ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the cultural geographies of a variety of carceral landscapes and their relationship with a shifting punitive state. Whilst the previous chapter focused on the design of prisons and the intentions behind their operation as prisons in terms of the intentions of a particular criminal justice system, in this chapter the focus is on the relationship between the carceral and a punitive state in a wider and less tangible sense. The chapter looks at prisons and places of incarceration as landscapes with meaning and power, and traces some of the ways in which what happens to prison sites when they cease to be places of incarceration (the notion of the ‘post-prison’) can and should remain deeply significant for their relationship to a punitive state.
