ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experience of penal space by investigating prisoner experiences in relation to the concept of privacy in two different penal settings France and the Russian Federation. It overviews the theorization of privacy within geographical scholarship, before considering the spatial organization of prisons in France and Russia. The chapter explores what 'privacy' might mean in the penal context. The public/private distinction is complex it does not represent a single paired opposition, but a complex arrangement of binaries, specific to particular contexts and subject to different interpretations and understandings. The penal geographies of France and of Russia differ significantly, both at the macro and the micro scale. The experience of incarceration is both an experience of confinement in terms of the lack of space and an experience of dispossession. In both Russia and France, prisoners sought privacy through solitude in public space deploying various tactics to find themselves alone in communal spaces.
