ABSTRACT
Understanding the continuity and contiguity of prisons with coalmines, coal ash dumpsites, landfills and trash incinerators as productive analytical terrain, this chapter argues for extracting the prison from an analysis of punishment and instead locating it squarely within the operations of and changes to capitalism. The chapter argues that this practice enacts a counter-visual criminology, a methodological, scholarly and political position that calls attention to the complicity of criminology in the visuality of the carceral state. Dorothy and Paul's association of prisons with the surrounding "waste" suggests that the ideology of punishment is not complete, but rather clouds criminological and policy inquiries into the carceral state even as people in prison towns perceive with the political economic processes at work. In revealing these social contradictions, counter-visual study aims for a counter-carceral sense of possibility, gesturing to the alternative visual economies and signs of life that hold a just economic transition for the region alongside a rejection of the prison.
