ABSTRACT
Prison as the visual location of punishment is in retreat. The chapter draws on data from the broader study of prison architecture, design and technology to which Ellie Slee's PhD is linked. It stimulates debate within visual criminology about the role of prison architecture and design in mediating our relationship to the individuals confined within. The chapter suggests that contemporary carceral aesthetics have a mimetic quality, sequestering offenders, sanitizing the pains of imprisonment, and eliciting ignorance and apathy in the spectator. It provides narratives of Ellie's visual impressions of the exterior appearances and surroundings of two very different prisons. The first, HMP Manchester (Strangeways) was completed in 1868; the second, HMP Oakwood, just outside Wolverhampton in the English midlands, was constructed in 2012. As Ellie's vignettes illustrate, the emotional experiences involved in looking – the 'affective dimensions of spectatorship' as Young puts it – are not necessarily rousing, sensate experiences.
