The spaces made by the culture of incarceration.
From the July 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
A featureless night, seen from a bus window, carrying family members across distances to the prisons where loved ones are confined. A former mining town in Appalachia where residents talk about prison jobs they see coming, and, importantly, keeping. A Los Angeles parklet as a lever to force registered sex offenders to leave a neighborhood. These are some of the places that comprise The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, a new film by the geographer and filmmaker Brett Story. They aren?t in prisons or next to prisons, but the system is everywhere.
If we are only just beginning to reckon with the devastating social and economic costs of our reliance on incarceration, we?ve barely even noticed how they?ve shaped urban and rural space outside the prison walls. ?The consequences of the prison system don?t begin and don?t end at the prison gate,? Story says, and those consequences are ?not just for people?s lives but also about how space is organized.? The film takes an oblique, faceted approach to its subjects, showing, rather than describing, the way prison systems and prisoners have created spaces by both their presence and absence. In the accumulation of landscapes and stories, the film makes a powerful argument for prison as an underrecognized actor in the design and use of cities.
Story was prompted by the interplay between the psychological and geographic distance of pr...