ABSTRACT
Imprisonment, confinement, and criminal court processes are often depicted as ceasing movement and rendering stasis. Yet, movement is central to criminal court processes, and incarceration enacts what Todd Clear and his colleagues (2003) call ‘coercive mobility’ (also Moran et al., 2012). Instead of freedom of movement, incarceration constrains and coerces mobility, from the disruption of neighbourhood stability to the tightly controlled and highly regulated movement of incarceration. These movements include from the ‘outside’ to the inside of prison and jail; from points along a pathway, such as jail→courts→prisons→halfway house; between security levels such as minimum to maximum and back; between types of institutions, such as ‘treatment’ centres, ‘reception’ centres, vocational institutions and (supposedly non-carceral) civil detention spaces; and from practices of probation and parole to the negotiation of life on the ‘outside’ with a felony record. Instead of immobility, confinement is part of a much more f luid, mutable, and complicated series of movements across time and space (Moran et al., 2012).
