Michelle Brown

Visual criminology and carceral studies: Counter-images in the carceral age

Mass incarceration maps onto global neoliberal carceral formations that, in turn, look very much like a visual iconography of social suffering. Camp or prison-like conditions define the daily life of many of the world’s inhabitants caught in contexts of detention, incarceration, forced migration, and population displacement. Often depicted as abject subjects, actors in carceral contexts and the people who organize with them seek to find strategies of representation that humanize and politicize their existence. This essay attempts to gain a sense of the visual struggles at the heart of these carceral scenes by way of an analysis of the use of images and new media by current and former prisoners, community members, artists, and scholars to counter mass incarceration in the United States. Such scenes are significant sites for examining how a visual criminology might reveal and participate in the contestations and interventions that increasingly challenge the project of mass incarceration.

Empathy and punishment

With its foundations of injury, harm, and pain, the sociology of punishment is poised to give attention to the role of empathy at precisely those instances of social experience where human connection, understanding, and social knowing are destroyed, avoided, prohibited, or simply impossible. I explore this predicament through a specific case drawn from fieldwork in a geriatric prison, where institutional and intersubjective relations established by prison workers challenge empathic connections. The ‘graying’ of the prison population, one of mass incarceration’s unanticipated consequences, brings issues of pain, death, and dying to the fore. The majority of research to date on aging and dying in prison has had an important descriptive and policy orientation. There has been less of an emphasis upon the theoretical underpinnings of such a turn and the nature of intersubjective relations at the intersection of care and punishment. There have been no intensive ground-level analyses of aging in prison against the backdrop of mass incarceration in the contemporary era. This study seeks to fill that vacuum while offering a more complex understanding of the relevance and limits of empathy to the study of punishment.

New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral studies:

Criminology has been slow to open up a conversation about decarceration and abolition in comparison with other disciplines, including history, geography, and gender, race, and critical ethnic studies. Scholars from these areas and actors on the ground—close up to confinement—have done most of the organizing against mass incarceration and theorizing of alternative possibilities. Why those experiences—and the theoretical traditions that inform their work—have been less recognized and developed in criminology is of pivotal concern as more criminologists move forward with the political project of decarceration. The extent to which criminology can sustain an alternative or abolitionist politics remains an open question. Amid growing conversations about decarceration and shifting rhetorics on punishment, we address some of the obstacles that limit criminology as a site from which to engage the abolitionist project, asking where criminologists might turn for interventionist models that move away from imprisonment and the violence of the carceral state. In this article, we advocate for and discuss the contours of critical carceral studies, a growing interdisciplinary movement for engaged scholarly and activist production against the carceral state. We discuss the imperatives for criminological engagement with critical carceral studies and sketch some of the terrain on which the discipline can contribute to the project, including important work to counter criminological discourses and knowledge production that reify and reproduce carceral logics and practices.

Of prisons, gardens, and the way out

Abstract Metaphorically, the garden invokes a repertoire of skills, arts, and virtues that run counter to the act of confinement but are embedded in its disciplinary practice: spaces in punitive environments where care, growth, health, and cultivation are emphasized. Gardens and the force of law and labor are foregrounded in Judeo-Christian myths, in slavery, and in prison farms as spaces of expulsion and brutality. Yet as abandoned, fortress-style prisons dilapidate, and vines and weeds break through concrete, we can begin to ask, What might it mean to imagine the prison through the lens of the garden?

Unequal Protection Under the Law: Encoding Racial Disparities for Hispanics in the Case of Smith v. Georgia

We interrogate the Georgia Supreme Court ruling in the 2002 capital murder trial of Brandon Smith to illustrate how “fair cross section” implementation in Georgia’s legal system was used to create case law that institutionalized discrimination against Hispanic participation in the jury process. By paying scrupulous attention to legal precedents specifically intended to widen inclusion under the equal protection clause, the Justices’ decision put into place one legal standard for Hispanic participation in the jury process and another standard for all other groups. Using critical race theory, we argue that legal precedents based on distorted perceptions of the composition of the Hispanic community in new destination states, common practices of jury forced balancing and sole reliance on decennial census numbers collided to create case law that unintentionally deprives Georgia’s Hispanics of equal protection under the law and may contribute to the disproportionate presence of racialized minorities and Hispanic youth in the criminal justice system.

Captivity, Citizenship, and the Ethics of Otherwise in the Society-of-Captives Thesis: A Commentary on Arrigo

In this engagement with Professor Bruce Arrigo’s psychological jurisprudence model, I explore his critique of captivity and risk management. I am particularly interested in his claims that incarceration culminates in society’s own captivity, that the most destructive aspect of captivity is its foreclosing of human difference and potentiality, and that a praxis that is both clinical and mindful might point a way out. By way of a case anecdote, I interrogate several of the key terms in Arrigo’s formulation—citizenship, reform, revolution, and praxis—in an effort to further conjugate from the ground up such an innovative and important set of possibilities.

Penal Optics and the Struggle for the Right to Look: Visuality and Prison Tourism in the Carceral Era

From fortress prison museums to community jail houses, bed and breakfast “cells” (Schept 2014) to fine dining at London’s Clink (MacEacheran 2015), the carceral regime continues to innovate. From its early conceptions (Strange and Kempa 2003; Brown 2009), the study of penal tourism has navigated these various sites, expanding into an emergent and increasingly robust area of research. As a body of knowledge, it expresses the potential to play an important role in carceral and prison studies and the sociology of punishment as it points to a convergence of penal, visual, political, and historical problems. And because it takes tourism as its focus, it is unavoidably the study of penal configurations within the spatialized contradictions of global neoliberal capitalism. In less than a decade, however, scholars have thoughtfully demonstrated the pitfalls of assuming penal tourism as solely reflecting a commodified form of base consumption. The onus of historical preservation; the creation of public memory, memorialization, and penal history; the record of social suffering and appeal to human dignity; and the struggles for other altogether alternative meanings are all inscribed in more and less visible ways in the commodified production of carceral tourism. Scholarly analyses, consequently, range in their focal points, including emergent national and international forms of prison tours (Welch and Mauare 2011; Welch 2012, 2013, 2015; Wilson 2008), the hierarchies of power in tour design (Wilson 2008), the problematized performances of authoritative tour scripts (Piche and Walby 2010, 2012), the extensive history and historicizing force of prison tourism (Brown and Barton 2015), its contested ethics and pedagogies (Dey 2009; Greenhouse 2003; Piche and Walby 2012; Wilson et al. 2011), its cultural power through the transmission of penal meanings (Brown 2009; Welch 2015), the intentional omission of prisoner presence in tour narratives (Wilson 2008), and the still underexplored experiences of tourists themselves (Ferguson and Piche 2015; Wilson 2008).

Routledge international handbook of visual criminology

Dynamically written and richly illustrated, the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology offers the first foundational primer on visual criminology. Spanning a variety of media and visual modes, this volume assembles established researchers whose work is essential to understanding the role of the visual in criminology and emergent thinkers whose work is taking visual criminology in new directions. This book is divided into five parts that each highlight a key aspect of visual criminology, exploring the diversity of methods, techniques and theoretical approaches currently shaping the field: Part I introduces formative positions in the developments of visual criminology and explores the different disciplines that have contributed to analysing images. Part II explores visual representations of crime across film, graphic art, documentary, police photography, press coverage and graffiti and urban aesthetics. Part III discusses the relationship of visual criminology to criminal justice institutions like policing, punishment and law. Part IV focuses on the distinctive ethical problems posed by the image, reflecting on the historical development, theoretical disputes and methodological issues involved. Part V identifies new frameworks and emergent perspectives and reflects upon the distinctive challenges and limits that can be seen in this emerging field. This book includes a vibrant colour plate section and over a hundred black and white images, breaking down the barriers between original photography and artwork, historic paintings and illustrations and modern comics and films. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, visual ethnographers, art historians and those engaged with media studies.

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes: An interview with film producer and director Brett Story

Editors Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine interview filmmaker Brett Story about her recent documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes.

Book Review: Nicole Rafter Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (2nd edn) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiii + 265 pp.

If the proper place of culture in criminology remains an open question, even more contested is the place of popular culture with its emphasis upon discourse, text and image. However, the publication of recent work on film in Theoretical Criminology and Law and Society Review as well as the emergence of the journal Crime, Media, Culture reflect new ways in which cultural images are achieving serious engagement in criminology. Nicole Rafter’s second edition of Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society is an exemplar of this turn in its scope and scale, its disciplinary contributions, its attention to teaching and, not least, its popularity as it enters its second edition. It remains to date the most comprehensive treatment of crime and punishment in cinema, accessible and smartly written, marking it as an important work within criminology but also in film and cultural studies. Rafter’s focus is fundamental, systematically directed at an assessment of the ways in which crime films ‘mirror’ society historically and in contemporary circumstances through their representation of changing ideologies and social relations. In this pursuit, she highlights the manner in which Hollywood narratives are classically marked by contradiction, reflecting a compulsive fascination on the part of audiences with crime and violence alongside of an oppositional desire for resolution/punishment— what she refers to as a ‘double movement, first challenging the status quo with questions, then reassuring us that justice has been served (or will be), that moral dilemmas can be resolved, and that good guys win’ (p. 213). Finally, she plots alternatives to this tendency and asks what the complex feedback loops of popular culture might have to offer in understanding what individuals learn from crime films. Theoretical Criminology