Transport facilitates flows of detainees into and through contemporary criminal justice detention, connecting distinct police, court and prison institutions, but has received limited scholarly attention. We analyse England and Wales’ detention transport system and identify a responsibility gap at institutional transfer points: where regulatory functions and staff responsibilities became obscured and confused. First, we map the detainee transport system, laying the foundations to illustrate how the responsibility gap develops between police, court and prison institutions. Then, we outline the four components of the responsibility gap and show how they contribute to negative impacts for detainees. These components are: regulatory blind spots; unclear communication and responsibilities; contrasting priorities; and deviation from guidelines. In so doing, we provide a valuable line of sight and original empirical data illuminating the previously largely invisible detainee transport system and its regulatory challenges.
Drawing on Michel Foucault's influential notion of heterotopia, this article examines how women's prison spaces are entangled with broader social inequalities, reflecting and distorting gendered norms and potentially amplifying experiences of trauma, sexism, and transphobia among incarcerated women and gender non-conforming individuals. Based on semi-structured interviews with 12 participants, this article explores the porous boundaries and interconnectedness between women's prisons and the outside world. More specifically, the themes identified highlight how the trauma experienced before prison appears to seep inward, potentially amplifying marginalisation. At the same time, sexist and transphobic social attitudes can permeate the prison space, generating a continuum of discrimination between prison and the outside world. While sexism appears to emerge through narratives of ‘double deviance’ and stereotypical roles and opportunities, transphobic tropes can manifest through punitive strategies, segregation policies and the denial of gender-affirming care. In line with feminist and queer criminological scholarship, this analysis extends carceral geographic work on the intimate connections between prison and the outside world by reconsidering prison spaces through heterotopic gendered lenses. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how these spaces can reflect, distort and amplify the experiences of violence, precarity and marginalisation of already disadvantaged social groups.
Escape rooms have grown in popularity across the world, with a number of these sites established in decommissioned sites of confinement or operating in purpose built faux-prisons. Drawing on fieldwork in prison-themed escape rooms across Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, this article explores how these tourism and leisure sites contribute to meaning-making vis-à-vis imprisonment and punishment. Beyond examining how these games allow game players to consume punishment at a safe distance from the realities of imprisonment, we show how these venues of penal spectatorship commodify major elements of penality, notably by using wrongful imprisonment and the prospect of death behind bars as carceral tropes. This process of commodification distorts and skews the realities of these phenomena, reinforcing hegemonic views of the punitive injustice apparatus. While the prison escape room experience is meant to entertain and though some sites offer surface-level criticisms of penality, our findings show how these sites reproduce carceral logics that sustain imprisonment as a central practice of exclusion in contemporary times.
The gendered pains of imprisonment, and particularly the partial or complete deprivation of mothering, have been increasingly recognised in prisons scholarship. Yet, given the ‘colour-blind’ representation of maternal imprisonment in much of the British literature, the distinctive experiences of Black mothers have received little attention. This article begins to address this problematic oversight by drawing upon narrative interviews with nine Black mothers who have lived experience of imprisonment in England. From the standpoint of Black Feminist Thought, our analysis identities three intersecting pains of Black maternal imprisonment: Marginalised mothering, subtle discrimination, and self-censorship and appeasement. We argue processes of racialised and gendered oppression combine to shape Black mothers’ experiences within and through the prison walls and thus explicate the ways in which the prison perpetuates the systematic repression and regulation of Black motherhood.
