Prisoners and Animals: An Historical Carceral Geography

Abstract

This paper explores some of the key historical-geographical resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies that appear in my book, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals. In it I propose a contribution to carceral geography from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that I place into conversation draw from a number of institutional and industrial domains, including the prison, the farm, the research lab, and the zoo. In this paper I specifically focus on the shared carceral logics and ‘animalization’ of populations of humans and animals at these sites, as well as key entangled historical-geographies of the prison’s death row and the animal slaughterhouse that are at once structural, operational, and technological.