ABSTRACT
Carceral geography has much to learn from longer-standing engagements with incarceration, but they too have much to learn from geography. What it is that carceral geography brings to the study of prisons and imprisonment is geography's understanding of space, an understanding developed over a century of debate over the nature of geographical space. Beyond the existing dialogues with criminology and prison sociology, there is also considerable potential for further transdisciplinary synergies between carceral geography and psychology, and architectural studies, in relation to prison design and the lived experience of carceral spaces. The challenge is for carceral geography to contribute to contemporary discourse within human geography, to remain open to transdisciplinary engagement. Underpinning much of the scholarship reviewed is an abolitionist praxis, in which abolition means a situation in which prisons, policing and the carceral system are not deployed to address what are at their essence, social, political and economic problems.
