ABSTRACT
Think about what Michel Foucault said about gardens: ‘The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity’ (Foucault 1984, 47). Now think about gardens, horticulture, environmental education, and sustainability science within the prison environment. Think of ecocarcerality and how sustainability science and education in the prison become a site of biopower, a disciplinary technology, to use Foucault’s terminology. This is the thematic focus of what follows, an article that cracks open the emerging eco-prison, that is, the contemporary marriage of neoliberal sustainability and penality. The emergence of penal environmental science education, it will be argued, calls for an approach attentive to contemporary critiques of the ‘penal State’ (Wacquant 2002, 2010a, 2010b, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c), as well as nuanced perspectives on neoliberal science and environmental biopolitics.
