ABSTRACT
Similar to the identities constructed for non-nationals, the prisoner is often determined as the Other, and at a distance, metaphorical as well as physical, from the citizen majority. In this way, prisons and the diverse penal systems that they help make manifest, have entered the geographic imagination as prime exemplars of how seemingly invisible, peripheral sites are integral to the functioning of a purportedly mainstream society. However, despite their often peripheral physical locations, the inter-linkages between prisons and society are numerous and complex. Recent work within and beyond the discipline of geography acknowledges that where we might imagine a sharp boundary between the hidden inside and outside of prisons, there is in fact a myriad of materials that cleave and bind penal geographies, including forms of communication and inscription, networks of machines or technological devices, and buildings, which mark the prison walls as a site of transaction and exchange (Baer and Ravneberg 2008, Gilmore 2007, Loyd et al. 2009, Pallot 2005, Vergara 1995, Wacquant 2000, 2001, 2009).
