1 00:00:00,330 --> 00:00:04,710 Also seminars this term. And Sarah is a senior research fellow. 2 00:00:06,860 --> 00:00:10,940 Well. She directs the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. 3 00:00:11,480 --> 00:00:15,650 Sarah is also the co-editor of the Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 4 00:00:15,650 --> 00:00:22,160 which has got an excellent threesome of glossary of Scottish women currently editing it. 5 00:00:22,160 --> 00:00:23,959 So I recommend reading. 6 00:00:23,960 --> 00:00:33,230 It's a really good journal and says own work concentrates on prisons and punishment and on visual methods, which is the topic of today's talk. 7 00:00:33,770 --> 00:00:40,560 Great. Thank you. I'm sorry to do this. 8 00:00:40,960 --> 00:00:44,130 Oh, there it goes. Sleep. Which is not helpful. 9 00:00:44,130 --> 00:00:56,420 And this doesn't. It's not going to work with just you know, it's sort of it's a Sony way to talk money, so to speak. 10 00:00:57,460 --> 00:01:02,200 It's hard to talk to these pictures and to also just offer a disclaimer and effective. 11 00:01:02,680 --> 00:01:07,450 I wouldn't say that I, you know, rigorously or consistently use visual methods, 12 00:01:07,450 --> 00:01:11,080 but the visual is something that's become increasingly important to me. 13 00:01:11,560 --> 00:01:16,570 Just the subject of this paper, which is how we represent different problematics, 14 00:01:16,570 --> 00:01:24,430 different issues and crime and justice and upgrades and so and so on. 15 00:01:24,430 --> 00:01:33,850 The cover here is, first of all, thank you very much for inviting you and likewise to join this this talk series. 16 00:01:33,850 --> 00:01:36,969 And there's so many interesting papers that have happened that are about to happen. 17 00:01:36,970 --> 00:01:45,700 So it's a privilege to be part of that. These the cover here is just three different visualisations of a Scottish prison, 18 00:01:46,330 --> 00:01:53,950 and it gives you a sense of just the diverse ways you can think about prison from its insides, 19 00:01:53,950 --> 00:02:01,540 from its outsides, and its aggregate sense of individual sentence in its future to prison population projections. 20 00:02:01,810 --> 00:02:06,970 And it's passed as a ruin of a past. Castle keep us on the northeast coast of Scotland. 21 00:02:08,380 --> 00:02:16,600 And I just offered up to or juxtapose those three different images of prison to to just trigger the issue for today, 22 00:02:16,600 --> 00:02:23,080 which is to think generally about the problematics of representation in criminology and crime and justice policy. 23 00:02:23,410 --> 00:02:28,629 And I think for those of us working and researching in this field is that we have a particular problem, 24 00:02:28,630 --> 00:02:31,870 as many other people in different intensive areas of social policy do, 25 00:02:32,350 --> 00:02:39,250 is that our field is littered with such dominating tropes, frames, stereotypes, 26 00:02:39,820 --> 00:02:44,799 images of crime, injustice, but they begin to colonise the imagination. 27 00:02:44,800 --> 00:02:53,560 So it's almost impossible to see and therefore to think or know the field any differently than through the imagery that we're given. 28 00:02:55,660 --> 00:03:02,709 And so one of the things I want to do is only be focusing on the topic of prisons, which is my own research area, 29 00:03:02,710 --> 00:03:09,910 and how it's represented in some of the challenges that have arisen for me around that, but particularly something like imprisonment. 30 00:03:09,910 --> 00:03:21,069 The imagery is dominated by especially United States, by race and poverty in Scotland is less defined by race and ethnicity. 31 00:03:21,070 --> 00:03:24,850 But there is a criminalisation of poverty that happens throughout the criminal justice system. 32 00:03:25,660 --> 00:03:32,410 And so how does a scholar, particularly a scholar who unapologetically is interested in a progressive politics of reform, 33 00:03:32,410 --> 00:03:40,300 represent something like prison without entrenching and deepening the associations that we draw between race and punishment? 34 00:03:41,110 --> 00:03:47,620 That is, how can we challenge something like mass imprisonment without simultaneously triggering and entrenching 35 00:03:47,620 --> 00:03:53,199 the associations between race and punishment that exist without normalising and naturalising? 36 00:03:53,200 --> 00:03:57,370 It's that we begin to expect and become familiar with those associations. 37 00:03:57,980 --> 00:04:06,520 In other words, how can we see what the problem is which fight racism or classism and then unsee it so that we can overcome it and see it? 38 00:04:06,880 --> 00:04:11,920 See some different reality that might exist if we didn't have those problems in the criminal justice system. 39 00:04:12,490 --> 00:04:17,680 So that broadly is the challenge of the problem that I was thinking about in writing this paper. 40 00:04:18,190 --> 00:04:24,370 And I thought how we think of the visual, we tend to focus on media popular cultural imagery. 41 00:04:24,910 --> 00:04:29,080 But I'd argue that social science is deeply complicit in these problems of 42 00:04:29,080 --> 00:04:33,430 representation of over associating certain kinds of frameworks and stereotypes, 43 00:04:33,670 --> 00:04:38,680 and that even within the the explanatory modes and methods of social science itself, 44 00:04:39,010 --> 00:04:45,069 that we're constrained into particular channels of representation, particular ways of showing, 45 00:04:45,070 --> 00:04:49,870 and these couple up in form assemblages with other, other ways of representation. 46 00:04:49,870 --> 00:04:53,979 So they combine and reinforce each other into this dominant imagery and 47 00:04:53,980 --> 00:04:59,770 stereotypical kind of problem so that people like Judith Chefs has written that. 48 00:04:59,770 --> 00:05:05,620 How do you visualise something without simply reproducing the problem of that visualisation? 49 00:05:05,920 --> 00:05:13,240 But even when you're trying to critique something, you may end up just reinforcing a stereotype. 50 00:05:14,200 --> 00:05:16,269 So that is the subject of this paper. 51 00:05:16,270 --> 00:05:26,559 And by I introduce the notion of seeing in a way that is familiar visual studies and is just worth rehearsing here, which is to say, seeing by seeing, 52 00:05:26,560 --> 00:05:33,820 I mean not just the cognitive perspective and physical sensory act of absorbing a visual stimulus, 53 00:05:34,090 --> 00:05:37,300 but actually the cognitive process of making sense of that image. 54 00:05:37,720 --> 00:05:42,129 So that seeing is not simply an act of perception. It's always an act of making sense. 55 00:05:42,130 --> 00:05:45,730 And making sense requires a prior frame. 56 00:05:45,730 --> 00:05:50,160 A prior. Socially influenced, cognitively influenced frame of reference. 57 00:05:50,580 --> 00:05:54,870 So this is the challenge for us is in that seeing is knowing. 58 00:05:54,870 --> 00:06:01,620 Seeing is making sense but making but knowing is also seeing that we almost cannot see something that we cannot make sense of. 59 00:06:01,800 --> 00:06:09,510 So how might we try to see things that we don't fully understand or which don't fit within the existing frameworks of explanation that we have? 60 00:06:10,260 --> 00:06:13,379 In addition, I introduced this concept called Seeing as, 61 00:06:13,380 --> 00:06:21,330 which is a move I'm hoping to make from getting from a place of a perception that is defined by a pre-existing cognitive framework, 62 00:06:21,330 --> 00:06:27,270 by expecting or having a familiarity with particular ways of talking about crime and justice issues into 63 00:06:27,270 --> 00:06:33,389 a new framework where we might begin to see things slightly differently in a sort of bridged format, 64 00:06:33,390 --> 00:06:40,530 is to recognise things in front of us and yet use that as a springboard rather than as a trap to some different modes of representation. 65 00:06:41,580 --> 00:06:47,610 And the idea overall, drawing on John Burris famous work, both ways of seeing, 66 00:06:48,120 --> 00:06:53,129 is the aim that for me is to overcome the veil of the veil of familiarity and self evidence 67 00:06:53,130 --> 00:06:57,030 that surrounds the experience of seeing and to turn it into a problem for analysis, 68 00:06:57,360 --> 00:07:08,149 a mystery to be unravelled. And just to tether this to make it less abstract. 69 00:07:08,150 --> 00:07:16,020 For some empirical example, I give you this tale of two prisons, 70 00:07:16,170 --> 00:07:23,249 and these images are of the same prison and the experience which led to two sets 71 00:07:23,250 --> 00:07:26,550 of discombobulation which got me thinking about representational problems, 72 00:07:27,030 --> 00:07:30,809 was I went to prison with a group of Cambridge researchers, 73 00:07:30,810 --> 00:07:39,240 Allison Liebling and Bethany Schmidt and colleagues to go examine a prison which had recently experienced a riot. 74 00:07:40,470 --> 00:07:48,390 The prison was a brand new building, and in Scotland, the new prisons are unbelievably beautiful. 75 00:07:48,400 --> 00:07:52,950 For prisons, they look like colleges or hospitals, they don't look like prisons. 76 00:07:53,700 --> 00:08:00,630 This is a visiting room, but the housing is also full of natural light and bright colours and soft furniture and whatnot. 77 00:08:01,130 --> 00:08:06,990 At the same time, this brand new prison had triggered a riot. So why would there be such disruption? 78 00:08:07,380 --> 00:08:08,670 It's such an amazing place. 79 00:08:08,730 --> 00:08:16,110 The prison the new prison was built because two older 19th century prisons closed, horrible and gothic feeling kind of places. 80 00:08:17,130 --> 00:08:28,800 So the decision to build one new prison in place of two for cost reasons meant the new prison was sited well out of any population centre. 81 00:08:28,800 --> 00:08:32,850 So it was a two hour bus ride from the nearest city where most of the prisoners were coming from. 82 00:08:33,630 --> 00:08:36,390 And it was on the site of the old prison, 83 00:08:36,420 --> 00:08:43,320 one of the old prisons where there had been a riot in the 1980s because the prisoners said this prison is too far for our families to visit. 84 00:08:44,160 --> 00:08:50,730 Ironically, this prison was built under a new policy in Scottish Prison Service of something called community facing prisons, 85 00:08:51,090 --> 00:08:56,100 of prisons that are made up of the local communities residents. 86 00:08:56,100 --> 00:09:01,620 So they because they're not they're not classified by by familiar different lines of segregation. 87 00:09:01,620 --> 00:09:07,319 There's free man, long term, short term young people, women, men, everybody in the prison. 88 00:09:07,320 --> 00:09:13,860 The idea is the most important thing is community access in a prison that's 2 hours away where there's a riot saying it was too far. 89 00:09:14,550 --> 00:09:18,630 So we spent several days talking to people, interviewing, observing, 90 00:09:18,960 --> 00:09:25,040 delivering that the survey that Cambridge do and people just talked about this prison in such different ways. 91 00:09:25,050 --> 00:09:34,020 The prisoners talked about the riot, the boredom, the absence of regime because they couldn't get any service or programme staff to work there. 92 00:09:34,270 --> 00:09:35,790 Such a long commute from anywhere. 93 00:09:37,080 --> 00:09:43,530 And the prison managers talked about this amazing building and all the programs that could now be run in it because it had this beautiful, 94 00:09:43,530 --> 00:09:47,220 centrally organised learning space, had a great health centre and all the rest of it. 95 00:09:47,970 --> 00:09:55,950 And by the end of a few days it began to feel like not only were people talking about different ways they saw the prison, 96 00:09:55,950 --> 00:10:01,920 but they're talking about differently and fully formed, completely separate realities of prison. 97 00:10:02,490 --> 00:10:07,740 And one group, mainly the prisoners and the frontline staff, we're talking about a prison that wasn't that pleasant, 98 00:10:08,160 --> 00:10:10,710 that was looking backwards towards a riot that just happened. 99 00:10:11,010 --> 00:10:15,450 And the more senior staff and the administrative staff were talking about a future facing prison, 100 00:10:15,450 --> 00:10:20,610 one which is going to achieve all these wonderful, progressive, family oriented goals of the prison service. 101 00:10:21,960 --> 00:10:27,000 So it was this kind of disjuncture between these two prisons, 102 00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:35,670 the prisons of the future and this prison of the past was embodied by this walkway that exists at this prison between the administrative offices, 103 00:10:36,000 --> 00:10:43,140 you know, glass cube, open plan, office space and the operational side of the prison where prisoners lived and were programmed to run, etc. 104 00:10:43,470 --> 00:10:48,720 You have to walk up and down the skyway, connecting the two sides and different ends of the sky, 105 00:10:48,720 --> 00:10:52,890 where there's also inspirational slogans painted on the wall. 106 00:10:52,980 --> 00:10:55,980 Know Orwellian, you know, not quite work to make you free, 107 00:10:55,980 --> 00:11:01,590 but not far off that and it just walking back between these two prisons and work 108 00:11:01,830 --> 00:11:06,180 which contained two very different understandings of what the prison was created. 109 00:11:06,180 --> 00:11:14,160 This is a visceral sense of a prison that just did not make sense, a place that was beautiful, well-bred and organised, professional, 110 00:11:14,610 --> 00:11:23,370 good records, and yet a place that also felt depressing, almost on edge, as if another instance of disorder could take place. 111 00:11:23,370 --> 00:11:30,780 It's like, you know, imagining a riot might break out at it, you know, at your local college or something. 112 00:11:31,020 --> 00:11:34,650 And so this call was from a field note of, you know, just chatting with each other. 113 00:11:34,850 --> 00:11:39,899 And I wrote this down just feeling like it all culminated going to the health centre at the health centre. 114 00:11:39,900 --> 00:11:43,620 It's a beautiful health centre, it's nicer than my GP's office was. 115 00:11:43,620 --> 00:11:52,290 All the staff kind of hanging out, having their coffee break and they have a glass cubicle for prisoners to wait and they literally are 116 00:11:52,290 --> 00:11:56,519 then like in a fishbowl and everyone was laughing and having their morning cup of tea and stuff. 117 00:11:56,520 --> 00:12:02,040 And there's these guys sitting there, you know, all in various states of distress because of, you know, what happened to. 118 00:12:02,070 --> 00:12:06,450 A broken leg. And. And I just felt like this is two different places. 119 00:12:06,720 --> 00:12:13,320 And it just it felt jarring. And I wanted to make sense of it and not to write just the report that was meant to be written, 120 00:12:13,320 --> 00:12:17,550 which was about how staff and prisoner relations were, and what could be done to prevent another riot. 121 00:12:24,960 --> 00:12:29,190 So I turned to work and criminology. 122 00:12:29,190 --> 00:12:33,090 I turned to literary sources, I turned to alternative sources of theory. 123 00:12:34,170 --> 00:12:39,629 But I had read that Carlin spoke imaginary banalities before, but it hadn't struck me. 124 00:12:39,630 --> 00:12:43,410 I went back to it and I had to remember this vignette, she tells, 125 00:12:43,410 --> 00:12:49,530 which is really interesting of going to an Australian women's prison where it was also brand new 126 00:12:49,530 --> 00:12:56,700 facility and it was aimed at supporting women about recognising complex needs and special programs, 127 00:12:56,700 --> 00:12:58,799 non punitive approaches that would benefit women. 128 00:12:58,800 --> 00:13:05,280 So this prison was built with all these programs to be run for women attached to through care services for women leaving the prisons. 129 00:13:05,280 --> 00:13:09,510 They'd be sort of supported in their community and reconnected to their families. 130 00:13:09,840 --> 00:13:16,740 So she went to this prison and actually she she found out there were no prisoners who could serve, 131 00:13:16,770 --> 00:13:21,900 that this prisoner could serve, that the women it was designed for just didn't exist and weren't getting sent to the prison. 132 00:13:22,440 --> 00:13:25,349 So she wrote about it as having imaginary prisoners, 133 00:13:25,350 --> 00:13:33,480 imaginary programs and imaginary community which was going to receive these women and bring them back up to law abiding citizenship status. 134 00:13:34,590 --> 00:13:40,110 It was interesting, and what Haaland did in discussing this was not just to say this was a stupid idea. 135 00:13:40,590 --> 00:13:47,250 Someone built a prison that was unneeded and that the policy wasn't working and not think about instrumentally. 136 00:13:47,550 --> 00:13:54,030 She took it as a reality itself that the imaginary prison was itself a durable reality in which she 137 00:13:54,030 --> 00:14:01,890 calls it an as if reality in which the rhetoric of this future prison was becoming the reality. 138 00:14:02,430 --> 00:14:06,749 And that sense it was becoming a material reality because the staff in that prison were getting performance 139 00:14:06,750 --> 00:14:12,030 managed for how many referrals and supports they were offering the women the women prisoners who weren't there. 140 00:14:12,510 --> 00:14:15,839 So this imaginary prison had material consequences on the ground. 141 00:14:15,840 --> 00:14:16,730 And so, you know, 142 00:14:16,770 --> 00:14:25,200 I felt like was a very parallel experience of having to deal with two prisons in the same place that connects to a novel written by China. 143 00:14:25,200 --> 00:14:29,009 Miéville I don't know if you guys are fans of science fiction or not, 144 00:14:29,010 --> 00:14:32,820 but he's written a lot about London, but he's written a book called A City in a City. 145 00:14:33,630 --> 00:14:39,750 And in the novel he writes about two cities that exist in the exact same Euclidean space. 146 00:14:40,380 --> 00:14:47,160 And there is a law against noticing other aspects of the other city that you're living in. 147 00:14:47,160 --> 00:14:52,170 So there's two cities which can be visible most, but it's illegal to notice the other city in your city. 148 00:14:52,170 --> 00:14:56,670 And there's a whole police force that polices breaches of city. 149 00:14:57,570 --> 00:15:02,690 And this is what occurred to me quite useful frame for thinking about how we, 150 00:15:02,700 --> 00:15:08,010 our particular strategies of representation are particular modes of social science methodology 151 00:15:08,640 --> 00:15:14,460 prevent us and in some sense are in forcing us from seeing different realities in the same place. 152 00:15:14,820 --> 00:15:19,229 Miéville is writing about London and increasing segregation in that city between rich and poor, 153 00:15:19,230 --> 00:15:25,380 and how you can live two completely different lives in one place. But I found it quite reductive for thinking about this problem. 154 00:15:26,520 --> 00:15:36,360 So finally looking for some sort theoretical tools and frames to address this, to try to capture a different way of representing the prison. 155 00:15:36,570 --> 00:15:40,260 So turn to science, technology studies, particularly the work of Anne Marie Boal. 156 00:15:40,260 --> 00:15:46,020 And that is an image from her book, The Body Multiple, in which she's studying hardened arteries. 157 00:15:46,110 --> 00:15:50,669 But she talks to patients, to doctors, to hospital managers and so on, 158 00:15:50,670 --> 00:15:56,459 and found and described in a similar way how each of them are describing completely different realities of a patient, 159 00:15:56,460 --> 00:16:00,420 family member and insurance unit and so forth, 160 00:16:01,230 --> 00:16:08,340 and develops that idea to argue for the body multiple the idea that the body has multiple realities in the same space. 161 00:16:08,760 --> 00:16:15,540 I also pulled in notions of contradiction that if we're allowing multiple realities to exist at the same time, 162 00:16:15,540 --> 00:16:19,110 that those necessarily won't always be coherent or consistent with each other. 163 00:16:19,680 --> 00:16:27,510 So I wanted to to see how a contradiction might be one way that would be productive for us to develop representational practices. 164 00:16:27,990 --> 00:16:36,690 And finally, I drew on John Law and Vicky Singleton's work again on in the mental and medical field on alcoholic liver disease, 165 00:16:37,020 --> 00:16:43,739 where they interact, they develop a notion, concept of the fire object, which is where there were every object. 166 00:16:43,740 --> 00:16:46,979 Both has simultaneous presences and absences. And to me, 167 00:16:46,980 --> 00:16:56,549 that was a really useful way of thinking about how the object of the prison we were at reflected quite a lot of absences in absence headquarters, 168 00:16:56,550 --> 00:17:00,540 which was deciding that a prison not near your community would be a community facing prison. 169 00:17:00,540 --> 00:17:06,780 So it was living this illogical policy that somehow seemed rational, very far away in space time. 170 00:17:08,610 --> 00:17:13,469 And with all this thinking about contradiction, multiplicity of absence, 171 00:17:13,470 --> 00:17:20,130 it leads to to think of some existing tools that are used in criminology and concepts like assemblage from Dallas. 172 00:17:20,490 --> 00:17:29,129 And we're where we get the sense that. There's arrangements of different kinds of organisational elements that that came 173 00:17:29,130 --> 00:17:33,720 together but don't necessarily cohere into a systematic picture or a grand narrative. 174 00:17:38,750 --> 00:17:45,470 So just to hone in on these notions of multiplicity, contradiction and absence. 175 00:17:47,210 --> 00:17:54,140 So multiplicity, as I've mentioned, is a way of capturing the simultaneous description of completely formed 176 00:17:54,140 --> 00:17:58,970 realities for people who have occupied different standpoints in the same space. 177 00:17:59,480 --> 00:18:06,470 And it adopts an ethnographic form of description. Or to capture this which which more calls a proxy graphic method, 178 00:18:07,520 --> 00:18:13,730 which is to say that a practice geographic orientation means that the techniques that make things of visible, 179 00:18:14,150 --> 00:18:19,070 audible, tangible, knowable are themselves part of net, enacting them as real. 180 00:18:20,420 --> 00:18:27,229 And that message comes back then to the criminologist, to the researcher, in that the tools we use to describe, 181 00:18:27,230 --> 00:18:35,780 to depict, to represent our objects of study are also participating in enacting them as realities. 182 00:18:38,210 --> 00:18:48,380 Secondly, the notion of contradiction that we could have such a to a depressing and isolated institution 183 00:18:48,860 --> 00:18:54,830 alongside a progressive one focussed on social and family integration and forward thinking, 184 00:18:56,300 --> 00:19:04,790 was difficult. And going against the tendency and the pressure we feel as social science to come up with coherent, singular narratives. 185 00:19:05,360 --> 00:19:08,920 A notion of contradiction means that we can describe both of those things and leave 186 00:19:08,930 --> 00:19:15,079 them there without trying to reconcile or collapse one description over another, 187 00:19:15,080 --> 00:19:19,580 as one as more as a more important, more relevant, more salient reality. 188 00:19:22,130 --> 00:19:32,209 And by doing that, I'd argue that it makes it possible to see specific harms dynamics and implications of things like penal institutions 189 00:19:32,210 --> 00:19:39,080 in a way that's impossible to do if you collapse or support eight different kinds of descriptions into each other. 190 00:19:42,110 --> 00:19:50,330 That's so and I call it a quote to sort of illustrate this notion, 191 00:19:50,930 --> 00:19:54,680 which is to argue for the justification of thinking about a contradiction as something which 192 00:19:54,680 --> 00:19:59,060 is productive rather than something which should be bracketed in our supposed research. 193 00:19:59,600 --> 00:20:04,970 But this is this is from an article by Elaine Genders about breaches in a private prison. 194 00:20:05,360 --> 00:20:08,810 And it's a long list of things that have gone wrong. 195 00:20:09,830 --> 00:20:19,130 And it goes from 211 incidents of prisoner self-harm right down the list to eight failures to report on performance measures. 196 00:20:19,700 --> 00:20:23,260 And what I love about this is the collapsing of a prison that is a physical, 197 00:20:23,300 --> 00:20:31,160 physical space of abuse with a with a performance management prison, which is an example of contractual governance, 198 00:20:31,820 --> 00:20:41,450 so that the actual physical violence perpetrated against inmates becomes juxtaposed and flattened alongside failure to make a contractual report. 199 00:20:42,340 --> 00:20:46,820 And so what that does, that is a facility with a certain amount of fines for the private provider. 200 00:20:47,900 --> 00:20:51,260 And if the private provider fixes those, then everything's fine. 201 00:20:51,380 --> 00:20:58,160 But what it leaves in the dark is the fact that there is a really important difference between bullets and bullet points, 202 00:20:58,520 --> 00:21:04,280 that there is a physical violence. There's a black mark on a contractor, but there's a black eye for a prisoner, 203 00:21:04,610 --> 00:21:10,220 which has implications for understanding the violence of that space, which may or may not be captured in performance measures. 204 00:21:11,390 --> 00:21:17,959 And so even this list itself is the enactment, I'd argue, of a particular piece of reality, 205 00:21:17,960 --> 00:21:21,830 which is the penal reality of the contractual governance prison. 206 00:21:22,160 --> 00:21:30,739 But this is the prison which becomes the ground by which we form political movements of resistance, that by attacking a prison, 207 00:21:30,740 --> 00:21:37,820 we begin to lump together these things and lose sight of its actual direct brutalities and how those are caused. 208 00:21:38,120 --> 00:21:45,320 And so that managerialism itself remains slightly out of focus in our ability to attack it. 209 00:21:45,530 --> 00:21:53,809 And we become we become absorbed into the managerial list paradigm of of using of relying on the same 210 00:21:53,810 --> 00:21:59,150 numbers and speaking the language of these numbers and this discourse in order to challenge and critique it. 211 00:22:00,050 --> 00:22:06,380 So where I come from in Scotland, where the prisons, for the most part physically do not look that brutal, 212 00:22:07,130 --> 00:22:14,570 it can be hard to find a space of critique to say, but in our prisons, two people committed suicide last month. 213 00:22:14,570 --> 00:22:18,170 And to young people commit suicide in our prisons the month before that. 214 00:22:18,620 --> 00:22:26,269 Yeah, that becomes quite a small thing in the midst of many other policies, programmes, performance measures. 215 00:22:26,270 --> 00:22:37,460 The prison is doing very well just going back to and then absence was just refer to this idea that any object. 216 00:22:37,610 --> 00:22:44,780 Toward depicting her. Representing always consists of a series of present and absent forces, spatially and temporally. 217 00:22:44,780 --> 00:22:54,229 And so this is just to emphasise the point I made before that this prison that we were looking at was a prison that existed in a very tiny village, 218 00:22:54,230 --> 00:22:58,790 not near anything that was at the same time a prison that was visualised, 219 00:22:58,790 --> 00:23:05,450 constructed in the minds of managers headquarters in Edinburgh as the kind of prison which would be the model of the future existence. 220 00:23:15,010 --> 00:23:18,010 So from here. 221 00:23:22,150 --> 00:23:29,050 But picture is a image of another new prison that was built in Scotland. 222 00:23:29,380 --> 00:23:31,450 And it's a picture of the machine room. 223 00:23:31,960 --> 00:23:41,080 And it was the it was part one image taken as part of an artist residency project we had at our centre called Working Spaces, Punishing Spaces, 224 00:23:41,080 --> 00:23:51,130 where the artist was looking at the ways that criminological research was participating in or reproducing some of the practice of culture. 225 00:23:51,140 --> 00:23:55,630 Looking at what she did as she took a lot of different pictures of prisons with no bodies and all. 226 00:23:56,020 --> 00:24:01,780 And what I loved about this image was the way that it draws attention to the prison, 227 00:24:01,780 --> 00:24:06,909 literally as a machine, a prison as a very large building that is processing water, 228 00:24:06,910 --> 00:24:12,880 waste, electricity, which to me opened up an opportunity to think about it, 229 00:24:13,180 --> 00:24:18,010 not just as a container for bodies that can only understand through the bodies that are in it, 230 00:24:18,340 --> 00:24:28,030 but also part of a community, part of a of a neighbourhood that is using resources that is a source of employment or not employment, 231 00:24:28,030 --> 00:24:32,139 a source of resentment as this you put these new prisons in Scotland are because 232 00:24:32,140 --> 00:24:36,340 they tend to have better facilities than the local communities that surround them. 233 00:24:38,020 --> 00:24:46,570 And so I was thinking, this is the kind of imagery that I'm interested in, is the banal, mundane spaces of punishment, 234 00:24:46,870 --> 00:24:54,100 which get at some of these issues of invisibility and neglect and contradiction in prison. 235 00:24:56,230 --> 00:25:04,690 So and so making the move then from seeing to seeing. 236 00:25:04,690 --> 00:25:20,460 As for thinking about seeing as constrained by particular practices and tropes, seeing as is, how do we go about representing the prison differently? 237 00:25:20,700 --> 00:25:24,520 Simply just taking pictures of the prison that are less familiar and more open to all. 238 00:25:26,200 --> 00:25:33,519 And here I do heavily draw on the work of Johns law and jury in their article, 239 00:25:33,520 --> 00:25:39,489 enacting the social in which they talk about the methodologies of social science and the methodologies we still use, 240 00:25:39,490 --> 00:25:47,110 which were created in the 19th century and have a particular understanding of the world and a particular understanding that in space. 241 00:25:48,520 --> 00:25:54,700 And they argue that those methods and techniques of recording the world were also based 242 00:25:54,700 --> 00:25:58,809 on ideological understanding of the world as a particular sort of coherent reality, 243 00:25:58,810 --> 00:26:06,250 both socially and physically, and that those techniques are no longer as productive or valuable an age that 244 00:26:06,250 --> 00:26:10,420 we live in with various kinds of social disruption and global engagement. 245 00:26:11,260 --> 00:26:16,240 And so they argue, and I'm quoting, that if social investigation makes the world, 246 00:26:16,360 --> 00:26:20,920 then it can in some measure think about the world it wants to help make. 247 00:26:22,150 --> 00:26:27,760 And sure, I wanted to raise the possibility that there is a breakdown in social sciences and that can 248 00:26:27,760 --> 00:26:34,059 be effected through representational practices between descriptive and normative positions, 249 00:26:34,060 --> 00:26:40,840 between our duty as social scientists to objectively record and present the world, 250 00:26:41,380 --> 00:26:47,220 as well as citizens and activists to use that to have some part in changing the world. 251 00:26:48,160 --> 00:26:53,470 And that is where I introduce the notion of seeing as not as a direct form of activism, 252 00:26:53,860 --> 00:27:00,880 but as an imaginative step, as a step of saying that by describing the world, we're taking a stand on it, 253 00:27:01,300 --> 00:27:05,830 and that often our descriptions can take a stand that's in alliance with very traditional, 254 00:27:05,830 --> 00:27:11,770 conventional and stereotyped understandings of criminal justice institutions and crime, justice problems. 255 00:27:13,360 --> 00:27:17,500 And here, the work of Ruth Levy task, the utopian sociologist, is really helpful, 256 00:27:17,800 --> 00:27:24,910 who looks at Utopia as a method in her work, reconstituting the social rights that the utopian method means. 257 00:27:24,910 --> 00:27:30,160 Not that we are aiming for some particular image of reform or some goal on the horizon, 258 00:27:30,700 --> 00:27:37,750 but that we have the ability as sociologists to imagine that that is part of the sociological duty, 259 00:27:38,560 --> 00:27:43,719 in contrast to something like labour and science vocation, where there's a sharp distinction between the problem. 260 00:27:43,720 --> 00:27:59,070 That is the problem of art. And then finally, I think I also draw on some of the work of Richard Worley, who is a deceased American pragmatist, 261 00:27:59,070 --> 00:28:04,860 philosopher, who also writes about the work of emancipation in the work of liberation. 262 00:28:05,400 --> 00:28:10,139 And he says that one of the key ways that we get to a different way of being is to 263 00:28:10,140 --> 00:28:14,160 imagine it and to have some way of talking about it has the language of talking about it. 264 00:28:14,760 --> 00:28:22,380 And so he writes that the challenge is to work between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and have poor vocabulary, 265 00:28:22,650 --> 00:28:30,840 which vaguely promises great things. So the challenge that that faces me is someone who's interested in punishment and 266 00:28:30,840 --> 00:28:36,330 prison practices is to find ways of depicting something that is extremely familiar, 267 00:28:37,080 --> 00:28:42,600 but in ways that are slightly oblique and offer new grounds for understanding 268 00:28:42,600 --> 00:28:47,670 both the potential for a world in which prisons might eventually become for us, 269 00:28:48,150 --> 00:28:58,500 and which we can also continue to have debates about the problems that prisons present in terms of containing disproportionate numbers of social, 270 00:28:58,500 --> 00:29:01,530 social, ethnically and racially marginalised people. 271 00:29:02,680 --> 00:29:11,850 And so this is just the ruins of an old castle, which is just down the road from the new prison that they have built. 272 00:29:12,960 --> 00:29:20,370 And. And so my own work with that's led me to do is to focus more on bureaucratic spaces and objects of 273 00:29:20,370 --> 00:29:25,949 punishment and to understand that you're building on the classic work of people like Robert Cover, 274 00:29:25,950 --> 00:29:29,040 who wrote Violence in the Word about the violence of the judge and the work of 275 00:29:29,040 --> 00:29:32,520 the judge is equivalent to the violence that happens to the person in prison. 276 00:29:32,910 --> 00:29:38,459 It's to understand these bureaucratic sites, the spaces as themselves potentially violent and dangerous, 277 00:29:38,460 --> 00:29:43,620 and also to reconstruct the picture of the prison as something which is that holds bodies that 278 00:29:43,620 --> 00:29:48,840 they can only know through telling stories of the bodies and to try to control the prison itself, 279 00:29:49,500 --> 00:29:52,500 which is something I'm also writing on separately. 280 00:29:54,150 --> 00:29:56,520 I'm also trying to I'm beginning to explore, 281 00:29:56,550 --> 00:30:04,470 thinking about about how narrative how the structure of narrative works in criminology, which is an entirely a project. 282 00:30:04,590 --> 00:30:08,070 I have to talk about. But even for now. 283 00:30:08,730 --> 00:30:12,540 And so so yeah. So that's that's why I'm leaving the paper. 284 00:30:12,540 --> 00:30:13,380 This the last slide. 285 00:30:13,470 --> 00:30:25,610 This is the, the paper appears in the International Handbook of Visual Criminology, and I'm happy to share it with anybody, but I'll read it. 286 00:30:28,520 --> 00:30:31,580 On paper there is so much.