Abandonment, Criminalization, Development: Geographies of Carceral Expansion in Three Countries

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

This thematic panel features work from scholars exploring the dynamics of incarceration in three distinct and geographically distant regions: Manitoba, Canada; Eastern Kentucky, USA; and Victoria, Australia. Taken together, the papers show how incarceration is threaded into community planning and development agendas, which filter through to calibrate individual experiences of the carceral state at different scales of power. Each paper analyzes how political, economic, and historical forces shape the regionally-specific dynamics and constituencies that are expanding and refining technologies of policing and incarceration - and elucidates some of the consequences of this. The methods adopted in these papers are rooted in the idea that the contours of carceral systems are best understood in relation to the historical structures of domination that precede them, the political economic crises that reproduce them, and the efforts of people on the ground to resist them.

Sub Unit

• Area IX. Comparative & Historical Perspectives:  / 68. Cross-National Comparison of Crime & Justice

Individual Presentations

• Choreographing Carceral Consent: How Local Communities are Enlisted in New Prison Projects in Regional Australia - Emma Russell, La Trobe University

• Jail development as reconciliation? Documenting a new politics of carceral expansion in Manitoba - Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, University of Winnipeg

• “That Makes Them an Easy Target:” Criminalization and Racialization in a Central Appalachian County - Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University

Chair

• Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, University of Winnipeg

Discussant

• Emma Russell, La Trobe University