Assata’s escape as disincarceral practice

Often carceral studies tends to focus on the prison as a mode of stationary confinement, sometimes forgetting that its rationales and practices are based crucially in movement. This is especially true for black populations disproportionately affected by mass incarceration and intentionally disoriented to the causes and manifestations of the oscillation to which they are reduced. This article is concerned with the carceral landscape that emerges in the criminalization of black people and politics through the legal concept of vagrancy, and how, in turn, black surreptitious movement is used to contest incarceration. To do so, it argues that vagrancy paraphrases a suppression of black political practice, focusing on political prisoner Assata Shakur’s transnational escape to Cuba and its discursive omission in her autobiography. In tracing the transience of Shakur, the article forwards vagrancy as an elaboration of how anti-blackness materializes via carceral geographies by way of displacement, disorientation, and forced movement. It presents a reformulation of Shakur’s escape as disincarceration, which takes seriously the flight toward black liberation as one that is still meaningfully incomplete, elaborating the significance of a continual absconding from the field of representation that has been controlled and constituted by discursive and material hegemonies of race.

Carceral Practices and Geographies in Roman North Africa

I explore the landscape of carceral practices and geographies in late antique Roman North Africa by applying a comparative lens to carceral punishments of exile and condemnation to the mines. I situate the research within the field of carceral studies, using the concept of carceral practices and geographies (as opposed to the narrower concepts of prison and imprisonment). I first offer a contextualization of the punishments of exile and condemnation to the mines as carceral punishments, remaining especially sensitive to the legal, material, and spatial aspects of each punishment. I then consider how different North African Christians used their carceral punishments and geographies to negotiate issues of political and social power in the broader Roman Mediterranean, specifically the letter exchange between Cyprian and three other groups of Christians condemned to the mines (Ep. 76–79). I use the letter correspondence as a case study to explore the “real-and-imagined” aspects of carceral practices and geographies in Roman North Africa. The carceral punishments of exile and condemnation to the mines have legal, material, social, gendered, rhetorical, and lived-experience components, all of which are treated as distinct, yet also fluid and intersectional with each other. I conclude by gesturing to how the case study adds texture to our understanding of how carceral punishment worked in Late Antiquity.

Race and ethnicity I: Property, race, and the carceral state

In this report, I focus on property, particularly housing, as an essential race-making institution and consider its connections to the carceral state. I examine renewed attention to property within geography and some of the ways that scholars are engaging with property regimes as a means to theorize race. Situating property within the context of racial capitalism and critical carceral studies, I draw from struggles over segregation and open housing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to illustrate the linkages between the city’s housing crisis and policing. A robust body of literature documents the inseparability of race and crime, but I further contend that both are conjoined with the politics of residential property.

Spatialization and Carceral Geographies

Carceral geography has emerged as a vibrant and important subdiscipline of human geography, and there is increasing, and productive, dialogue among human geographers concerned with the carceral and disciplinary scholars with longer-standing engagements with incarceration and detention. Although the geographical study of the prison and other confined or closed spaces is relatively new, this dialogue between carceral geography and cognate disciplines of criminology and prison sociology, ensures that carceral geography now speaks directly to issues of contemporary import such as hyperincarceration and the advance of the punitive state. Carceral geography addresses a diverse audience, with geographical approaches to carceral space being taken up by and developed further within human geography, and in criminology and prison sociology. Carceral geography has emerged in concurrence with the “spatial turn” in criminology, and the spatialization of carceral studies, and the particular ways in which carceral geographers have engaged spaces and practices of incarceration—specifically with concerns for mobility, for multisensory carceral experiences, and for methodology—may offer further, and productive, avenues of collaboration between geographers and criminologists concerned with the carceral.

Rethinking mobility in criminology: Beyond horizontal mobilities of prisoner transportation

Typically, to be incarcerated is to be fixed: limited within specific parameters or boundaries with liberty and agency greatly reduced. Yet, recent literature has attended to the movement (or mobilities) that shape, or are shaped by modes of incarceration. Rather than simply assuming that experiences are inherently ones of immobility, such literature unhinges carceral studies from its framing within a sedentary ontology. However, the potential of mobility studies for unpacking the movements enfolded in carceral space and imprisoned life has yet to be fully exploited. When attending to mobilities, criminologists have investigated the politics of movement through a traditional horizontal frame of motion (between prison spaces, between court and prison, etc.). This paper contends that studies of mobility in criminology could be productively rethought. Drawing on movements of convicts from Britain to Australia aboard prison ships, this paper argues that straightforward, horizontal mobilities at work in regimes of control and practices of resistance marry together with vertical mobilities. Paying attention to the complex mobilities involved in carceral experience leads to a more nuanced understanding of regimes of discipline and practices of resistance that shape how incarcerated individuals move (or are unable to move) within carceral spaces, past and present.