Visual criminology and carceral studies: Counter-images in the carceral age
| Author | Michelle Brown |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480613508426 |
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 176 –197
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480613508426
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Visual criminology and carceral
studies: Counter-images in the
carceral age
Michelle Brown
University of Tennessee, USA
Abstract
Mass incarceration maps onto global neoliberal carceral formations that, in turn, look
very much like a visual iconography of social suffering. Camp or prison-like conditions
define the daily life of many of the world’s inhabitants caught in contexts of detention,
incarceration, forced migration, and population displacement. Often depicted as abject
subjects, actors in carceral contexts and the people who organize with them seek to
find strategies of representation that humanize and politicize their existence. This essay
attempts to gain a sense of the visual struggles at the heart of these carceral scenes by
way of an analysis of the use of images and new media by current and former prisoners,
community members, artists, and scholars to counter mass incarceration in the United
States. Such scenes are significant sites for examining how a visual criminology might
reveal and participate in the contestations and interventions that increasingly challenge
the project of mass incarceration.
Keywords
Anti-prison movement, bare life, carceral studies, counter-images, mass incarceration,
visual criminology
Mass incarceration maps onto global neoliberal carceral formations that, in turn, look
very much like a visual iconography of social suffering. Across modernity, these images
span forces of enclosure and expulsion, including, for instance, representations of such
Corresponding author:
Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, 901 McClung Hall, Knoxville, TN
37996-0490, USA.
Email: mbrow121@utk.edu
508426TCR18210.1177/1362480613508426Theoretical CriminologyBrown
research-article2014
Article
Brown 177
disparate sites as prison systems; migrant detention centers; border, conflict, and disaster
zones; factories and maquiladoras; new war prisons; and refugee and concentration
camps. Carceral (camp or prison-like) conditions define the daily life of many of the
world’s inhabitants at the global intersections of political and economic instability and
increasing levels of detention, incarceration, forced migration, and population displace-
ment. These subjects include prisoners, refugees, internally displaced persons, detainees,
irregular migrants, and a host of other invisible actors caught beyond recognition and
representation. They share restricted rights and weaker claims to citizenship and are at
the center of contemporary social science and political philosophy debates as ‘bare life’
(Agamben, 1998, 2005), ‘pariahs’ (Varikas, 2007), ‘urban outcasts’ (Wacquant, 2007),
human ‘waste’ (Simon, 2007), the ‘dispossessed’ (Butler, 2013), and the otherwise
extremely marginalized who exist in zones of social exclusion (Aas and Bosworth,
2013), social abandonment (Biehl, 2005; Scheper-Hughes, 1993) and social death
(Cacho, 2012; Guenther, 2013).
Easily reified as utterly abject subjects, these carceral actors represent more than bio-
logical life, capable of expressing, even in the worst of human conditions, some degree
of agency and, sometimes, achieving political presence (Biehl, 2005; Bosworth, 2012;
Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009; Comaroff, 2007;
Mirzoeff, 2011; Nyers, 2006). Against neoliberal carceral regimes, subjects still find
ways to make their existence visible. They engage in hunger strikes, lip-sewing, self-
mutilation, and other embodied acts of resistance (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005; Rhodes,
2004). Their family members and loved ones carry images of their faces and expressions
of their kinships on signs in front of prisons and at state house doors that then circulate
across social media, nonprofit websites, and community organizing materials. Spaces of
both social life and death, carceral existence marks the ground zero where, simultane-
ously, the odds of life chances are significantly reduced and the most profound human
linkages across social problems are born. As anthropologist Jean Comaroff (2007: 209–
210) writes of HIV/AIDS survivor activists in South Africa, ‘In the face of social death
…, the will to assert visibility, dignity, kinship, and attachment fuels the task of everyday
survival’, visible in ‘the insistence on positive life—life imbued with ordinary, future-
oriented expectations’, ‘palpable in the forms of mobilization that press for recognition’.
In contexts of utter vulnerability, such as immigrant detention, ‘people even in the most
abject of situations attempt to negotiate power relations’ and ‘first-hand accounts from
detainees can flesh out the burden of living without citizenship while appreciating how
these individuals try to assert alternative, identity-based claims’ (Bosworth, 2012: 126).
In this article, I explore how the politics of bare life recognition, where actors must
mobilize around the totality of social injustice, relates to a visual criminology. The anti-
prison movement in the United States marks a compelling convergence of both bare life
assertions and a visual criminology. Allying with immigration, labor, and environmental
causes while positioning itself clearly at the intersections of calls for racial, class, gender
and sexual justice, the movement’s scenes are intensely intimate with visible expressions
of grief and loss central to the ways in which family members and the formerly incarcer-
ated seek to disrupt the social practice of mass incarceration. These grassroots efforts
merge with artistic creations and activist scholarship that employ the visual as a way in
which to more effectively and poignantly convey the scale, scope, and irrational logic of
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