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Privacy in Penal Space : Women's Imprisonment in Russia University of Birmingham Privacy in penal space : women’s imprisonment in Russia Moran, Dominique; Pallot, Judith; Piacentini, Laura DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.002 License: Other (please specify with Rights Statement) Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Moran, D, Pallot, J & Piacentini, L 2013, 'Privacy in penal space : women’s imprisonment in Russia', Geoforum, vol. 47, pp. 138-146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.002 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Geoforum. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum Volume 47, June 2013, Pages 138–146 DOI 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.002 Eligibility for repository : checked 31/07/2014 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Privacy in Penal Space: Women’s Imprisonment in Russia Dominique Moran, Judith Pallot & Laura Piacentini Forthcoming in Geoforum Abstract This paper deploys a theoretical engagement with the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to explore the experience of surveilled penal space by incarcerated individuals, and in so doing further advances the new field of carceral geography. Foucault’s description of self- surveillance as the mechanism through which disciplinary power or biopower operates to produce ‘docile’ bodies has been challenged by those who argue for the significance of prisoner agency and the importance of penal space; that socialisation mitigates the effect of biopower, and that prisoners ‘perform’ docility rather than interiorising it. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence gathered during interviews with women prisoners and prison staff in Russia, the paper discusses the ways in which prisoners negotiate and engage with penal spaces. It finds that even though prisoners describe penal space as ‘public’, they find ways of deploying agency to utilise and subvert public space to construct the ‘private’, and argues that a consideration of the contested binary of public/private may be a useful way of investigating prisoners’ agency amidst Foucauldian disciplinary power. Keywords Prison; biopower; privacy; space; agency; Russia; carceral geography. 1 1. Introduction The work of Michel Foucault, and in particular Discipline and Punish, has left an indelible mark on prison scholarship, heavily influencing the work of geographers engaging with carceral space. However, his description of self-surveillance as the mechanism through which disciplinary power or biopower operates to produce ‘docile’ bodies has been challenged by those who argue for the significance of prisoner agency; that socialisation mitigates the effect of biopower, that prisoners ‘perform’ docility rather than interiorising it, and who identify the mediating importance of penal space in the operation of biopower (Dirsuweit, 1999, Vaz & Bruno 2003, Baer 2005, Simon 2005, Sibley & Van Hoven 2009). Based on their study of dormitory confinement in a New Mexico prison, Sibley and Van Hoven (2009) in particular call for more detailed empirical analysis of the experience of penal space by inmates, to further explore the ways in which prisoners respond to constant surveillance in the penal setting. Understandings of carceral space are key to the current development of ‘carceral geography’ (Moran et al forthcoming a, Moran forthcoming), amongst the most vibrant areas of advancement of geographies pertaining to security and the punitive state. This paper deploys theoretical engagement with the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to further probe the experience of penal space by incarcerated individuals. As Staeheli and Mitchell (2007, 792) point out, the meaning of ‘public space’ has become increasingly complex in recent years; the once unproblematic equating of ‘public’ with ‘open or accessible’ space has been problematised, with new debates opening up around the meaning of ‘public’ complicating discourses across normative political theory and critical geography. In parallel, although less prominently, a similar process has surrounded the 2 conceptualisation of the ‘private’, the assumed binary partner of the ‘public’, but a term no less contested or contestatory. This paper suggests that a consideration of prisoners’ conceptualisation of the ‘private’ may provide a useful and illuminating means of exploring their experience of penal space. Drawing on empirical evidence gathered during interviews with prisoners and prison personnel in contemporary Russia, we discuss the ways in which prisoners negotiate and engage with penal spaces. As Hubbard (2001, 51) notes, space “is not just a passive backdrop to human behaviour and social action, but is constantly produced and remade within complex relations of culture, power and difference”. Engaging with this critical constructionist notion of space, we examine carceral spaces at the micro scale, exploring the assumed public/private spatial binary and the ways in which this binary is challenged and destabilised in carceral space, as prisoners seek solitude as a penal corollary for privacy. The paper opens with a consideration of contemporary theorisation of public and private, and privacy in penal space, before introducing the Russian research context and exploring the empirical material generated through interviews with current and former prisoners and prison personnel, using this to illustrate prisoners’ perceptions of public space and the tactics and practices deployed to create privacy within it. It concludes by suggesting that consideration of the private in penal space may be a useful means by which to explore prisoner agency within spaces commonly understood to be characterised by Foucauldian disciplinary power. 2. Conceptualising Private and Public 3 The ‘public/private distinction’ is one of the ‘grand dichotomies’ of Western thought, in the sense of a binary opposition that is ‘used to subsume a wide range of other important distinctions and that attempts... to dichotomise the social universe in a comprehensive and sharply demarcated way’ (Weintraub 1997, 1). The vocabulary of public and private causes as much confusion as it does clarification, though, as the terms means different things in different contexts, and can also mean several things at once. Bailey (2000, 381) holds that ‘the public/private distinction has been an important, generative but relatively unexplicated and unstable background assumption in sociological thinking’. The distinction between public and private has also been a central organising theme of feminist scholarship, and the demarcation between the ‘private’ realm of ‘personal life’ and the ‘public’ realm, is one of the epitomes of modern life. The sharpness of the split between the ‘personal’, the emotionally intense, intimate domain of family and friendship, and the ‘impersonal’, instrumental domain of formal institutions is a defining characteristic of modernity (Weintraub 1997, 20-21). Broadly defined, the ‘private’ is ‘that which is hidden and withdrawn, versus the ‘public’ which is open, revealed or accessible; what is individual, or pertains only to an individual, versus what is collective, or affects the interests of a collectivity of individuals’ (Weintraub 1997, 5). However the terms can be applied to a vast array of circumstances and contexts, as Weintraub indicates with his typology of four main uses; a liberal version, which contrasts the market with the state; a citizenship version, which uses the public to refer to political community, distinct from state centralisation; a historically-based version, which identifies the emergence of the private sphere in Western society and the associated loss of public sociability; and a feminist version, which contrasts ‘the family’ with civil society. As feminist legal scholars have pointed out, the public/private 4 binary as it pertains to the reach of the law,
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