The Spatial Logics of Penal Institutions: Historical and Cross-Institutional Analysis

• In Event: Roundtable: Incarceration

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of space and place in criminological discourse and penal practice. The ascendance of place-based policing, hot-spot analysis, and geospatial instruments is perhaps the most emblematic expression of this trend. But penal policy and practice have long relied on different notions of space and its centrality for understanding crime and responses to it. These notions vary historically across scope of analysis (the city, neighborhood, micro-places), the significance attributed to place (an independent-variable, a physical environment, a constitutive aspect in community-life), and the perceived possibilities of making space a unit of intervention. Furthermore, space constitutes a central component of penality far beyond policing, and it variably figures in the logic of a wide array of contemporary penal institutions (e.g. probation, e-monitoring, re-entry programs). This paper assumes a historical and cross-institutional perspective to investigate the development of “penal spatial logics” and consider its institutionalization across a broad field of practices. It develops a typology of such logics and demonstrates its conceptual, policy-related, and critical opportunities. Taking the criminological understanding of place as a unit of analysis allows us to contextualize many aspects of contemporary discourse and practice in ways that will prove most beneficial.

Author

• Gil Rothschild, University of California, Berkeley