(Un)seeing like a prison: Counter-visual ethnography of the carceral state
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480613517256 |
| Author | Judah Schept |
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
517256TCR0010.1177/1362480613517256Theoretical CriminologySchept
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Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 198 –223
(Un)seeing like a prison:
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Counter-visual ethnography
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480613517256
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of the carceral state
Judah Schept
Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Abstract
While prisons proliferate in the rural landscape and sites of penal tourism expand, the
carceral state structures the available visual and analytic vantages through which to
perceive this growing visibility. Using examples from fieldwork in Kentucky, including
Appalachian prison communities and a site of penal tourism, this article proposes
‘counter-visual’ ethnography to better perceive the ideological work that the carceral
state performs in the spatial and cultural landscape. A counter-visual ethnography
retrains our eyes to see that which is not ‘there’ but which structures the contemporary
empirical realities we observe, record, and analyze: the ghosts of racialized regimes past,
the sediment of dirty industry that seeps into and imbues the present, and the trans-
historical and trans-local circulation of carceral logics and epistemologies. In addition,
this article suggests the important role images play in shaping alternative vantages from
which to better perceive the carceral state with historical, spatial, and political acuity.
Keywords
Capitalism, ethnography, geo-history, knowledge production, prison industrial
complex, radical criminology
Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central and whose vision is synoptic. State
simplifications of the kind we have examined are designed to provide authorities
with a schematic view of their society, a view not afforded to those without authority.
Rather like the US highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy
Corresponding author:
Judah Schept, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Stratton Building 467, 521 Lancaster
Ave, Richmond, KY 40475, USA.
Email: Judah.schept@eku.edu
Schept
199
a quasi-monopolistic picture of the selected aspects of the whole society. This privileged
vantage point is typical of all institutional settings where command and control
of complex human activities is paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor,
and the administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many state like functions
and often mimic its information structure as well.
(James C Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1998: 79)
Introduction
Field notes, July 2012
We stood on the side of a country road in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and opened the trunk
of my car in order to begin unpacking Jill’s camera equipment. Across the rural highway, nestled
in an otherwise bucolic eastern Kentucky valley, was Little Sandy, the state’s newest prison and,
according to the Department of Corrections’ own website, its most technologically sophisticated.
We saw no people, guards or prisoners. As a researcher and a photographer studying the political
and cultural geography of incarceration in the state, our intention was to get a sense of the place
the prison takes in the landscape. We popped the trunk and began discussing what equipment to
use. A white pickup truck with official tags pulled up behind us. A correctional officer stepped out
of the truck and began walking toward us, all the while speaking into the walkie-talkie attached to
his shoulder. Friendly but curt he got right to the point: he would need to call the police and
confiscate our equipment and photographs if we stayed any longer or took pictures of the facility.
‘You see those signs?’ he asked, pointing up and down the road to signs far in the distance on
either side of us. ‘No photographs between those signs.’ He got back in his truck and started the
engine. We could see him talking into his walkie-talkie. He shut off the engine and returned to our
car before we could leave. ‘I’m going to need to see your IDs,’ he said, and promptly jotted down
both of our driver’s license information before ushering us on our way.
The correctional officer’s role in this encounter from my field work eminently demar-
cated a visual hierarchy: only authorized personnel could look with anything other than
a fleeting gaze at the embodiment of state power and violence that is a prison. Between
signs that extended the prisonscape a hundred yards in either direction, the only permit-
ted look was an ephemeral one obtained from a passing car. Those of us who would
enjoy—or perhaps even demand—a ‘right’ to see prisons in a way that exists outside of
their control are given a firm dismissal: ‘move on, there is nothing to see here’.1 Of
course, the very ability of the officer to interrupt our attempt to document the prison
relied on the prison’s power to make us visible. The cameras that were undoubtedly
trained on us from the prison and the surrounding landscape created a unidirectional
sightline. The prison could remain largely invisible while we were subjected to surveil-
lance, control, and the threat of detention, loss of property, and arrest.
According to visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff, the opposite of this ‘right to
look’ is not censorship. Indeed, information about Little Sandy exists on Kentucky’s
Department of Corrections website and images can be found there or through various
Internet search engine map functions.2 Rather than censorship, the appropriate
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Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
Figure 1. Prison Town’s Main Street, five months after a tornado.
oppositional force to a right to look is what Mirzoeff (2011: 474) calls ‘visuality’, or ‘that
authority to tell us to move on and that exclusive claim to be able to look’. Mirzoeff
argues that the complex of visuality is comprised of three constitutive components: clas-
sification (through naming, categorizing, and defining); separation (of those classified as
a means for social organization); and aestheticization, by which he means the production
of a normalized and hegemonic ‘common sense’. In other words, the opposite of such a
right is the authorial role of the state in constructing, legitimating, and normalizing its
own history and presence.
Once told to move on, we packed up our equipment and left, driving the 20 miles into
nearby Prison Town, a community whose pseudonym seemed to choose itself because it
is sandwiched between Little Sandy and a second state prison. In Prison Town, I experi-
enced the most emotionally charged moments of the research: staring at the destruction
of downtown residential and commercial buildings due to a devastating late winter tor-
nado (see Figures 1–4). Here, the hub of Appalachian public and civic life remained deci-
mated, five months after the tornado had struck. The prisons, however, persisted; their
durability was literally inscribed architecturally and in the larger geography of the com-
munity. The contrast between the empty devastation of the proverbial and literal Main
Street and the humming, fortress-like invincibility of incarceration raised layers of ques-
tions: about what it means to invest more human, financial, and political capital in insti-
tutions of exclusion than the public commons; about the physical and symbolic place of
incarceration in the rural landscape; and about the role of the state and capital in structur-
ing the future of communities.3
These encounters from my fieldwork index a broader relationship between state
authority and the structuring of the visual field. Jill, a photographer, and I had wanted to
visually integrate the prison into its geographical and historical contexts, situating its
dominating presence in the dilapidated rural communities that are its host and in the
migrations of capital and jobs out of Kentucky that structured its very potential. It is
Schept
201
Figure 2. Closed for Renovation on Prison Town’s Main Street.
Figure 3. Flag on Prison Town’s Main Street.
precisely this kind of inquiry that the state tries to preempt, and its visual documentation
that the state finds suspect and thus subjects to securitization (Simon, 2012).
The visuality of prisons and other carceral institutions configures our ability to
perceive them, the available vocabularies with which to speak of them, and the con-
texts in which to place them. That is, the carceral state has structured our very
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Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
Figure 4. China King Coming Soon, Main Street in Prison Town.
capacities to perceive this particular coercive constellation of state power, especially
in its historical and spatial contingencies. This article examines the relationship
between the growing visibility of carceral formations in the political economic, cul-
tural, and geographical landscapes of Kentucky and the narratives and vantages that
such visibility both enacts and precludes. I argue for a ‘counter-visual’ scholarly prac-
tice that can better perceive and intervene in the visual and ideological prevalence of
the carceral state.
I draw from multi-sited fieldwork in order to illuminate the connection between car-
ceral growth and the structuring of our visual and rhetorical means for understanding it.
First, in rural prison towns in eastern Kentucky, I address the narrow and dubious narra-
tive of economic development through which prison building is justified and which, in
the process, buries other narrative vantages. Second, hundreds of...
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