ABSTRACT

This chapter begins with a vignette of a prison visit that triggered a sense of disjuncture and puzzlement partly because it challenged a familiar narrative of punishment that dominant prison representations encourage. It argues that seeing and unseeing are both problems and needs of a visual criminology. Such work helps us problematize how visual criminology 'sees' and how else we might see crime and the strategies deployed to respond to it. The chapter addresses the notion of 'seeing-as', the imaginative step as part of an expanding agenda of a visual criminology. It develops the contribution to a politics of visibility, using the notion of 'seeing-as' to develop the connections between description and imagination, critique and change. The chapter describes a recent experience of discombobulation. Seeing is connected to seeing-as when acts of description do not lock in the present as inevitable and inescapable.