(Un)Becoming Carceral: Genealogy of Landscape and Prison Growth in Appalachia

• In Event: Visual Criminology and the Penal Spectacle

Abstract

Even as Americans “experience” incarceration through a variety of mediated images, sound bytes, and narratives, there are aspects of the carceral state that would seem to evade the exhibitionist notions of “spectacle.” The quotidian disappearances of people into the depths of penal institutions and the growing prevalence of those institutions in rural America eerily avoid the attention that “spectacles” usually invite. Indeed, the absence/presence of people and prison is marked mostly by their normalization into the logics and landscapes of American society, a kind of carceral common sense that can place a dramatic phenomenon—like the growth of prisons—outside the visual register. Working through photo-ethnographic material from eastern Kentucky, this paper tries to denaturalize prison growth by examining the changing landscape of Appalachia. We focus our examination on two related processes: how some landscapes become carceral and how others—passed over for prison siting—avoid it. In mapping a genealogy of the changing rural topography we look to illuminate a political economic and cultural process that has so dramatically—and yet so unspectacularly—transformed communities. In examining landscapes that remain free of prisons, we gesture toward the possibilities of reimagining and remapping carceral space.

Authors

• Jill Frank, Georgia State University

• Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University