Prisons

Abstract

Prisons are the result of a lot of trouble, and they cause a great deal of trouble in their own right. Much of this trouble is spatial in nature. Geographic imaginations-including those that we have inherited or passively accepted-play a role in all of this trouble, as do material conditions and embodied experiences. The ontological argument presented in this chapter is that prisons can be analysed as productive of the absolute, relative, and relational spatial process of imprisonment. In this sense, any given prison is many places at once. Prisons are imposing, by design, because fixity produces a far more manageable space than does flow. Prison abolitionists are currently looking in seemingly distant places for solutions: schools and healthcare systems are part of the solution.