A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
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.
The lack of housing for returning residents reveals the intertwining crises of our housing and carceral systems—crises that COVID-19 exacerbates, but does not create. Though not often considered as part of the same struggle, housing constitutes a crucial piece of the abolitionist puzzle.
Brett Story’s "Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power" across Neoliberal America is a brilliant and timely study on prison geographies. Story, who is from Canada, arrives to the U.S. prison through her personal experiences of eviction, first as a child and then as a young student fighting against gentrification and documenting it as an amateur filmmaker.
"Spaces of Security" is a richly detailed volume examining the multiple dimensions, practices, and formulations of security that increasingly shape the conditions for modern life, as well as the discourses that have shaped how security is understood.
This paper describes our study, which was conducted as a partnership between Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) and Roosevelt University. We review briefly our outreach and methods, and highlight some key results, before reflecting on the importance of narrative and the promise of elevating community voices for changing policy.
A succession; compounding successions; a storied stack; the superposition of time; the folds of the longue durée; materialized temporality. We see it in our mind’s eye: a peeling back that reveals the inner complexity of multi-generational dwelling and deep time. We might even imagine standing next to a cut-away, holding something for scale.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.