Carceral Geography

Book excerpt: The ’punitive turn’ has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ’carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.