar rates in the United States – sharing characteristically homogeneous populations and security infrastructures, and with fear of prisons being used as an explicit sales technique for gated communities.

But what if we think of the gated community itself as carceral? Descriptions frequently invoke the prison metaphor, referring to gates, locks, surveillance and armed response. Lai noted that ‘[a] gated community can resemble a high-security prison in physical appearance and atmosphere’ (2016: 381). But, with the caveat that ‘voluntary’ acts are rarely free of some sort of obligation or influence, gated community residence is usually understood to be a choice, a privilege attainable only by a select few. At the same time, as Roitman (2005) has argued, the need for gated community enclosure suggests fear and escape of circumstances outside, such that voluntary enclosure could be carceral, albeit considered a lesser evil than the alternative. Gated community life comes with its own incapacitations:

Although parking restrictions seem trivial in comparison to the privations of incarceration or detention, the issue here is the subjectivity and relativity of the carceral.

Foucault spent very little time considering the thoughts of the governed or the precise and lived nature of their self-discipline or self-development. His focus was on how individuals are governed; although the logic of the panopticon was that inmates would internalize the schema, this internalization is discussed from the perspective of the powerful, rather than the imprisoned. Drawing on this (alongside other ‘conceptual’ inspirations like Goffman [1968] or Agamben [2005]), carceral geography has established a distinctive corpus of scholarship that attends precisely to the lived experience of compact and diffuse carceral models, and shows that the individual subjective experience of carceral institutions is diverse and divergent. Carceral geography should therefore continue to focus on more than the diffusion of the institutional practices perfected within the prison; it should uncover the subjectivity and relativity inherent in the experience of carcerality, since in its lived experience the carceral is relative rather than absolute. To paraphrase Jefferson (2014), it enables an understanding of how practices and meanings are articulated between carceral sites, through social relations and subjectivities.

Since the 16th century, carcer as a geomantic sign has communicated ideas of ‘great detrement’ – a symbol which ‘inflicteth many evils’; and Foucault’s theorization of the prison rests on ideas of punishment – the intent, experience and achievement of which could be the defining feature of the carceral. For both Christie (1978) and Carlen (1994), the focus was squarely on the prison and its infliction of pain. For Foucault (1977), the ‘universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished’, lowering the threshold of tolerance to penality as the carceral ‘naturalises’ the legal power to punish, just as it ‘legalises’ the technical power to discipline (1977: 301, 303). For him, it was the quality and quantity of punishment that diminishes as the carceral circles widen with distance (literal or metaphorical) from the prison – a perspective implicitly shared by Christie and Carlen in their appeal to keep asking ‘important questions about the prison’s punitive capacity’ (Carlen, 1994: 138).

Considering the carceral as relative rather than absolute echoes the ‘differential and relational’ (Adey, 2006: 83) within mobilities studies. Adey recognized that there ‘is never any absolute immobility, but only mobilities which we mistake for immobility, what could be called relative immobilities’, dependent upon the person and their social context. A plane, rail or car passenger, for example, is apparently ‘still’ in their seat, yet hurtling through space at high speeds. In a similar way, we must go beyond taken-for-granted, absolute notions of carcerality to emphasize the subjective and the relational.

So where does this leave us? For the purposes of conceptualizing the ‘carceral’ in carceral geography, there are alternatives. We might retain an expansive understanding of the carceral following the Foucault of Discipline and Punish. We might narrow the scope in some way, perhaps in terms of the compact and the diffuse models of the carceral archipelago – both the prison and other institutions that resemble it physically and/or functionally, and the rippling out of carceral technologies and practices to more diffuse structures and institutions which bear less resemblance. Whichever path we take, the central problematic of the prison as a diverse and contested reference point is likely to remain. What carceral geographical scholarship to date tells us very clearly is that the carceral is in the eye of the beholder – its perception is complex, nuanced, contextual and only partially predictable. What is felt acutely as suffering by one individual may not perturb another. What is not intended to punish may deliver significant harm. What it also tells us is that, given the political imperative to track the carceral age, time devoted to introspective classificatory debate about what is, or is not, carceral, according to pre-formed criteria, could be better spent.

Bound to this term, carceral geography must drive debate on this topic. In the spirit of our mobilities-oriented colleagues, if boundless potentialities present challenges of emphasis, we might call for a ‘recapturing’ of carceral geography. Transposing Adey’s mobility theorizations, carcerality too could be argued as ‘profoundly relational and experiential’ (Adey, 2006: 83). Thus, rather than pursue a potentially reductive binary categorization of carceral-or-not, we advocate discussion of a continuum of qualities – or conditions – which, whilst further facilitating the productive openness of this field, still enable a means to appraise carcerality itself.