Dominique Moran

University of Birmingham · School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Carceral geography has yet to define the ‘carceral’, with implications for both its own development, its potential synergies within and beyond geography, and effective critique of the carceral ‘turn’. A range of explicatory alternatives are open, including continued expansive engagement with the carceral, and attendance to compact and diffuse carce...

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 dev...

Geography, as a disciplinary lens, brings a valuable perspective to the study of the carceral, and carceral geography’s concern for the spatial could provide a new explanatory perspective to the consideration of some accepted tenets within criminology, whilst at the same time offering a productive and useful ‘grounding’ of contemporary geographies...

Carceral geography, whilst in dialogue with many aspects of theory-building in contemporary human geography, including notions of affect, mobility and embodiment, has yet to meaningfully engage with animal geographies to consider the nonhuman dimension of carceral experience. Likewise, criminological scholarship of human-animal carceral co-presence...

A growing body of scholarship draws attention to prisons and environmental justice, pointing out the propensity for prisons to be located on contaminated sites and to be in close proximity to polluting industries, as well as for prisons themselves to contribute to local environmental degradation. Prisoners’ immobility renders them unable to relocat...

In this paper, we present evidence of estimated significant associations between greenspace and prisoners’ self-reported well-being, self-harm and violence in prisons in England and Wales. Refining and extending our previous research that estimated the relationship between greenspace and self-harm and violence while controlling for the effects of p...

Charles Dickens is often evoked to make connections to Victorian times – and to highlight the need for change in today’s society. The situation of prisons is a prime example, where references to the ‘Dickensian prison’ figure in contemporary discourse to draw critical attention to the state of prisons and to call for reform. But it would be too sim...

Contrary to descriptions of a desensitising situation – with restrictions on movement, monotonous regimes and sparse surroundings – much research highlights imprisonment as sensorially and emotionally powerful. Following work within the ‘turn to affect’ that focuses on non-verbal, non-conscious and, often, non-human embodied experiences, scholars h...

Geographers have expanded notions of the carceral, the military and war far beyond conventional ideas of the prison, the armed forces of the nation state and armed conflict, thus situating spaces of confinement, surveillance and monitoring in deep histories of violence. Nevertheless, we argue that renewed attention to these ‘conventional’ instituti...

Prior scholarship tracing the origins and architecture of prisons has tended to focus on how and why prisons are built—what they are intended to achieve and their construction as an expression of the punitive philosophies of their age. It does not consider how prisons persist as time passes, perhaps beyond their anticipated operational life span, a...

Introduction Knowledge about the factors that contribute to the correctional officer’s (CO) mental health and well-being, or best practices for improving the mental health and well-being of COs, have been hampered by the dearth of rigorous longitudinal studies. In the current protocol, we share the approach used in the Canadian Correctional Workers...

Research on prison location primarily focuses on relationships with local communities and the impact of distance on visitation. Considering the issue of prison location in a different manner, this exploratory paper deploys GIS methodology to determine whether the characteristics of prison location can impact prisoners themselves. The presence of gr...

This paper extends discussions of military and post-military landscapes, and prior theorisation of the prison-military complex. In so doing it highlights as-yet unresearched synergies between the prison and the military which take form through the repurposing of former military bases as prisons, the creation of carceral landscapes of military memor...

Prior research into military–civilian transition has suggested that the Prison Service may be a popular destination for Armed Forces leavers, but the experience of former military personnel within the prison system as prison staff (rather than as Veterans in Custody) has so far been overlooked. As a result, we know very little about their route int...

Building on prior theorisation of the prison-military complex and critiques of Foucault's claim of similarities between the prison and the military, this paper uses the example of ex-military personnel as prison staff to consider the nature of this relationship. In a UK context in which policy discourse speaks of 'military' methods as an aspiration...

The prior employment history of prison officers has been overlooked within academic literatures and, in contrast with the prior military service of Veterans-in-Custody, the significance of their military experience has been almost completely disregarded. Since military service is known to be predictive of subsequent professional performance, this o...

This paper demonstrates for the first time that prisons with a higher proportion of natural vegetation within their perimeter have lower levels of staff sickness absence. It makes three significant contributions. First, it extends studies of workplace nature contact into the un-researched carceral context. Second, whereas previous workplace nature...

This article presents crucial new evidence that prisons with a higher proportion of the area within their perimeter given over to natural vegetation exhibit lower levels of self-harm and violence (both between prisoners and toward staff). Extending prior qualitative prison-level studies that find that nature contact influences prisoners’ self-repor...

This chapter explores the significance of sensory interactions with blue space through the bars of a prison cell window. The architecture of incarceration is almost always assumed to impinge on the lives of those residing in carceral space in harmful rather than therapeutic ways. Drawing on notions of therapeutic landscapes and data collected from...

Arguing that criminology has thus far inadequately theorised militarism as it relates to the prison system, this agenda‐setting article introduces the ‘prison‐military complex’ as a means to initiate examination of militarism in relation to institutions and practices of incarceration. In so doing, it identifies a key knowledge gap vis‐à‐vis the rol...

It has long been recognised within communications and linguistic studies that human interactions cannot be reduced to merely exchanges between two participants. Beyond the dyadic model of communication (involving speaker and listener) are participation frameworks of different kinds, involving multiple actors in diverse contexts. Our focus in this c...

This paper considers the potential for elements of custodial environments to have a restorative effect on those who are incarcerated within them. Considering the applicability and practicality of using Attention Restoration Theory (ART) to frame experience in a custodial context, it interprets results of a survey of prisoners at a large medium-secu...

Architectural ethics has only begun to consider in earnest what it means, in a moral sense, to be an architect.1 The academy, however, has yet to adequately to explore the ethical problems raised,2 to evaluate the types of moral issues that arise, and to develop moral principles or moral reasons that should guide decisions when encountering these m...

‘Healthy prisons’ is a well-established concept in criminology and prison studies. As a guiding principle to prisoners’ quality of life, it goes back to the 18th century when prison reformer John Howard regarded the improvement of ventilation and hygiene as being essential in the quest for religious penitence and moral reform. In more recent, times...

This handbook brings together the international research focussing on prisoners’ families and the impact of imprisonment on them. Under-researched and under-theorised in the realm of scholarship on imprisonment, this handbook encompasses a broad range of original, interdisciplinary and cross-national research. This volume includes the experiences o...

This paper considers the intimate exchanges taking place in a space whose public/private designation is indistinct; the prison visiting room. Drawing on extensive research with serving prisoners, their visitors, and prison staff in the UK, and using as an interpretive lens recent geographical conceptualizations of comfort as affective complex, it s...

This paper advances carceral geographies by situating water in relation to the nexus of care and control in the carceral setting. Critical for both hygiene and health, but also requiring control and management, consideration of water offers an analytical lens to uncover everyday, intimate and embodied institutional spaces of care and control mediat...

In this paper we explore the potential applicability of evidence of health-enabling effects of elements of the built environment – particularly access to nature – deriving from research in healthcare facilities to evidence-based design in the custodial context. Drawing on comparative qualitative research conducted in the UK and the Nordic region, w...

This paper advances geographies of absence by considering the multiscalar, overlapping, ambiguous and reciprocal absences inherent in incarceration, and the compound nature of the experiential and embodied absences characteristic of prison visiting. It progresses extant literatures by considering as absent a group which differs from those previousl...

This volume has worked towards a diverse and in-depth engagement with the boundaries of carceral geography. The individual contributions have provided engaging, innovative and sometimes deeply unsettling explorations of these borders, extending the field conceptually, methodologically and empirically.

Advocating greater engagement between children’s and carceral geographies, this paper explores the spaces of parenting as they exist within a UK male prison, building upon criminological research on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families and children. Focusing primarily on the visiting room, it extends discussion of the specificities of...

Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This article opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of ‘circuits’ to critically enquire into the carceral. Drawing...

This paper engages with the digital mediation of cultural and political opinion in simulation gaming, and recent critique of cultural geography’s aptitude for research into digital media. Drawing attention to literatures within carceral geography and cybergeography, and presenting an empirical case study of the simulation computer game Prison Archi...

There are currently over 1.6 million prisoners in Europe and conditions in European prisons vary widely. The European Society of Criminology’s Working Group on Prison Life and the Effects of Imprisonment was established in 2010. The Working Group consists of scholars from over 20 countries who aim to encourage prison research in Europe. These acade...

This paper advances geographies of architecture beyond frequently studied ‘signature’ buildings by drawing attention to non-iconic, non-utopian, banal counterpoints – in this case, new prisons. It argues that by attending to ‘signature’ buildings, architectural geographies have overlooked the critical and underexplored circumstances and contingenci...

This paper contributes to a growing body of work on labour market migration to the UK from the new Member States (NMS) of the European Union, particularly the migration of Polish nationals to the UK, drawing attention to the weaknesses of existing data sets which attempt to quantify these migration flows and in particular to map the geographical di...

The reconstruction of the history from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s of Soviet repressions critically influenced the social formation of Gulag memory in Russia. Amongst those re-narrating the past, the ‘Memorial’ Society and the Russian Orthodox Church most actively shaped the collective memory of Soviet repressions, trying to establish multi-lay...

Despite longstanding implicit recognition of the significance of prison space, which can be traced back at least as far as Bentham’s notion, introduced in 1791, that prisoner reform and wellbeing are achieved in part by a ’simple idea in architecture’, prison architecture, design and technology (ADT) remain underresearched and poorly theorized. Thi...

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive historical-geographical lens to the development and evolution of correctional institutions as a specific subset of carceral geographies. This book analyzes and critiques global practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of "corrections" from the eighteenth to t...

This article examines the ways in which sustainability discourses intersect with carceral policies. Building new prisons to ‘green’ industry standards; making existing prison buildings less environmentally harmful; incorporating processes such as renewable energy initiatives; offering ‘green-collar’ work and training to prisoners; and providing ‘gr...

This exploratory paper introduces the notion of the "green" prison, uncovering the ways in which environmental sustainability inflects carceral policies and practices. Focusing on the United States, it highlights the construction of an "organizational sustainable development" discourse within the correctional system, and argues that it is the syste...

This paper deploys a theoretical engagement with the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to explore the experience of surveilled penal space by incarcerated individuals, and in so doing further advances the new field of carceral geography. Foucault’s description of self-surveillance as the mechanism through which disciplinary power or biopower opera...

This paper contests Goffmann’s (1961) interpretation of the prison as a ‘total institution’, echoing critiques which draw attention to its spatial porosity and permeability, and drawing attention to the experience of incarceration and reintegration as inherently embodied. It suggests that ‘transcarceral’ spaces, in which released prisoners experien...

This book draws together the work of a new community of scholars with a growing interest in carceral geography: the geographical study of practices of imprisonment and detention. It combines work by geographers in ‘mainstream’ penal establishments that incarcerate people convicted of a crime by the prevailing legal system, with geographers’ recent...

This paper argues that the burgeoning sub-discipline of carceral geography needs to pay particular attention to context when theorising carceral space, and that the specific context of Finland offers a new and valuable perspective. Much of the work within this new area of human geography originates in or pertains to the highly incarcerative, or 'hy...

Building on previous work which has conceptualised the embodied experience of imprisonment as prison time ‘inscribed’ on the body, this paper argues that the experience of reintegration after release from prison is similarly embodied and corporeal. It contends that while scholarship of prisoner reintegration post-release has identified the stigmati...

By bringing debates over experiential time within human geography and criminology/prison sociology into dialogue with one another, this article draws attention to the imperative of considering time in the geographical study of incarceration. Informed by an understanding of space and time which sees them as analytically inseparable from each other,...

This paper addresses the challenge of measuring the extent of immigration to the UK following EU Accession in 2004, and argues that the most commonly used databases (UK Census, Labour Force Survey and Worker Registration Scheme) can be supplemented by the National Insurance Number (NINo) Allocations database, and demonstrates the utility of this da...

This paper suggests that although carceral space seems to be sharply demarcated from the outside world, the prison wall is in fact more porous than might be assumed. The paper critiques Goffman’s theory of the ‘total institution’ by deploying a geographical engagement with liminality to theorise prison visiting rooms as spaces in which prisoners co...

A UK-based team of two geographers and a criminologist presents the results of its ongoing investigation of the geography of Russia's prison system, which in 2011 is in the early stages of transition from housing inmates in communal barracks (regardless of the severity of their crimes) to one more similar to that in the United States, in which faci...

In the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, teaching post-socialist transition to undergraduate students has become increasingly challenging. This paper relates the development, planning and operation of a fieldwork module in Moscow, for Year Three geography undergraduates. It argues that ‘on-street’ teaching and imaginative use of visual so...

Using materials gathered during field work in the penal region in the southwest corner of the Republic of Mordoviya in 2007, the authors examine the official representations of the history of the Mordovan gulag from 1930 to the present day. Through an analysis of the penal authority's institutional newspaper, its museum and anniversary celebrations...

This article presents findings from research conducted in a penal colony for young women in Russia. Russia’s penal system remains under-researched in socio-legal and criminological scholarship. This contribution is the first multi-disciplinary study of Russian imprisonment to be conducted in the post-Soviet period, bringing together criminology, hu...

This paper examines the construction of femininity within Russian women’s prisons. On the basis of fieldwork carried out in three women’s prisons in the secure and restricted penal zone within Mordovia, Russian Federation, we present unique and original qualitative data, as well as a critical engagement with contemporary Russian press sources. Star...

This chapter explores the links between drug use and HIV/AIDS in post-socialist Russia, investigating the connection between drug use, especially Injecting Drug Use (IDU), and HIV/AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). It considers drug use both in terms of IDU as a direct means of transmission for the HIV virus...

This paper is concerned with the 'production' of items of material culture, including monuments, made from precious and semi-precious stone, in the early Soviet Union (1920s and 1930s). Selecting examples such as the stars which top the Kremlin towers, it engages with the issues of production of these items, in particular the significance of the ma...

The motivation for this paper is to inform the selection of future policy directions for tackling HIV/AIDS in Russia. The Russian Federation has more people living with HIV/AIDS than any other country in Europe, and nearly 70% of the known infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The epidemic is particularly young, with 80% of those infected...

In this paper I take the example of the 'Map of Industrialization, a huge stone mosaic map of 1930s USSR as a point of convergence for discourses connecting Soviet propaganda and the depiction of Soviet space through cartography, the nature of maps as social constructs, the relationship between cartography and art in Soviet Russia, and the role of...

This article locates the following sector articles in a review of recent research into government interventions in the non-state provision (NSP) of education, health, water and sanitation. Non-state providers (NSPs) are defined here to include all those existing outside the public sector, whether they operate for profit or for philanthropic purpose...

A British geographer discusses the spatial distribution of HIV infections in the Russian Federation, and the comparative lack of geographical research probing this phenomenon. Drawing on literature that suggests a connection between HIV and the impact of transition, the paper reports results of exploratory analysis of associations between prevalenc...

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about the local conditions which accompanied the dual policies of settlement and development of the resource-rich Russian North during the Soviet period. Archival research is presented in the context of recent debate over the focus of Stalinist policies towards the penal labour force,...

This paper provides an overview of the literature concerned with the impact of HIV on public administration, looking in particular at projections of the impact of HIV/AIDS on public expenditure, the impact of attrition on the health and education sectors and on the civil service as a whole. ‘Success stories’ such as Uganda and Senegal are discussed...

Special issue. Incl. bibl., abstracts.

This paper examines the history of forestry in the Russian North through a study area in the North Urals. The relationships between the local leskhozy (forestry enterprises) and the lesniki (forestry workers) and the environment are contrasted. The paper explores four key aspects: exile, planned production, decline in rural population and environme...

This paper explores the relationship between the forestry enterprises (leskhozi) and the inhabitants of forestry villages in the northern rayony of Perm oblast, Russian Federation in the context of the `new regional geography'. These relationships are compared with those identified between peasant farmers and collective and state farms post-1991, a...

This paper focuses on conditions in forestry villages in the northern rayony of Perm’ oblast’, in European Russia, which form part of the Russian "Near North". It describes the collapse of the local forestry economy after 1991, and against the backdrop of these economic conditions, the paper then discusses the survival strategies being employed by...

The authors, based on extensive field work in northern Perm' Oblast, investigate how people who cannot or do not wish to leave Russia's economic and geographic margins survive, in this case using "subsidiary plots" and forest resources. Northern Perm' Oblast, one of the northern areas that became "overpopulated" during the Soviet period (in this in...

This paper is concerned with the 'production' of items of material culture, including monuments, made from precious and semi-precious stone, in the early Soviet Union (1920s and 1930s). Selecting examples such as the stars which top the Kremlin towers, it engages with the issues of production of these items, in particular the significance of the ma...