6 - Punishment, Prisons, and the Visual

Summary

Introduction

Like many of the other issues and sites taken up in this book— and, more generally, taken up by criminology— the ways and moments in which we imagine the prison are intensely configured by the ways and moments in which we see the prison; how we understand the concept of the prison is conditioned by how, where, when, and what we see when we look for or at the prison as a material space, as a building and as a location. The inverse, though, is also of course true: what we look at and for when we look for the prison in the vast landscapes of visual culture is conditioned by what we imagine the prison to be. Caleb Smith (2013: 167) cuts to the heart of this relation, noting that ‘the penal state is operative in sites where we might not be accustomed to look for it’. It is necessary for a visual criminological exploration of punishment to think expansively about when and where we might render regimes of punishment visible, or to otherwise use images in order to wrestle meaning from punishment.

It is obviously essential, then, when thinking about the visual dimensions of punishment, that we not limit our analysis to prisons. Like police, described later in Chapter 7, the full form of punishment is first obscured by thinking solely of the prison. In the example of police, the problem arises from the limitations imposed by ‘the’, whereas in the case of punishment the limitation is imposed by ‘prison’. It is important, then, to remain mindful of the vast apparatuses of punishment that extend beyond and outside of the confines of the prison.

Given the scope of tendencies implicated at the intersection of the visual with prisons and punishment— including everything from the material space of the prison to the virtual spaces of ‘e- carceration’ and other trends in non- custodial supervision, as well as the incalculably vast archive of images flowing from the social facts of the prison and punishment— it may be useful to think instead simply of a ‘carceral culture’ (that is, a culture entirely conditioned by a carceral regime and carceral political economy), a category that captures the full range of carceral possibilities.