Understanding confinement beyond site

Research at the intersection – or rather on the overlap – of prison and urban studies is increasing, as policies and techniques of confinement and surveillance, but also practices of subversion and informal organization reach out of prison into the urban, and from the urban into the prison (Fassin 2017; Gill et al. 2018; Jefferson 2012; Skarbek 2012; Steinberg 2004). The ever-growing push for securitization (including dominant ‘war on’-discourses) effectively subjects the lives of those ‘trapped’ at the urban margins to a ‘carceral grip’ (Crewe 2011), as they are subjected to carceral techniques of separation and exclusion, disproportionate processing through the criminal justice system, and further marginalization (e.g. Goffman 2014; Wacquant 2009). Work on policing and urban violence in particular has emphasized these dynamics and politics of surveillance, control and exclusion (e.g. Auyero, Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes 2015; Denyer Willis 2015; Goldstein 2012; Rodgers 2006). Relatedly, much work on prisons and penality has underlined how carceral measures exacerbate pre-existing deprivations, thwarting already complicated processes of social inclusion, re-entry, rehabilitation or reinsertion (e.g. Armstrong and Durnescu 2016; Crewe 2011; Liebling and Maruna 2005).

On the other hand, however, penal institutions have often been understood in stark contrast to the rest of society (Spierenburg 2007), and their analyses have been historically characterized by the (presupposed) opposition between life on the outside and life on the inside, between ‘inmate subculture’ and outside culture (Clemmer 1940; Goffman 1991; Irwin 1970; Sykes 1958). One example of the criminological fix on prisons that is particularly pertinent to our endeavour is that the re-entry literature by and large privileges an analytical distinction between prison life and post-prison life over an analytical focus on continuity (Petersilia 2003). Yet Adrian Grounds and Ruth Jamieson (2003), Andrew Jefferson (2010) and Mahuya Bandyopadhyay (2010) have all argued for the necessity of taking long-term trajectories and traversals into account when considering how prison affects people's lives. In fact, prisons are often just one site of confinement in people's lives, as Boe, Bandyopadhyay and Weegels also emphasize in this collection and, as Jefferson (2014) has argued, it is not only sites that confine; confinement can also be a feature of everyday practices and states of mind.

Though it is important to understand the particularities of the prison and the street to be able to understand what particular configurations of security, marginality and confinement mean for people's everyday lives (and for researchers’ opportunities to generate knowledge about these), we direct attention to the social practices and relations where prisons ‘spill over’ into urban areas that they are located in or purposely removed from, just as those where ‘street’ configurations of power or identity politics (concurrently) ‘pour into’ the prison space (or are actively countered by the system). The seemingly manifest boundaries between these sites are then often in fact porous borders, and social life inside or outside prison or on and off the street should not be analytically disaggregated (Waltorp and Jensen 2019).

Still, it is complicated to formulate a language that allows us to think about confinement in other than site-specific or binary terms, especially as the term itself implies a particular situatedness. It becomes even more complicated if we want that language to speak to rather than with power, and to break with thinking within/towards a paradigm of liberal social ordering (see Bandyopadhyay in this issue). In prison studies the most common binary is manifest in the commonly invoked basic distinction between inside and outside. Yet if empirical data clearly point to a world of connectivity beyond these binaries, we must strive to resist them and seek to understand the street and the prison in terms of overlap, traversal and porosity.

Chris Vasantkumar's (2017) programmatic essay on world sites may be useful for this task. He aims to debunk some of the binary distinctions made between the city and the village, for example the association of the urban with connection and the rural with disconnection, and the association of the urban with the global and the rural with the local, where the rural is always reduced to what is left behind after the urban has been defined. As such, he claims that ‘significant attention must be devoted to deconstructing the binaries that continue to condition the boundary work’ (2017: 367) and argues ‘for the necessity of seeking to uncover rather than presuming ahead of time particular geographically specific archipelagos of connection’ (ibid.). His call to pay attention to the work of the binary is one we take to heart here, as we seek to examine the prison/street overlap without presuming an inherent difference or similarity between the sites.

In turn, Jennifer Turner's work is helpful. She draws specific attention to questions pertaining to where the boundary between prison and society is located, by whom that boundary is constituted and how. Like us, she is concerned with problematizing the notion of the prison ‘as a discrete, self-contained entity, opposed to outside society’ (2016: 14). Like us, she grapples with the dominance of binary thinking.

Consideration of the social myths that inform classic imagined binaries of prison and street is instructive: why is the prison portrayed as closed and the street as open? Why is the prison considered separate and hidden from view and the street public and exposed? Is prison really a place of deprivation and the street a place of liberty? Is prison actually a place of order and control and the street a place of carnival? Is the prison a ‘backward’ and disconnected village and the street a venue of modernity and connectivity? These presupposed binaries often over-determine how confinement is conceived of, where it happens, with what purpose, to whom and how. Nodding to these imaginaries, the contributions in this special issue present possible answers through close attention to the empirical realities of daily practice.

Our effort to disrupt the prison/street binary can be viewed as a push to challenge the ‘policing’ of site in a Rancièrian sense. Rancière defines policing as ‘the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying’. It includes the mechanisms by which people and institutions are ‘assigned by name to a particular place and task’ (Rancière, in Chambers 2011: 306). He argues that this ordering is premised on inequality and domination and puts forward a very specific definition of ‘politics’ as the one-off acts that seek to disrupt policing, often in impure and imperfect ways (Rancière, Panagia and Bowlby 2001). We evoke Rancière's notion of boundary-policing as a generalized and deep-seated project of ordering, which site-oriented perspectives on confinement are easily drawn into. Following Rancière, we propose an impure politics of porosity and traversal that we find is better equipped to critically inspect the real politics of confinement.

From fixed boundaries to porous borders

In examining porosity and traversal, we conceptually distinguish between borders and boundaries. We take this distinction from Richard Sennett's appreciative rehabilitation of the open city (2006): ‘The boundary is an edge where things end; the border is an edge where different groups interact. At borders, organisms become more interactive … whereas the boundary is guarded territory, as established by prides of lions or packs of wolves. No transgression at the boundary: Keep Out!’ (8). Sennett carries this analogy deeper down to a cellular level: the cell wall ‘retains’ and is analogous to the boundary, he argues, but the ‘cell membrane is more open, more like a border – but … the membrane does not function like an open door; a cell membrane is both porous and resistant at the same time, holding in some valuable elements of the city, letting other valuable elements flow through’ (ibid.).

In prison studies, the wall has been attributed a particularly heavy significance. It is the wall that keeps prisoners in. It is through the wall that one must pass to enter or leave prison, whether as a prisoner, a member of staff, a visitor, an inspector or a researcher. As such, it is the wall that provides the materialized illusion of separation, serving as a potent manifestation and symbolic expression of the idea that prison and society are separate. Yet even with this formal entry and exit function, the prison wall much more resembles a messy border than an ordering boundary: the prison's wall is rather a membrane. Luisa Schneider's contribution to this issue grapples with exactly these ‘degrees of permeability’. This is also picked up in Andrew Jefferson and Tomas Martin's contribution relating to Myanmar prisoners’ struggles to traverse the prison wall through the forging of tenuous connections (this issue). Confinement, in this sense, is not as much containment in impermeable structures as it is a central expression of a relationship between the state and the incarcerated citizen across bordered, porous sites.

It is from a comprehensive engagement with life inside prison that recent prisons research has become more attentive to the prison's embedding in wider social structures. It is now commonplace in prison studies, for example, to acknowledge the regular flow of bodies in and out of the prison, or the engagement of prisoners in smuggling or extortion rackets, or the application of video communication technology to facilitate contact between prisoners and their families (Jewkes 2005; O'Neill 2015). Prison scholars have also explored the dynamics of the prison–society interface (e.g. Moran, Gill and Conlan 2013) through the concept of liminality. For scholars who have examined the spaces associated with prison visits, liminality is a stage, a passing, a state of temporary being. The notion of porosity, on the other hand, focuses on the quality of the trail, the permeability of the landscape, and on the flows, fluids and qualities of the membrane, cognizant of the ways in which institutions are fused – politically, socially, symbolically, discursively and affectively. This resonates with criminological perspectives on carceral circuits (da Cunha 2008) and arguments that fluidity rather than fixedness is a fundamental quality of confinement (Armstrong and Jefferson 2017).

In the field of urban studies, a similar preoccupation with boundaries, delineation and the division into territories persists, not in the least due to society's own preoccupation with sealing off and setting apart particular areas: slums from affluent neighbourhoods, centres from peripheries, cities from rural areas, homes from streets and so on. Much ethnographic work in urban anthropology and urban sociology effectively points, however, to the highly productive quality of such distinctions, to their politics and (simultaneously) to their artificiality (Auyero and Berti 2015; Caldeira 2000; Jaffe 2016; Rodgers 2004).

Experiences of confinement across different kinds of sites (prisons, camps, ghettos and so on) was the topic of a series of papers in a recent special issue of Ethnos⁶ that emerged as the current collection was being developed (Agier; Jefferson, Turner and Jensen, Jefferson and Segal; Le Marcis; Løvgren and Turner; Povinelli; Rodgers; Løvgren; Waltorp and Jensen; all 2019). The special issue develops the notion of stuckness to refer to cross-cutting and intersecting experiences of confinement emphasizing the need for understanding the way people are caught up in time as well as place, an issue also touched on by Manuela Cunha in this volume. The authors also emphasize how experiences of confinement do not simply take place and cause harm in closed spaces during moments of immobility, but equally play out in persisting loops of forced mobility, and protracted marginality.

Thus, scholarship from across a range of disciplines and continents points to an entwined, fluid relationship between two sites once understood as radically distinct objects of analyses (da Cunha 2008, 2014; Turner and Jensen 2019; Wacquant 2002). However, it remains the case that relatively little attention has been paid to the analytic traction of traversing actors and porous borders, to help us critically inspect the productive power of boundary-making, the pervasive politics of confinement and the lived practices of submission and subversion in the face of structural exigencies.

The contributions: ethnographies of traversal and porosity

Our introduction has so far proposed a new analytical frame for thinking about confinement that reaches beyond site. We have explained the reasoning behind this proposal, but it is, admittedly, only a lens. The crux is of course what this lens allows us to see. In this final part of the introduction, we briefly present the individual contributions, indicating how they deliver on the ambition of pointing towards novel avenues for a grounded theorization of confinement through an attention to porosity and traversal.

First, Mahuya Bandyopadhyay takes as her point of departure ethnographic encounters that illustrate the multiple and often incoherent expressions of the prison/street nexus in India. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a prison and a para (urban neighbourhood), she narrates moments in people's lives and events in prison and outside of it that do not fit neatly with categories central to the understanding of the prison/street relation as a ‘deadly symbiosis’, a continuum or a liminal space. Bandyopadhyay consequently identifies a poverty of concepts in narrating these transgressions between the prison and the street and she draws on a seminal essay by Lorna Rhodes to show how ‘blind fields’ and ‘punctums’, illustrated through prison fieldwork, may be productively used to disrupt conventional, hegemonic narratives of urban marginality. Through critically reflexive considerations of methodology, her article thus represents a call for analyses that disrupt the spread of hegemonizing ideas based on the presumed primacy of order and the presumed aberration of violence and chaos.

Picking up on this and arguing against control-based theories of safety, Hollis Moore traces how ‘carceral subjects’ envision and pursue safety through their knowledge of how legal and extralegal worlds function and who within them can facilitate the delivery of safety when things go awry. Concerned with the mutually constitutive relationship between extralegal agency, familiar solidarity and insurgent safety in Brazil, she explores the story of a mother's embodied, situated and relational ways of knowing the system and key actors within it, persuasively deprivileging the explanatory power of gang and rule of law discourse as sources of safety. Instead, she holds, protection under precarious circumstances is afforded not by the state or by gangs but through fragile and contingent relationships based on an intimate knowledge of the system that crosses borders between state and non-state, legal and extralegal dimensions of the carceral.

Drawing on her prison ethnography and sustained contact with (former) prisoners in Nicaragua, Julienne Weegels explores three former prisoners’ post-release trajectories. In the face of a hybrid state that manifests as both a legal penal state and an extralegal system of powers, colloquially referred to as el Sistema, and against the backdrop of a (d)evolving political context, she argues for an understanding of the ‘tightness’ of post-release life and the ways in which prisoners both submit to and resist this. Bringing Crewe's (2011) conceptualization of the ‘carceral grip’ into dialogue with the ‘transcarceral’, she convincingly conceptualizes the Sistema's ‘transcarceral grip’ in order to pinpoint how the hybrid carceral state expands through the continued mobilization of carceral logics against former prisoners. Bringing nuance to the simple transposition of carceral logics onto the neighbourhood as a whole, then, she argues that particular carceral subjects are held more tightly than others. Importantly, she argues that in order to fully comprehend the tightness of this transcarceral grip, its extralegal qualities must be taken into account, too.

Based on her detailed interactions with two men caught up in flows between sites of confinement (in the USA and France, respectively), Carolina Boe utilizes the concept of metis to describe how they both deal with and transcend the conditions of their own subjugation as foreign nationals avoiding deportation. She argues that stories of lives that move back and forth through different sites of confinement – poor urban neighbourhoods, prisons, deportation centres, as well as schools and the military – are illustrative of the apparent inevitability of confinement for certain segments of populations subject disproportionately to the effects of ‘the combined wars on drugs, terror and immigration, as well as the entanglements of immigration law and criminal justice’. These political and societal developments have had consequences, argues Boe, for prisons and neighbourhoods alike. Boe's analysis affirms previous work that emphasizes the importance of attending to the apparently self-perpetuating inevitability of institutional and non-institutional confinement under structural conditions that exclude and disenfranchise. Her attention to flows disrupts rigid ideas of inside and outside, before and after, as well as local and global.

Luisa Schneider's analysis, based on her ethnographic encounters with three prisoners and a man appearing in court – a prisoner leader, a subjugated youth, a hustler and a trickster – vividly illustrates how the prison walls are more permeable for some than for others. Through close analysis of personal narratives, central ideas associated with notions of the distinct free city and the closed prison are problematized: prisoners are not only governed, they govern too; severance from the outside world and the prisoner community can be seen as a kind of paradoxical (though damaging) freedom; ways of being in prison can be relatively consistent with pre-prison life; social connections are severed for some but maintained by others. Her careful disaggregation of prisoner experiences shows how prison affects people differently and is dealt with by recourse to different tactics and strategies. This similarly represents an important corrective to accounts of continuums and continuities that imply that these operate in uniform ways with similar effects. The permeability of prison walls varies not according to its materiality – its height or thickness – but according to the ‘personal circumstance, background, social standing and resources available’ to individual prisoners.

Andrew Jefferson and Tomas Martin then explore the porosity of prisons in Myanmar with reference to the way in which prisoners and their relatives struggle to maintain states of connectivity through practices of ‘tying’ and ‘cutting’. Drawing primarily on interview data about family visits, Jefferson and Martin introduce the notion of connectivity as an alternative analytic frame to that provided by established notions of prisoner–family contact. They examine how people in fact seek and manage to relate in situations of chaos, control and surveillance; how they suffer under circumstances of not-knowing; and how they establish protective exchange relations. In line with the contributions to this special issue, their analysis of the prison/society interface is based on the experiences of embodied, situated subjects, but their focus is not on the circulation of bodies between prison and poor urban neighbourhoods (except in the sense that prisoners’ relatives do this). Instead, they scrutinize the continuous processes of negotiating and co-producing states of connectivity at the porous border of the prison that implicate both prisoners and their relatives and have consequences for lives inside and outside.

Finally, Manuela Cunha, who has been at the forefront of the scholarship attentive to circuits of exchange between prisons and deprived urban neighbourhoods, takes us on a journey across time rather than space. She demonstrates how changed interpersonal dynamics within a women's prison reflect changing patterns of who is entering the prison. An increased homogenization of the female prison population in Portugal resulted in a greater sense of sameness and fewer othering practices. Based on connections or common experiences outside the prison, most women in the same prison ten years later felt a sense of togetherness rather than distinctiveness that was expressed through bodily practices and modes of intersubjective relations. Worlds behind and beyond bars, she argues, had become ‘socially and morally continuous’. Thus, Cunha's article brings together discussions of morality and sociality as features of embodied experience inside and outside of prison over time. Interestingly, she poses a key question as to whether the juncture between prison and street has become more salient over time or whether we have simply become more attentive to it as scholars. Steffen Jensen picks up on this in his afterword on the conceptual inroads that this collection makes and their relevance for urban anthropology.

In sum, the contributors to this special issue draw together a series of ethnographic explorations of prison in relation to the street, and the street in relation to prison in order to investigate what we conceptualize as fluid and multidirectional processes of traversal, which have consequences for human lives, policies and institutional practices. This practice and relation-oriented focus is shared across the articles and shows how an attention to overlapping porous borders and people's agentic engagements through and across them can help address the differential effects of carceral power on people's lives (both inside and outside prison). By extension, the grounded theoretical contributions made in this collection help to push existing debates towards understandings of confinement beyond site without reifying the extremes or directionalities of a continuum.