Description
Liminality and porosity are key concepts in prison studies, a sign of the blurred boundaries of the prison but also of the concept of carcerality itself. This paper explores contemporary developments in theorising the carceral, within prisons scholarship, contrasting this with other sites. A current research project I am pursuing, exploring bureaucracy as a fundamental source of violence in prison, provides a way of harnessing conceptual reflection to specific practices. I look at how things like paperwork, violence in/of administrative spaces and temporal phenomena of waiting and delay take on distinctive qualities in prison but reflect generic, profound harms of bureaucracy in other confining settings including asylum and migration processes.
