Dominique Moran Introduces You to Carceral Geographies

This review was originally published in The Canadian Geographer published by the Canadian Association of Geographers and is available here. Read this and more at AustinKocher.com.

Dominique Moran’s book, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration, is a significant contribution to the academic investigation of the explosive growth of incarceration. Carceral Geographies astutely interrogates the ways in which power over bodies becomes institutionalized in the form of prison spaces by reviewing the complex array of practices, individual experiences, and forms of mobility that make prisons possible and even palatable. Moran accomplishes this by drawing upon a carefully selected and quickly expanding body of literature, within which Moran is, unquestionably, a trailblazer.

Over the past few decades, states in the developed world have abandoned the classical reformist mentality that drove early prison reforms and experimented with mass incarceration as a way of regulating growing populations who have been abandoned by neoliberal public policies. This transformation in police power is what many now call the “punitive turn.” Carceral geography emerges at this moment as a way of understanding how prison spaces are “spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied, and affective” (p. 1). Moran’s text is a useful counterbalance to…