Rethinking mobility in criminology: Beyond horizontal mobilities of prisoner transportation
| Author | Jennifer Turner,Kimberley Peters |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516654463 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
2017, Vol. 19(1) 96–114
! The Author(s) 2016
Rethinking mobility
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in criminology: Beyond
DOI: 10.1177/1462474516654463
pun.sagepub.com
horizontal mobilities of
prisoner transportation
Jennifer Turner
University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
Kimberley Peters
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Abstract
Typically, to be incarcerated is to be fixed: limited within specific parameters or bound-
aries 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, crim-
inologists 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 atten-
tion 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.
Keywords
carceral geography, convict ship, mobilities, movement, transportation
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Turner, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Mayfield House Falmer,
Brighton BN19PH, UK.
Email: J.Turner6@brighton.ac.uk
Turner and Peters
97
Introduction
In recent years, mobilities have become a central concern for scholars seeking to
understand a world that is ever on the move (see Adey, 2009; Cresswell, 2010;
Merriman, 2013; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). Exploring mobile lives in
the past has been a firm part of this effort and has helped to make sense of both
historical events and the formation of mobility norms in the present (Anim-Addo,
2014; Leary, 2014; Merriman, 2007). Following Moran et al. (2012) – in a seminal
paper that urges carceral scholars to embrace mobility – we likewise contend that
there is a need to take seriously movement in carceral settings. Indeed, in spite of
common assumptions relating to the ‘fixity’ of carceral experience, ‘[m]obility
is . . . a constant practical concern in the management of penal systems’ (Moran
et al., 2012: 449).
Accordingly, while contributions have unhinged carceral spaces from sedentarist
ontologies that conceptualise spaces of detention, imprisonment and captivity as
ones of stability and fixity, (see Gill, 2009; Moran et al., 2012; Pickering and
Weber, 2006), we argue that where motion has been considered, it has been through
a predominantly linear, flat approach. In contemporary carceral studies, to move is
to journey from point to point, charting a geometric and horizontal trajectory
across space. Even where movement is circular, it follows a line – a loop – that
connects start points to end points (see Ingold, 2007). Yet as scholars have argued,
mobility is the politics of motion in the process of moving. Accordingly, mobility is
not the abstract macro-movement along a path or line: it is the minute, intimate,
embodied, power-filled ways and methods of moving within the path or along the
line. If we are to move (literally) beyond thinking of carceral movements as ‘travels’
between fixed nodes to a more probing understanding of how, why, whom, by what
means, and under what conditions subjects, objects, ideas and elements move –
then the literature still has some way to go. With mobility studies exploring the
ways in which motion is never straightforward – occurring forwards and back-
wards; horizontally and vertically; as well as under and over (see Adey, 2010) – we
use the example of the convict ship to attend to how a specifically vertical approach
may reconfigure understandings of carceral mobility, adding ‘height and depth’
(Elden, 2013: 35) to discussions. This leads to a greater comprehension of the
politics of how, why and where incarcerated individuals move (or are unable to
move) within regimes and volumes of disciplinary control, as well as through prac-
tices of resistance enacted and performed through the architectural shape of the
prison. Although accounts of convicts ships are plentiful in academic and popular
literature (see Anderson, 2000; Bateson, 2004; Campbell, 1994; Vaver, 2011); little
attention has been paid to prison vessels in respect of mobility explicitly.
The convict ship was a space most obviously mobile through the journey from
Britain to the Colonies, yet numerous other mobilities were also present inside the
vessel as the crew and convicts engaged in everyday life on board: exercising on
deck; the rhythmic washing of clothes against a board; and the repetition of picking
oakum, amongst others. On board, mobilities were complex, multi-directional,
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horizontal and vertical, driven by social forces and frictions, alongside the dynam-
ics driving the undulation of the ship at sea (the waves, currents, wind and so on)
(see Peters and Turner, 2015). Therefore, the convict ship demonstrates how pris-
oners moved in varied ways, not only through regimes of mass mobility facilitated
by technologies of transportation. Mobility was a constant in the embodied lives of
those incarcerated. Far from being static within the confines of prison space, pris-
oners – on a micro, intimate scale – still moved; be it disciplined, coerced or other-
wise (see Moran et al., 2012; Peters and Turner, 2015; Pickering 2014). Notably
though, they moved within the volumes of space available, and it was through this
volume that power was exercised (see Weizman, 2003).
In what remains, we split the paper into three parts. We begin by outlining in
greater detail the mobilities paradigm and its adoption in carceral studies, particu-
larly through the lens of geography. We then observe the necessity for exploring
vertical motion in order to take seriously how disciplinary control and resistant
practices are realised through the volume of penal settings. Finally, to exemplify
how such an approach can deepen our understandings of the practical workings
of discipline and control in the contemporary penal landscape, we then turn to the
convict ship as a case study for drawing out the multi-directional mobilities of
incarceration.
Mobility studies and carceral space
In contemporary studies of carceral settings, geographic interventions have sought
to explore the multiple spaces, times and experiences encapsulated before, during
and after detention, confinement, imprisonment and captivity (see Conlon, 2011;
Loyd et al., 2012; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Moran, 2015; Pallot, 2005, 2007;
Turner, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). While mobility features in this pivotal work,
approaches are centred on the predominantly fixed geographies of the prison
and limited mobility (or immobility) of subjects therein. This is due to the
common assumption that incarcerated experience is anything but mobile (Moran
et al., 2012: 449). Indeed, as Ong et al. write ‘while studies of prisoner, passenger
and migrant subjects examine the intricate spatialities of . . . control, they tend to
focus on . . . the more rooted/immobile disciplinary and punitive nature of prison
spaces and carceral geographies’ (2014: 5). Carceral experience is often said to be
one of fixity – movement of the subject is limited within specific parameters or
boundaries – with liberty and agency greatly reduced (Moran et al., 2012: 449).
Indeed, ‘prisons may seem to be the epitome of immobility, with inmates incarcer-
ated within a static physical space of detention’ and as such, carceral scholarship is
particularly ‘at risk of neglecting mobility’ (Moran et al., 2012: 449). This seden-
tarist ontology has resulted in the manifold mobilities that permeate prison life and
reality being overlooked.
Accordingly, of late, carceral scholars have argued that mobility may well be a
useful framework for understanding experiences of incarceration. Mobility, as Moran
et al. (2012: 449) note, is ever present in carceral settings in the movement to,
Turner and Peters
99
from and between prisons. Broadly defined, mobility unhinges a way of knowing
that ‘assumes a stable point of view, a world of places and boundaries and terri-
tories rooted in time and bounded in space’ (Cresswell and Merriman, 2012: 4) and
is instead alerted to a vision of the world built on fluidity, flows and connections.
Mobilities are attuned to the messy, complex, contradictory, unmappable realities
of how, where, why and by what means people move or are unable to move. Such
studies are pertinent in carceral settings, where scholars increasingly recognise how
movement (or a lack of movement) underscores experience in and between prisons,
detention centres, custody units and so on (Gill, 2009; Moran et al., 2012). Indeed,
on closer inspection mobilities are evident in the very act of incarceration as sub-
jects are moved or removed from wider society,...
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