ABSTRACT
Carceral geography has emerged as a vibrant and important subdiscipline of human geography. Although the geographical study of the prison and other confined or closed spaces is relatively new, carceral geography has already established dialogue with cognate disciplines of criminology and prison sociology, and now speaks directly to issues of contemporary import such as hyperincarceration and the advance of the punitive state. This chapter aims to outline in broad-brush the perspective of carceral geography and the ways in which scholarship in this subdiscipline meshes with carceral studies more generally, in terms of the approach that it takes to carceral space. It next briefly considers the parallel visual turns in criminology and geography, and the ways in which the latter of these has informed the practice of geographers researching the carceral, before focusing for the remainder of the piece on specific elements of carceral geography in which visuality has been explicitly considered.
