Also seminars this term. And Sarah is a senior research fellow.
Well. She directs the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Sarah is also the co-editor of the Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice,
which has got an excellent threesome of glossary of Scottish women currently editing it.
So I recommend reading.
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.
Great. Thank you. I'm sorry to do this.
Oh, there it goes. Sleep. Which is not helpful.
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.
It's hard to talk to these pictures and to also just offer a disclaimer and effective.
I wouldn't say that I, you know, rigorously or consistently use visual methods,
but the visual is something that's become increasingly important to me.
Just the subject of this paper, which is how we represent different problematics,
different issues and crime and justice and upgrades and so and so on.
The cover here is, first of all, thank you very much for inviting you and likewise to join this this talk series.
And there's so many interesting papers that have happened that are about to happen.
So it's a privilege to be part of that. These the cover here is just three different visualisations of a Scottish prison,
and it gives you a sense of just the diverse ways you can think about prison from its insides,
from its outsides, and its aggregate sense of individual sentence in its future to prison population projections.
And it's passed as a ruin of a past. Castle keep us on the northeast coast of Scotland.
And I just offered up to or juxtapose those three different images of prison to to just trigger the issue for today,
which is to think generally about the problematics of representation in criminology and crime and justice policy.
And I think for those of us working and researching in this field is that we have a particular problem,
as many other people in different intensive areas of social policy do,
is that our field is littered with such dominating tropes, frames, stereotypes,
images of crime, injustice, but they begin to colonise the imagination.
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.
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,
and how it's represented in some of the challenges that have arisen for me around that, but particularly something like imprisonment.
The imagery is dominated by especially United States, by race and poverty in Scotland is less defined by race and ethnicity.
But there is a criminalisation of poverty that happens throughout the criminal justice system.
And so how does a scholar, particularly a scholar who unapologetically is interested in a progressive politics of reform,
represent something like prison without entrenching and deepening the associations that we draw between race and punishment?
That is, how can we challenge something like mass imprisonment without simultaneously triggering and entrenching
the associations between race and punishment that exist without normalising and naturalising?
It's that we begin to expect and become familiar with those associations.
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?
See some different reality that might exist if we didn't have those problems in the criminal justice system.
So that broadly is the challenge of the problem that I was thinking about in writing this paper.
And I thought how we think of the visual, we tend to focus on media popular cultural imagery.
But I'd argue that social science is deeply complicit in these problems of
representation of over associating certain kinds of frameworks and stereotypes,
and that even within the the explanatory modes and methods of social science itself,
that we're constrained into particular channels of representation, particular ways of showing,
and these couple up in form assemblages with other, other ways of representation.
So they combine and reinforce each other into this dominant imagery and
stereotypical kind of problem so that people like Judith Chefs has written that.
How do you visualise something without simply reproducing the problem of that visualisation?
But even when you're trying to critique something, you may end up just reinforcing a stereotype.
So that is the subject of this paper.
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,
I mean not just the cognitive perspective and physical sensory act of absorbing a visual stimulus,
but actually the cognitive process of making sense of that image.
So that seeing is not simply an act of perception. It's always an act of making sense.
And making sense requires a prior frame.
A prior. Socially influenced, cognitively influenced frame of reference.
So this is the challenge for us is in that seeing is knowing.
Seeing is making sense but making but knowing is also seeing that we almost cannot see something that we cannot make sense of.
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?
In addition, I introduced this concept called Seeing as,
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,
by expecting or having a familiarity with particular ways of talking about crime and justice issues into
a new framework where we might begin to see things slightly differently in a sort of bridged format,
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.
And the idea overall, drawing on John Burris famous work, both ways of seeing,
is the aim that for me is to overcome the veil of the veil of familiarity and self evidence
that surrounds the experience of seeing and to turn it into a problem for analysis,
a mystery to be unravelled. And just to tether this to make it less abstract.
For some empirical example, I give you this tale of two prisons,
and these images are of the same prison and the experience which led to two sets
of discombobulation which got me thinking about representational problems,
was I went to prison with a group of Cambridge researchers,
Allison Liebling and Bethany Schmidt and colleagues to go examine a prison which had recently experienced a riot.
The prison was a brand new building, and in Scotland, the new prisons are unbelievably beautiful.
For prisons, they look like colleges or hospitals, they don't look like prisons.
This is a visiting room, but the housing is also full of natural light and bright colours and soft furniture and whatnot.
At the same time, this brand new prison had triggered a riot. So why would there be such disruption?
It's such an amazing place.
The prison the new prison was built because two older 19th century prisons closed, horrible and gothic feeling kind of places.
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.
So it was a two hour bus ride from the nearest city where most of the prisoners were coming from.
And it was on the site of the old prison,
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.
Ironically, this prison was built under a new policy in Scottish Prison Service of something called community facing prisons,
of prisons that are made up of the local communities residents.
So they because they're not they're not classified by by familiar different lines of segregation.
There's free man, long term, short term young people, women, men, everybody in the prison.
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.
So we spent several days talking to people, interviewing, observing,
delivering that the survey that Cambridge do and people just talked about this prison in such different ways.
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.
Such a long commute from anywhere.
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,
centrally organised learning space, had a great health centre and all the rest of it.
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,
but they're talking about differently and fully formed, completely separate realities of prison.
And one group, mainly the prisoners and the frontline staff, we're talking about a prison that wasn't that pleasant,
that was looking backwards towards a riot that just happened.
And the more senior staff and the administrative staff were talking about a future facing prison,
one which is going to achieve all these wonderful, progressive, family oriented goals of the prison service.
So it was this kind of disjuncture between these two prisons,
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,
you know, glass cube, open plan, office space and the operational side of the prison where prisoners lived and were programmed to run, etc.
You have to walk up and down the skyway, connecting the two sides and different ends of the sky,
where there's also inspirational slogans painted on the wall.
Know Orwellian, you know, not quite work to make you free,
but not far off that and it just walking back between these two prisons and work
which contained two very different understandings of what the prison was created.
This is a visceral sense of a prison that just did not make sense, a place that was beautiful, well-bred and organised, professional,
good records, and yet a place that also felt depressing, almost on edge, as if another instance of disorder could take place.
It's like, you know, imagining a riot might break out at it, you know, at your local college or something.
And so this call was from a field note of, you know, just chatting with each other.
And I wrote this down just feeling like it all culminated going to the health centre at the health centre.
It's a beautiful health centre, it's nicer than my GP's office was.
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
then like in a fishbowl and everyone was laughing and having their morning cup of tea and stuff.
And there's these guys sitting there, you know, all in various states of distress because of, you know, what happened to.
A broken leg. And. And I just felt like this is two different places.
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,
which was about how staff and prisoner relations were, and what could be done to prevent another riot.
So I turned to work and criminology.
I turned to literary sources, I turned to alternative sources of theory.
But I had read that Carlin spoke imaginary banalities before, but it hadn't struck me.
I went back to it and I had to remember this vignette, she tells,
which is really interesting of going to an Australian women's prison where it was also brand new
facility and it was aimed at supporting women about recognising complex needs and special programs,
non punitive approaches that would benefit women.
So this prison was built with all these programs to be run for women attached to through care services for women leaving the prisons.
They'd be sort of supported in their community and reconnected to their families.
So she went to this prison and actually she she found out there were no prisoners who could serve,
that this prisoner could serve, that the women it was designed for just didn't exist and weren't getting sent to the prison.
So she wrote about it as having imaginary prisoners,
imaginary programs and imaginary community which was going to receive these women and bring them back up to law abiding citizenship status.
It was interesting, and what Haaland did in discussing this was not just to say this was a stupid idea.
Someone built a prison that was unneeded and that the policy wasn't working and not think about instrumentally.
She took it as a reality itself that the imaginary prison was itself a durable reality in which she
calls it an as if reality in which the rhetoric of this future prison was becoming the reality.
And that sense it was becoming a material reality because the staff in that prison were getting performance
managed for how many referrals and supports they were offering the women the women prisoners who weren't there.
So this imaginary prison had material consequences on the ground.
And so, you know,
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.
Miéville I don't know if you guys are fans of science fiction or not,
but he's written a lot about London, but he's written a book called A City in a City.
And in the novel he writes about two cities that exist in the exact same Euclidean space.
And there is a law against noticing other aspects of the other city that you're living in.
So there's two cities which can be visible most, but it's illegal to notice the other city in your city.
And there's a whole police force that polices breaches of city.
And this is what occurred to me quite useful frame for thinking about how we,
our particular strategies of representation are particular modes of social science methodology
prevent us and in some sense are in forcing us from seeing different realities in the same place.
Miéville is writing about London and increasing segregation in that city between rich and poor,
and how you can live two completely different lives in one place. But I found it quite reductive for thinking about this problem.
So finally looking for some sort theoretical tools and frames to address this, to try to capture a different way of representing the prison.
So turn to science, technology studies, particularly the work of Anne Marie Boal.
And that is an image from her book, The Body Multiple, in which she's studying hardened arteries.
But she talks to patients, to doctors, to hospital managers and so on,
and found and described in a similar way how each of them are describing completely different realities of a patient,
family member and insurance unit and so forth,
and develops that idea to argue for the body multiple the idea that the body has multiple realities in the same space.
I also pulled in notions of contradiction that if we're allowing multiple realities to exist at the same time,
that those necessarily won't always be coherent or consistent with each other.
So I wanted to to see how a contradiction might be one way that would be productive for us to develop representational practices.
And finally, I drew on John Law and Vicky Singleton's work again on in the mental and medical field on alcoholic liver disease,
where they interact, they develop a notion, concept of the fire object, which is where there were every object.
Both has simultaneous presences and absences. And to me,
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,
which was deciding that a prison not near your community would be a community facing prison.
So it was living this illogical policy that somehow seemed rational, very far away in space time.
And with all this thinking about contradiction, multiplicity of absence,
it leads to to think of some existing tools that are used in criminology and concepts like assemblage from Dallas.
And we're where we get the sense that. There's arrangements of different kinds of organisational elements that that came
together but don't necessarily cohere into a systematic picture or a grand narrative.
So just to hone in on these notions of multiplicity, contradiction and absence.
So multiplicity, as I've mentioned, is a way of capturing the simultaneous description of completely formed
realities for people who have occupied different standpoints in the same space.
And it adopts an ethnographic form of description. Or to capture this which which more calls a proxy graphic method,
which is to say that a practice geographic orientation means that the techniques that make things of visible,
audible, tangible, knowable are themselves part of net, enacting them as real.
And that message comes back then to the criminologist, to the researcher, in that the tools we use to describe,
to depict, to represent our objects of study are also participating in enacting them as realities.
Secondly, the notion of contradiction that we could have such a to a depressing and isolated institution
alongside a progressive one focussed on social and family integration and forward thinking,
was difficult. And going against the tendency and the pressure we feel as social science to come up with coherent, singular narratives.
A notion of contradiction means that we can describe both of those things and leave
them there without trying to reconcile or collapse one description over another,
as one as more as a more important, more relevant, more salient reality.
And by doing that, I'd argue that it makes it possible to see specific harms dynamics and implications of things like penal institutions
in a way that's impossible to do if you collapse or support eight different kinds of descriptions into each other.
That's so and I call it a quote to sort of illustrate this notion,
which is to argue for the justification of thinking about a contradiction as something which
is productive rather than something which should be bracketed in our supposed research.
But this is this is from an article by Elaine Genders about breaches in a private prison.
And it's a long list of things that have gone wrong.
And it goes from 211 incidents of prisoner self-harm right down the list to eight failures to report on performance measures.
And what I love about this is the collapsing of a prison that is a physical,
physical space of abuse with a with a performance management prison, which is an example of contractual governance,
so that the actual physical violence perpetrated against inmates becomes juxtaposed and flattened alongside failure to make a contractual report.
And so what that does, that is a facility with a certain amount of fines for the private provider.
And if the private provider fixes those, then everything's fine.
But what it leaves in the dark is the fact that there is a really important difference between bullets and bullet points,
that there is a physical violence. There's a black mark on a contractor, but there's a black eye for a prisoner,
which has implications for understanding the violence of that space, which may or may not be captured in performance measures.
And so even this list itself is the enactment, I'd argue, of a particular piece of reality,
which is the penal reality of the contractual governance prison.
But this is the prison which becomes the ground by which we form political movements of resistance, that by attacking a prison,
we begin to lump together these things and lose sight of its actual direct brutalities and how those are caused.
And so that managerialism itself remains slightly out of focus in our ability to attack it.
And we become we become absorbed into the managerial list paradigm of of using of relying on the same
numbers and speaking the language of these numbers and this discourse in order to challenge and critique it.
So where I come from in Scotland, where the prisons, for the most part physically do not look that brutal,
it can be hard to find a space of critique to say, but in our prisons, two people committed suicide last month.
And to young people commit suicide in our prisons the month before that.
Yeah, that becomes quite a small thing in the midst of many other policies, programmes, performance measures.
The prison is doing very well just going back to and then absence was just refer to this idea that any object.
Toward depicting her. Representing always consists of a series of present and absent forces, spatially and temporally.
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,
not near anything that was at the same time a prison that was visualised,
constructed in the minds of managers headquarters in Edinburgh as the kind of prison which would be the model of the future existence.
So from here.
But picture is a image of another new prison that was built in Scotland.
And it's a picture of the machine room.
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,
where the artist was looking at the ways that criminological research was participating in or reproducing some of the practice of culture.
Looking at what she did as she took a lot of different pictures of prisons with no bodies and all.
And what I loved about this image was the way that it draws attention to the prison,
literally as a machine, a prison as a very large building that is processing water,
waste, electricity, which to me opened up an opportunity to think about it,
not just as a container for bodies that can only understand through the bodies that are in it,
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,
a source of resentment as this you put these new prisons in Scotland are because
they tend to have better facilities than the local communities that surround them.
And so I was thinking, this is the kind of imagery that I'm interested in, is the banal, mundane spaces of punishment,
which get at some of these issues of invisibility and neglect and contradiction in prison.
So and so making the move then from seeing to seeing.
As for thinking about seeing as constrained by particular practices and tropes, seeing as is, how do we go about representing the prison differently?
Simply just taking pictures of the prison that are less familiar and more open to all.
And here I do heavily draw on the work of Johns law and jury in their article,
enacting the social in which they talk about the methodologies of social science and the methodologies we still use,
which were created in the 19th century and have a particular understanding of the world and a particular understanding that in space.
And they argue that those methods and techniques of recording the world were also based
on ideological understanding of the world as a particular sort of coherent reality,
both socially and physically, and that those techniques are no longer as productive or valuable an age that
we live in with various kinds of social disruption and global engagement.
And so they argue, and I'm quoting, that if social investigation makes the world,
then it can in some measure think about the world it wants to help make.
And sure, I wanted to raise the possibility that there is a breakdown in social sciences and that can
be effected through representational practices between descriptive and normative positions,
between our duty as social scientists to objectively record and present the world,
as well as citizens and activists to use that to have some part in changing the world.
And that is where I introduce the notion of seeing as not as a direct form of activism,
but as an imaginative step, as a step of saying that by describing the world, we're taking a stand on it,
and that often our descriptions can take a stand that's in alliance with very traditional,
conventional and stereotyped understandings of criminal justice institutions and crime, justice problems.
And here, the work of Ruth Levy task, the utopian sociologist, is really helpful,
who looks at Utopia as a method in her work, reconstituting the social rights that the utopian method means.
Not that we are aiming for some particular image of reform or some goal on the horizon,
but that we have the ability as sociologists to imagine that that is part of the sociological duty,
in contrast to something like labour and science vocation, where there's a sharp distinction between the problem.
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,
philosopher, who also writes about the work of emancipation in the work of liberation.
And he says that one of the key ways that we get to a different way of being is to
imagine it and to have some way of talking about it has the language of talking about it.
And so he writes that the challenge is to work between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and have poor vocabulary,
which vaguely promises great things. So the challenge that that faces me is someone who's interested in punishment and
prison practices is to find ways of depicting something that is extremely familiar,
but in ways that are slightly oblique and offer new grounds for understanding
both the potential for a world in which prisons might eventually become for us,
and which we can also continue to have debates about the problems that prisons present in terms of containing disproportionate numbers of social,
social, ethnically and racially marginalised people.
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.
And. And so my own work with that's led me to do is to focus more on bureaucratic spaces and objects of
punishment and to understand that you're building on the classic work of people like Robert Cover,
who wrote Violence in the Word about the violence of the judge and the work of
the judge is equivalent to the violence that happens to the person in prison.
It's to understand these bureaucratic sites, the spaces as themselves potentially violent and dangerous,
and also to reconstruct the picture of the prison as something which is that holds bodies that
they can only know through telling stories of the bodies and to try to control the prison itself,
which is something I'm also writing on separately.
I'm also trying to I'm beginning to explore,
thinking about about how narrative how the structure of narrative works in criminology, which is an entirely a project.
I have to talk about. But even for now.
And so so yeah. So that's that's why I'm leaving the paper.
This the last slide.
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.
On paper there is so much.