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Article

Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 176-197
Visual criminology and carceral The Author(s) 2014
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DOl: I10. 1177/1I36248061I3508426
carceral age tcr.sagepub.com

OSAGE

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: mbrow 121 @utk.edu
Brown I77

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
I178 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

mass incarceration. This essay will attempt 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 by current and
former prisoners, community members, artists, and scholars to counter mass incarcera-
tion.' 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. Furthermore, these same tools might allow for a
broader intervention in global carceral configurations. To lay out these claims, I first
outline the increasing attention given to carcerality in academic scholarship. Next, I
explore the relationship between theoretical perspectives in visual studies and criminol-
ogy. Finally, exploring visual interventions by activists and scholars, I point to the use of
counter-images and the counter-visual in decarceration and anti-prison movements in the
United States as evidence of a critically engaged visual criminology (Carrabine, 2012;
Hayward and Presdee, 2010).

Carceral studies
Alongside the cultural and visual turn, there has been an abrupt move to the carceral in
criminology and other disciplines. This broader conceptual framework allows for a num-
ber of things. First, it addresses the ways in which some human experiences and social
practices that involve systems of confinement differ from those that a sociology of pun-
ishment can or perhaps should address. While there are important points of connection
and overlap between the two, the turn to carceral studies reframes the foundations of
criminology, including definitions of punishment, the role of criminalization in global
processes, and the degree to which harm and suffering underpin claims to rights, citizen-
ship, and recognition. The empirical record of confinement extends beyond what many
sociologists might conceive of as punishment. Certain kinds of prison-like conditions
and carceral subjects exceed the forms, routine practices, cultural meanings, and formal
institutions of penality (Garland, 1990). Few sociologists, for instance, have identified
refugee populations dislocated by environmental disaster and political conflict as penal
subjects (although refugee camps are commonly referred to by their inhabitants and in
public discourse as 'open-air prisons'); rather, humanitarian discourses have predomi-
nated, defining refugees as victims, even as humans are stripped of political identity,
categorized as stateless, and placed in camps. Such contexts point to the manner in which
the carceral subject complicates and exceeds categories of criminality, penality, and
victimhood.
Second, carceral studies for many interdisciplinary scholars is bound up with map-
ping more carefully the many configurations of confinement across neoliberal land-
scapes by looking for their root causes at the intersections of capitalism and shifting state
formations amid globalization. In fact, mapping has been foundational in laying the
groundwork for a critical carceral scholarship and carceral geographers have played sig-
nificant roles in defining the carceral itself (Loyd et al., 2012; Moran et al., 2013). In
their edited volume, CarceralSpaces:Mobility andAgency in ImprisonmentandMigrant
Detention, Dominique Moran, Nick Gill, and Deirdre Conlon (2013: 240) define carceral
space as 'the forms of confinement that burst internment structures and deliver carceral
effects without physical immobilization, such as electronic monitoring, surveillance and
Brown 179

securitized public spaces'. Their work as well as that of Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson,
and Andrew Burridge (2012) in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global
Crisis demonstrates the important carceral linkages across geographic space, cultural
ideologies, and political economies, all of which link systems of confinement to the dark
side of global mobility. Both volumes highlight the ways in which struggles against
imprisonment are struggles against all forms of social division, hierarchy, and injustice.
In keeping with a growing literature on carceral formations, they point to the toxic effects
of neoliberalism upon major social institutions, including families, education, health-
care, law, and economies, which become sites for generating fundamental exclusions.
Individuals caught at the crux of myriad social forces are moved into frameworks of
expulsion and confinement, resulting in practices of urban banishment, school to prison
pipelines, and the criminalization of the poor, the mentally ill, and the most socially vul-
nerable (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Meiners, 2007; Richie, 2012; Rios, 2011; Wacquant,
2007). The state becomes 'carceral' as the powers to police and punish drive the bounda-
ries and borders of everyday life.
Carceral scholars find this nexus to be a key site from which to theorize and critique
state power and, more significantly, state violence. The scope and scale of the carceral
enterprise on the world scale is captured by political theorist Wendy Brown (2010: 7)
when she writes in her volume Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 'What we have come
to call a globalized world harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricad-
ing, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription.' Embedded in the walling of the
world, she argues, is a 'visual paradox' where against diminished state sovereignty, 'the
new walls iterate ... a vanishing political imaginary in a global interregnum, a time after
the era of state sovereignty, but before the articulation or instantiation of an alternate
global order' (2010: 39). Such volatile, transitional moments reveal the violence of the
state and provoke critical questions about its role in achieving justice. For many, the very
foundations of justice and the role of the state in its formulation bring questions of citi-
zenship, recognition, and social exclusion to the fore (Aas, 2007; Aas and Bosworth,
2013). What constitutes the very terms of recognizability is, in many ways, on the table
and up for debate on the world stage. As Judith Butler (2009: 6) argues, actors hoping to
address these dilemmas must engage in 'framing the frame', which involves command-
ing 'a highly reflexive overlay of the visual field'. Pointing to the way in which some-
thing important is always outside of the frame, marginal political actors push for
recognition that promotes a break with a taken-for-granted social reality, revealing alter-
native ways to conceptualize the problems we face. Philosopher Nancy Fraser (2009)
complements this perspective by arguing that such historical events allow an unusual
political space to materialize, one in which a plurality of competing frames for justice
present us with the daunting but incredible opportunity to reframe discussions of justice
altogether.
The social problems that undergird competing claims for justice are central to the
penal predicaments of carceral regimes. Anti-prison scholars argue that 'the analytic
ability to see how seemingly disconnected institutions of state violence are intercon-
nected and how they produce and police social difference' (Loyd et al., 2012: 3) is central
to an understanding of the slow death that maps the effect of carceral regimes upon indi-
viduals, families, and communities (Gilmore, 2007; Guenther, 2013; Kim, 2009; Richie,
I180 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

2012; Rodriguez, 2006; Smith, 2009; Smith et al., 2006). This undertaking is apparent in
counter-images of carcerality where representations are combined in a manner that pro-
ductively challenges our understandings of penal institutions, penal subjectivities, and
their relationship to the state. As representations directed toward the pursuit of an alter-
native justice, counter-images are evidence of how actors struggle to find innovative and
effective ways in which to communicate and build alternative discourses to punishment.
In order to contextualize these images differently, they depict carceral subjects in their
many forms as something other or more than perpetrators and victims. For instance, they
show people as having a history of belonging, now caught in life and death distinctions
of law and citizenship, often in a direct relationship with state violence. As Ariella
Azoulay (2011: 678) writes, these bare life, 'non-state' actors must be 'tied to the regime
that expelled [them] in order to learn about the nature of the regime'.
Political theorists, such as Arendt and Foucault, argue that the work of the state is to
mask and efface these struggles for representation and the historical labor of what it
means to be political by creating subjects emptied of political agency and belonging.
Powerful ideological forces structure how we see and understand punishment including,
as criminologist Judah Schept (2013: 73) argues, 'the important roles that individual
actors and communities play in adopting, reformulating and rearticulating carcerality to
fit specific political-cultural contexts', a hegemonic disposition or 'habitus' as he defines
it that is so prevalent as to 'imbue even oppositional politics'. Conventional carceral
images such as the figures of bodies in aggregate masses, including prison tiers, tent
camps and seas of dislocated humans, or individualized photos of mug shots and chained
actors in orange jumpsuits framed for punitive consumption, without context, have the
effect of creating 'speechless emissaries' and 'abject carceral subjects' who are effec-
tively depoliticized (Linnemann and Wall, 2013; Malkki, 1996). Efforts to counter these
images often nonetheless must take the form of both (individualized) portraiture and the
(aggregate) collective, caught inevitably in the frames of sentimentalized, romanticized,
and aestheticized spectacle. The counter-visual is fundamentally a tricky performance.
Within these partial and unpredictable visual fields, actors push to find ways in which to
steer ideological projections of carceral subjects toward a more multi-faceted under-
standing of incarceration. One way in which to visualize otherwise, they argue, is to see
the broad swathe of emergent carceral and 'nonstate' actors in roles that challenge state,
criminal, and humanitarian discourses-as they riot, resist, and employ violence for
political purposes; engage in hunger strikes, lip-sewing, and self-mutilation; make visi-
ble kinships, friendships, and collective organizing; and perform thousands of other
small ordinary acts of invisible and unrecorded resistance that foreground their own
disappearance and slow death at the hands of the state. Visual criminologists have much
to learn from these efforts as they seek out strategies to disrupt the ocular logics that
would naturalize the carceral spaces of global neoliberalism and the disappearance of its
subj ects.

Visual criminology
A visual criminology intersects with carceral studies in a number of ways. As Nicholas
Mirzoeff (2011) argues, visual culture has been legitimized as a critical project in part
Brown I8I

because it has been linked so strongly to questions of trauma and state violence (see also
Azoulay, 2008, 2011; Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013; Gronstad and Gustafsson, 2012;
Guerin and Hallas, 2007; Linfield, 2010; Sontag, 2003). In the course of examining the
visual through a criminological lens, one encounters a large body of cultural, media, and
visual studies that take political violence and spectacles of social suffering as their
focus-terrain that criminology has often omitted by defining it rather narrowly as not
crime-related. From Auschwitz to Darfur, Abu Ghraib to New Orleans post-Katrina,
questions about the criminalization of the vulnerable, the accountability of states, and the
radical heterogeneity of justice claims continue to mount. As Eamonn Carrabine (2012:
486) argues, 'a critically engaged visual criminology' builds from these disparate scenes:

The cultural turn in criminology has meant a greater attentiveness to issues of representation
and the issues posed are not just restricted to images that evidence criminal acts, but also figure
in any act of representation that transforms traumatic experience into visual art. By describing
the quite different and difficult subjectivities (between photographer, criminal, victim, spectator,
torturer, and artist) that any work of representation involves, the most persistent ethical question
encountered is: 'What right have I to represent you' (Levi Strauss 2003: 8)? In doing so, the
relationship between photographer, suffering subject and the very act of looking are put at the
centre of debate.

Taking up Carrabine's (2012: 463; Brown and Rafter, 2013) declaration that there has
been a 'remarkable visual turn in criminology' of late allows not only for an examination
of a set of 'distinctive ethical questions posed by visual representations of harm, suffer-
ing and violence' but also a much broader configuration of criminology's mandate. A
visual criminology is a 'visually attuned criminology' and this includes attention to the
problems of theory, methods, ethical engagement, political reform, and social responsi-
bilities that come with the production, representation, and analysis of images (Harper,
2012; Pink, 2007; Rose, 2011; Young et al., 2008). A visual criminology is equally vast
in scale and includes the proliferation of virtual assemblages of 'written texts, still pho-
tos, video excerpts, maps, graphs and tables, and interviews, all interconnected with the
live links that allow a viewer a nearly limitless number of paths through large bundles of
information' (Harper, 2012: 142). In the realm of new media, images collide and con-
verge across complex media platforms and interfaces. Photodocumentary, for instance, is
now a practice whose product-the still photo-circulates across numerous global cir-
cuits of distribution, viewing, downloading, and appropriation-trending, peaking,
going viral. For scholars and activists, new possibilities open up in their own work with
regard to this amazing visual scene. Many of us now strive to overcome what sociologist
Douglas Harper (2012) calls the visual/non-visual divide in research by understanding
and creating more and better visual forms of empirical and theoretical information, as do
activists, lobbyists, government officials, and news media. Images, like politics and the-
ory, are the space for learning how to imagine and persuade otherwise, beyond our cur-
rent placements, and this practice includes alternative visions of carceral landscapes and
subjects.
If provocation is the grounds for praxis, unpredictability in interpretation is to a cer-
tain extent the political power of a visual criminology. In The Cruel Radiance, Susie
I182 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

Linfield (2010: 30) argues that it is precisely because photos are so open-ended-'such
utter failures at providing answers to the tangled politics' of cruelty-

that they are so valuable: by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us to feel things we
don't quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little deeper .... Instead of
approaching these images as static objects that we either naively accept or scornfully reject, we
might see them as part of a process-the beginning of a dialogue, the start of an investigation-
into which we thoughtfully, consciously enter.

Linked to sentiment, affect, and emotion, images seek to garner public attention and they
often do this by moving us, making us feel astonishment, revulsion, outrage, admiration,
confusion, denial, connection, commitment. Linfield (2010: 30-3 1) points to the impor-
tance of acknowledging the incorporation of 'emotion into the experience of looking' as
a way for viewers to 'allow the suffering of the world to enter into them instead of
despising it as abjection'. Conveyors of complex emotional fields, images are important
political arbiters in social movements because, as sociologist lain Wilkinson (2005: 272)
writes, social transformation requires 'not only a radical revision of common cultural
categories, but also a radical reconfiguration of moral feeling'.
With images recognized as key sites for the production and incitement of critical
thinking and feeling about human suffering and social justice, there has been a growing
emphasis upon the ethical encounter in the study of visual culture. Media scholars Lilie
Chouliaraki and Bolette Blaagaard (2013: 254) argue,

The ethics of images refers firstly, to the social relations of power and the forms of moral-
political action that the visual representations of such vulnerability call on us to perform and,
secondly, to the truth claims and modes of identification with those who suffer-what, that
is, these visuals tell us about ourselves as moral actors and how they invite us to engage with
them.

Nicholas Mirzoeff insists that the right to look, as a right to the real, is the right to exist-
ence-that looking and recognition are central to human rights. The visualization of
'goals, strategies, and imagined forms of singularity and collectivity', he writes, is 'by no
means a simple or mimetic depiction of lived experience but one that depicts existing
realities and counters them with a different realism' (2011: 485). Visualizing is a way to
politicize those who have been marginalized to the point of depoliticization. Critical of
accounts that have argued the bleaker, more corrosive impacts of images upon public
life, including saturation, fatigue, and desensitization (Barthes, 2000; Sontag, 1979),
these scholars insist that visual or photographic acts may be of political necessity.
Regardless of its uncertain outcomes, including voyeuristic spectacle, egregious appro-
priations, and silent apathy, the act of representation remains a vital form of social
engagement. In keeping with this line of argument, Ariella Azoulay (2008: 24, emphasis
in original) argues that the widespread use of cameras across the planet (the age of 'civil
contract photography', as she names it) signals:

more than a mass of images; it has created a new form of encounter, an encounter between
people who take, watch, and show other people's photographs, with or without their
Brown I83

consent, thus opening new possibilities of political action and forming new conditions for
its visibility .... The users of photography thus reemerge as people who are not totally
identified with the power that governs them and who have new means to look at and show
its deeds, as well, and eventually to address this power and negotiate with it-citizen and
noncitizen alike.

Misrecognition (of citizens and images) becomes a strategy that may be used to force a
conversation, an issue, a look. This allows us, as Linfield (2010: 60) writes, to transform
'our relationship to photographs from one of passivity and complaint to one of creativity
and collaboration'.
While acknowledging that 'photography's strength comes from the visceral, emo-
tional responses it evokes', anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer Jeff
Schonberg (2009) add an element of precarity in their photo-ethnography of homeless
drug users, Righteous Dopefiend. They write, 'Interpretation, judgment, and imagination
move to the eyes of the beholder. The personality, cultural values, and ideologies of the
viewer, as well as the context in which the images are presented, all shape the meaning
of pictures' (2009: 14). This means that '(t)he multitude of meanings in a photograph
makes it risky, arguably even irresponsible, to trust raw images of marginalization, suf-
fering, and addiction to an often judgmental public' (2009: 14). Some images are more
susceptible to ideological projections-images of social suffering, cultural pariahs,
socially taboo behaviors (drugs, sex, crime, violence) that always occur along emotion-
ally charged lines of race, class, gender, and other vectors of marginality. These scholars
point to the way that, as a critical project, a visual criminology might 'involve us in many
of the ethical anxieties and methodological frustrations' that inform such work (Bourgois
and Schonberg, 2009: 14). They recognize that visual performance is necessarily laden
with tensions and risks that, when foregrounded,

make possible forms of social disclosure that would otherwise remain hidden from view.
Indeed, they often credit the most morally difficult, emotionally charged and semantically
unstable passages of their work as being most capable of raising the human-social situation up
for political recognition and critical debate.

(Wilkinson, 2013: 272)

Precariousness, when brought into view and contextualized, becomes the ground for the
political and 'the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its
capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and terri-
torial defense' (Butler, 2009: 32). In that process, by creating explicit connections and
contexts for understanding the link between social vulnerability and carceral formations,
we create an opportunity to see and thereby challenge state violence. We regard 'the
violators of human rights-not the photographers who document their victims-as the
real "agents of death' (Linfield, 2010: 60). By sheltering agonistic and ongoing antago-
nisms as the substance of a radical democratic politics, we may need to debate the terms
of recognition endlessly. But it is no small thing to bring the debate into the frame of
public discourse.
I184 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

Counter-images and the anti-prison movement

While the 'politics of abolition' has had a historical and recently renewed place in
European (Christie, 1981; Mathiesen, 1974; Ruggiero, 2010) and Canadian sociology
(Pich6 and Larsen, 2010), it has been less prominent as a lens in US criminology with
much of the scholarship on abolition situated in history, geography, and the humanities. 2
An emergent and expanding US anti-prison movement has directly taken on the issues of
disappearance and visibility central to mass incarceration. In a genealogy that stretches
from Angela Davis (2003) to Michelle Alexander (2012), this movement is grounded in
the efforts of women of color who argue against all forms of oppression by way of an
intersectional analysis of violence. Anti-prison activists have framed their efforts through
critiques of patriarchal, capitalist, racist, and heteronormative ideologies and their role in
the production of poverty, intimate violence, police brutality, immigrant detention, and
war (Davis, 2003; Meiners, 2007; Smith et al., 2006; Sudbury, 2005). The first Critical
Resistance conference held in Berkeley, California in 1998 culminated in a national
organization whose efforts have been central to the US anti-prison movement. Largely
organized by women, the event reflected the aims of a broad abolitionist movement that
would take seriously dismantling the prison-industrial complex (Smith et al., 2006). In
doing so, organizers argued that mass incarceration is the root problem through which
other social problems become visible and the roots of the prison are firmly entrenched in
the foundations of criminal justice: policing, arrest, prosecution, and sentencing that dis-
proportionately targeted poor communities and communities of color (Schept, 2012).
Many of these activists were scholars from Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, African
American Studies, and other area studies programs and these came to be the intellectual
homes for transformative justice movements in the United States-not criminology.
A growing collective with regional and national initiatives, the anti-prison movement
is now made up of myriad grassroots organizations, activist collectives, prisoner associa-
tions, think tanks, lobby groups, artists, and scholars (Loyd et al., 2012). Far-reaching in
the political scope of their message, anti-prison activists differ from reformists in that
rather than arguing for more humane or effective changes in the prison system, they
'view prisons and jails as a form of racialised state violence that must be dismantled as
part of a wider social justice agenda' (Sudbury, 2013). Posing a radical critique, aboli-
tionists argue that to confront mass incarceration, activists must address the conditions
that drive violence of all kinds, including state violence. Many self-identify as part of an
anti-violence movement that must take into account forms of state violence implicated in
the criminalization of poor and racialized communities and the role of the criminal jus-
tice system (in particular, police and prisons) in exacerbating crime and community con-
ditions (Richie, 2012; Smith et al., 2006). Rather than relying solely on critiques of state
power, organizers, as Schept (2012: 44) argues, have had to create coherent alternative
critiques of localized visions of carcerality, disrupting 'liberal discourses of incarcera-
tion' by pointing insistently to the ways in which only decarceration could provide 'long
term, sustainable solutions to the problems' that underlie mass imprisonment. Such
efforts mean that a repository of visual materials is readily available for those who seek
to challenge prisons through radical critiques of the state, racism, capitalism, and an
Brown I85

amalgam of related social justice issues. It also makes this movement an important
source for efforts at generating new meanings about and against imprisonment.
Concentrating on the totality of social justice issues, the decarceration movement
culminates in a political frame that merges student, immigrant, HIV/AIDS, health care,
and queer and transgender movements as well as calls for labor, economic, racial, and
radical justice. Anti-prison activists have faced a number of compelling challenges as
they seek to identify the work that visual technologies can do in and against prisons that
does not reaffirm the hegemony of state discourses of mass incarceration. Such work
begins with reconfiguring the tired and historically objectifying stock conventional uses
of the quintessential carceral image: the racialized body displayed in confinement.
Furthermore, prisons as prohibited zones for photography and visuality systematically
remove other ways of making incarcerated people and the force of the state visible. As
Ruby Tapia (2008: 687) writes, 'the structural, geographic, and institutional properties of
the prison elude visualization in material ways. Because the prison and its populations
are largely invisible, because they are made to exist only in the jettisoned reaches of our
society's landscapes, the possibilities of knowing them through seeing are foreclosed'
and our 'theories of images and visualities' must address the catch-22 of the spectacle of
disappearance and the human-in-a-cage as the sole modes of visibility. Out of these
dilemmas, a space of political urgency for making sure that the incarcerated are visible
as disappearedsubjects has materialized among activists.
Facing a politically charged economic crisis in the USA, activists have located an
important window through which to align decarceration objectives with state budget
reform, environmental concerns, immigration debates, and other politically salient issues
that might generate both powerful alliances and new frames for moving away from incar-
ceration in the minds of voters and citizens. These strategies have taken a variety of
forms. Simply 'showing up' and being present at direct action events near prisons, state-
houses, and community forums have rendered a new kind of visibility to these acts.
Careful to document their presence with photos and media alerts, organizers translate
these efforts into flyers, outreach materials, toolkits, legislative packets, newsletters,
infographics, photos, and videos while relying upon a repertoire of social media (email,
Facebook, twitterverse, the blogosphere, organization websites, youtube, and alternative
media outlets) to enlarge their sphere of impact. Employing multimedia platforms, the
images these groups produce are often shared and redistributed, moving quickly from
one organization's web presence and outreach materials to the next. As one example,
community members gathered on Earth Day to oppose plans for a new jail in an area of
San Mateo, California designated by the county as too polluted for residential use. In the
photo in Figure 1, environmental justice discourses merge with anti-prison activism in a
message of toxicity and death for both the environment and social life, visualized with
gas masks and skull and crossbones. This photo trended in the event's immediate after-
math across a number of news agencies, activist sites, and social media outlets.
This attention to innovative meaning-making is grounded in many of the commit-
ments and experiences of the actors who participate in decarceration efforts. Most come
from directly affected communities where actors have become explicitly involved in
community organizing because of their personal experiences and connections with mass
incarceration. These are communities where actors recognize that '"perpetrators" and
I186 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

Figure 1. 'Jails are toxic.'

Source: Californians United for a Responsible Budget.

"victims" coexist in a social context devastated by a combination of social exclusion,

poverty, racism, addiction, and government neglect' because they have lived in and
around it (Sudbury, 2013). Julia Sudbury (2013) argues that this experience 'shifts our
focus from the commonsense assumption that policing and prisons create security, to the
possibility of creating safety by redirecting resources to provide for the basic human
rights of all community members'. Decarceration strategies center upon redefining
'safety' by giving attention to the effects of imprisonment upon families, economies,
education, environment, and community. As Schept (2012: 55) writes of one successful
decarceration effort, Decarcerate Lincoln County (DLC), 'In forcing the community,
including politicians, to reflect on what brought about individual and community safety,
DLC successfully disrupted a rather narrow linear narrative that connected safety to a
robust, if benevolent, criminal justice.' Furthermore, mapping prisons onto economic
crisis and rendering them a force of violence and economic drain in and of themselves
allows hard-hit communities to speak directly to efforts to rebuild otherwise. The move-
ment has been successful in pointing to the closing of prisons as an important step in
addressing root causes of economic and other community issues (see Gilmore, 2007). As
Dan Berger (2013: 9), Founder of Decarcerate PA, writes, 'An anti-prison movement is
not solely for the 2.3 million human beings locked away but is centered even more in
what it takes to build safer, healthier, and ultimately flourishing communities.' As the
signs at direct action events insist, 'Build communities, not prisons.'
The images that derive from these efforts point to the centrality of social relationships
in decarceration efforts. Community members and organizers point to direct relation-
ships to the incarcerated as a means to visualize the long-term psychological, emotional,
and criminogenic effects of mass incarceration upon individuals, families, and
Brown I87

communities. Seeking to redefine the use of carceral images, many of these groups refuse
to show images of humans behind bars. Rather, often at direct action events, signs will
state very clearly the relationship that the individual shares with a prisoner: 'My brother
is a human being'; 'My uncle is a human being'; 'I am a mom'; 'My son is not a pay-
check.' Focusing upon the power of affective bonds (of family and loved ones), such acts
highlight the individual's connection to the outside, a process of rehumanization that
seeks to politicize the identity of a loved one beyond that of bare life: Prisoners are not
just fathers, brothers, and sons. They are 'our' fathers, brothers, and sons and mothers,
daughters, and sisters. Californians for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a statewide alli-
ance of organizations that makes a case for fiscal reform by decreasing prisoners and
prisons across the state, used the photo in Figure 2 as the banner for their Facebook page.
Language reminiscent of anti-Vietnam war discourse, 'bring our loved ones home', is
used to campaign for prisoner rights by explicitly identifying severed social relationships
at the heart of the collateral consequences of mass incarceration.
These strategies make visible the tensions that underlie mass incarceration, including
the relationships that would otherwise remain hidden from view, through a politics of
affect that draws attention to the character of mass incarceration less as a 'civil war in
miniature' (Garland, 1990: 292) but rather as a project of state impunity centered upon
disappearance. 3
Like anti-slavery and civil rights campaigns before them, the visual strategies invoked
by organizers must anticipate the ways in which their messages are likely to be inter-
preted, acknowledge the lack of control over the interpretation of the image, and steadily

Figure 2. 'Bring our loved ones home.'

Source: Californians United for a Responsible Budget.
I188 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

produce more counter-images that seek to reframe neoliberal discourses of punishment.

Contemporary art practices are interwoven with a politics of protest in an effort to create
a space for dialogue and debate about the social problems at the heart of carceral regimes.
In bringing together a nexus of social problems and forces, activists employ images to
call into question the frames of justice. Their messages insist upon a public forum for
thinking through the following: the failure of criminal justice and the consequent crisis
for many communities that the war on drugs has created; the practices of dehumanization
that are central to mass incarceration, capital punishment, and solitary confinement; and
how citizenship is constructed and for whom, exposing the ways in which racialized,
gendered, and class-based images of the other as criminal are used to justify unequal
relations and longstanding structures of white power. These tactics of intervention ulti-
mately take on a pedagogical intent. Employing teach-in posters and toolkits, their pro-
test is linked to forums, exhibitions, classrooms, new media, and direct action. Through
an ongoing visual politics, like other social movements, they strive to envision alterna-
tive spaces.
Joined with these efforts is an immense archive of photojournalism, art, and visual
data that critique mass incarceration and carceral regimes. Freelance writer and blogger
Pete Brook's Prison Photography website (http://prisonphotography.org/) provides a
daunting archive of carceral images culled from various news sources, research sites, and
photo exhibitions. Brook writes of his intervention,

I believe the United States needs to pursue large-scale prison and sentencing reform .... If a
camera is within prison walls we should always be asking: How did it get there? What are/were
the motives? What are the responses? What social and political powers are at play in a
photograph's manufacture? And, how is knowledge, related to those powers, constructed?
(emphasis in original)

At his site one finds juxtaposed in close proximity: photos by children who are incarcer-
ated; images of prisoner football, rec yards, visiting rooms, and tattoos; 'no photos' signs
at Guantinamo; men, women, and children in solitary confinement; multiple projects
that have produced portraits of men, women, and children in prison; images of walls and
borders across the planet; tourist photography at Auschwitz; artistic representations of
Abu Ghraib; cities laid to ruin in Syria and their inhabitants; and luminous night photos
of state penitentiaries lighting up the American sky. Brook maintains a growing list of
photographers of prisons, providing thoughtful commentary on their work and generat-
ing a larger narrative about the history and conventions of prison photography. With an
eye for amateur, commercial, artistic, institutional, transnational, historical, stock, pris-
oner, and photojournalist representations, Brook lays out a compelling visual archive
from which to further theorize carcerality.
At 'Prison Culture' (http://www.usprisonculture.com/), a blog dedicated to 'How the
PIC [Prison Industrial Complex] structures our world', a section of the site is dedicated
to the collection of data visualizations from across the web, including infographics and
youtube depictions. A number of independent blogs and nonprofit websites have similar
visual repositories, where critiques of mass incarceration, aging in prison, school to
prison pipelines, the costs of incarceration, the drug war, and comparative world rates of
Brown I89

Figure 3. Educate/Incarcerate.
Source: Jason Killinger.

imprisonment are on display.4 Infographics, for example, like direct action protest signs,
work to open up discursive foreclosures in carceral regimes. A single image, like the one
in Figure 3, can pose the irrational social costs of imprisonment alongside the divestment
of public goods like education. The image literally asks us to imagine a brown body both
as a student and a prisoner, split down the middle, foregrounding the decisions we make
when we choose to imprison our children.
I90 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

Recently, sociologists Sarah Shannon and Chris Uggen have pursued a similar pro-
ject, titled 'Visualizing Punishment' (http://thesocietypages.org/papers/visualizing-
punishment/). On their site, they argue that the scale and cost of mass incarceration is
simply too staggering for most to grasp and that data visualizations allow us to move
from 'boring" statistics to eye-catching and intuitive images'. In their work, they seek
'to visualize the story of mass incarceration, illustrating shifts in punishment over time,
space, and the populations most affected by its rise' through the use of interactive maps,
graphs, and tables that condense large amounts of data from various official sources.
Josh Begley's PrisonMap (http://prisonmap.com) follows this kind of topographic visu-
alization. On his website, he asks 'What does the geography of incarceration in the
United States look like?' Archiving Google Earth photos of over 5000 jails and prisons
in the United States, Begley states, 'A lot of times we'll just use numbers to talk about
this idea of mass incarceration and I thought that there maybe was something powerful
about using no numbers, no words and just having the images' (Badger, 2012). The satel-
lite images of prison facilities scroll on and on at his website, depicting a relentlessly
repetitive aesthetic symmetry of carcerality. This kind of work is reminiscent of the
Million Dollar Blocks Project by the Spatial Information Design Lab and Justice Mapping
Center (http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects.php?id=16). This project
achieved public attention by showing incarceration migration flows for several major US
cities. Shifting from 'crime events' to 'incarceration events', the designers mapped home
addresses of the incarcerated which were then visualized as dense clusters across sec-
tions of the city, reflecting 'the mass disappearance and reappearance of people in the
city' (Spatial Information Design Lab, 2006). Developers of the project describe the
prison as a 'distant exostructure' of urban spaces sapped of infrastructure. While impres-
sive efforts to document the sheer scale of mass incarceration and carceral regimes, these
visualizations, like photodocumentary, are open, as always, to the judgment and interpre-
tation of the viewer. In her critique of the Million Dollar Blocks project, filmmaker and
cultural geographer Brett Story (2013) warns of the ways in which logics of criminaliza-
tion that build upon neighborhood effects literatures resonate with carceral maps like that
of the Million Dollar Blocks Project. Locating crime still in the individual and specific
neighborhoods, they fail to foreground the role of the state, including its policies and laws,
in carceral regimes that are unwilling to see or address the social conditions of harm and
violence. Like raw images of social suffering, data visualizations too carry a set of meth-
odological challenges and ethical anxieties. The precarity of visuality is foregrounded in
all of these efforts, as we move, without certainty in the outcome of our efforts, toward
making possible new forms of social disclosure and political recognition.
Another tactic in the creation of counter-images has focused upon the very notion of
possibility itself through the imagining of the vista. Fernando Marti's popular culture-
strike poster, 'This Too Shall Fall/Tambi6n Caeri', depicts a vibrantly colored quetzel
against an orange sky flying past a razor wire wall lined with crosses in a white landscape
(see Figure 4). In their volume, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global
Crisis, Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (2012) chose a cover that
depicts community activists painting the image of a door opening onto a beautiful desert
vista on a border wall. English-based graffiti artist and activist Banksy has a number of
Brown 191

Figure 4. 'This Too Shall Fall/Tambi6n Caeri.'

Source: Fernando Marti.

murals on the barrier walls separating Israel and Palestine that incorporate this motif-a
young girl holding balloons floating upward, a white ladder reaching to the sky, a dotted
line with scissors creating an aperture, and a hole through which we see an island beach.
I92 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

With its associations of openings, freedom, and broadening horizons, the vista as a dis-
tant view through a narrow passage captures much of what it means to think and hope
beyond the prison. As Schept (2012: 63-64) writes, 'Perhaps most devastating to car-
ceral expansion, resistance can take the form of re-imagining once-carceral space, dis-
rupting incarceration's inevitability and offering a counter-hegemonic cartography', one
where, in his ethnographic study, 'the bricks and mortar' of criminal justice are re-imag-
ined by activists as 'the rainwater catchment barrels, compost piles, and garden beds of
a sustainable community landscape'.
Trevor Paglen's art exhibition 'Recording Carceral Landscapes' functions somewhat
differently, depicting the strangeness of prisons in natural landscapes by juxtaposing
design images and prison blueprints against the background of rural and natural land-
scapes. In his exhibition, the outlines of the architectural drawings of Pelican Bay grow
up out of the staggering beauty of the American Northwest, a jarring juxtaposition that
raises questions as to how these became the spaces in which prisons were imagined and
built. In a cover story of Paglen's work, Bryan Finoki (2005) writes of the intersection of
new media in these artist-activist creations:

With the evolution of GIS, GoogleMaps, and a phenomenon of web projects like Flickr,
FoundCity, Geobloggers, and Sprol, there is a real movement now for people to define their
own maps, their own boundaries and social proximities, their own landmarks, and to see and
expose places which have managed to hide from public view due to a basic lack of accessibility.

Other visual maps work conceptually and historically. 'Proliferation' by Paul Rucker
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySH-FgMljYo&feature-player embedded) sets US
prison expansion from 1778 to 2005 to music across a more than 10-minute video, as
different colored dots, each representing a prison, materialize against the black backdrop
of a US map. Evan Bissell's 'The Knotted Line' (http://knottedline.com) is an open
access online project dedicated to an alternative history of freedom and confinement in
the United States. Designed to be a 'tactile, interactive experience', it encourages users
to play with a historical timeline that marks 50 landmark episodes in the history of con-
finement, from conquest and slavery into the present. Seeking to open up new ways of
understanding these carceral moments, the horizontal axis of the timeline is not subject
to a simple scroll and view but requires clicking, stretching, and pulling the line in order
to reveal the hidden histories beneath. The effort, Bissell argues, underlines the work of
unpacking history. The vertical axis is dedicated to conceptual relations across history
with an emphasis upon 'reimagining and self-determination'. Along a third axis, people
leave comments embedded in the timeline. Highly pedagogical, the knotted line is dedi-
cated to the creation of a participatory and relational history that better interrogates the
frameworks of confinement and freedom.
A final example, artist Ashley Hunt's 'A World Map: in which we see ... ' (aworld-
map.com), is one of the first concept maps to attempt to visualize the many ways in
which global neoliberal forces generate carceral configurations and zones of exclusion.
Drawing upon political theory to design the map (which includes quotes from Hannah
Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Orlando Patterson, Karl Marx, and others),
Hunt creates a space in which viewers explore the intersections of capital, labor, and
Brown I93

Figure 5. 'A World Map: in which we see...'

Source: Ashley Hunt.

empire in the emptying of infrastructure and the generation of flight, expulsion, confine-
ment, and social death. For Hunt, who has a series of prison maps alongside his world
map, conceptualizing visually is the practice 'in which we see' what we would not oth-
erwise. He emphasizes in his work the juxtapositions, relations, and contextualizations
that might disrupt the logics of mass incarceration, carceral regimes, and global zones of
abandonment. Social death, for instance, is a convergence of statelessness and forms of
community cut-off in the figures of the prisoner and the refugee (see Figure 5). His work
is an ambitious effort to encompass the scope of carceral studies in visual terms.

Conclusion
In visual analysis, scholars now work through social and cultural imaginaries; visual
hierarchies, economies, and ocular logics; trending images, conceptual maps and data
visualizations; all in order to foreground the visual frames and optics by which we see ...
I94 Theoretical Criminology 18(2)

and do not see. Such an expansive and emergent vocabulary allows us to explore and
articulate in a more nuanced manner the stakes of seeing and understanding our subject,
ourselves, and our commitments in a plurality of ways. For criminologists and sociologists
in the carceral era, it also allows us to confront what Valerie Hartouni (2012: loc 2647) calls
an 'optics of thoughtlessness', a term that captures the 'practices that enable individuals to
ignore and mis-recognize (and thus participate in) the processes that produce superfluity
rather than plurality as the norm and given of human life together'. In other words, a visual
criminology is a space from which to cultivate the kind of moral judgment and ways of
seeing that are most often institutionally erased in neoliberal discourses that drive law, poli-
tics, media, and prisons. Although we may see glimpses of global relays and networks of
relation across mainstream and alternative news sites, there is still very little in the ways we
collectively think the world that allow us to make the kinds of connections and linkages
that decenter and dismantle social institutions like the prison. To do that requires us to
understand the perpetual problem and possibility of misrecognition and the technologies
and logics by which we see and fail to see. Myriad actors and groups are building the con-
ceptual resources, archiving the historical traces, and exploring the virtual interrelation-
ships that allow us to engage, as a part of everyday practice, in careful reflection on this
issue of the frame itself, with the awareness that the image, its subjects, and its interpreta-
tion remain ultimately precarious. The critical projects that drive these practices point to
the desire and wish for a radical justice of alterity and a politics of futurity, the kind of
vision in which a critically engaged visual criminology might play a useful role.

Notes
This article benefitted from: (1) discussions and engagements across 2010-2011 in planning
and hosting the Indiana University Cultural Studies symposium 'Carceral Studies across the
Disciplines: Scholarship at the Nexus of Art and Action', coordinated by Micol Seigel, Khalil
G Muhammad, Judah Schept, and myself; (2) work conducted at the Centre for Refugee Studies
Summer Course on Refugee and Forced Migration Issues at York University (Toronto, Ontario)
in 2012; and (3) participation in the Rethinking Prisons Conference at Vanderbilt University and
the International Crime, Media, and Popular Culture Conference in 2013. The author would like to
thank artists Ashley Hunt, Fernando Marti, and Jason Killinger for generously sharing their work
and Eamonn Carrabine, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Nicole Rafter, and Judah Schept for their help-
ful comments. Also, special thanks to Jenna Lamphere, Julie Shelton, and Carolina De La Torre
Ugarte for their research assistance and the Department of Sociology and the Center for the Study
of Social Justice at the University of Tennessee for their support. This research received no specific
grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

1. This work is part of a larger research project for which I am currently collecting data drawn
from: news archives; government and NGO public information campaigns; and nonprofit,
artist, and activist organizations. The study examines depictions of camps, prisons, detention
centers and the people they house.
2. A small but growing body of abolitionist work in US criminology is gradually taking shape.
Michael Coyle, for instance, has a forthcoming special issue of Contemporary Justice Review
on the theme of penal abolition. See also Schept (2012).
3. Such strategies are reminiscent of mothers' movements, such as los Madres de la Plaza de
Mayo of Argentina, that have organized against the role of governments in the disappearance
Brown I95

of their children.
4. See also Solitary Watch (http://solitarywatch.com) and Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity
(http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com).

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Author biography
Michelle Brown is associate professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee. She is the
author of The Culture ofPunishment(NYUP, 2009), co-author of Criminology Goes to the Movies
(with Nicole Rafter; NYUP, 2011), and co-editor of Media Representations of September II
(Praeger, 2003).