PRISON MAPS: WHAT IS THE CONTEXT?
Detail of Prison Map: What is the Context?
PRISON MAPS is a set of two mappings depicting the prison growth of contemporary mass incarceration:
What is the Prison Industrial Complex? and What is the Context for Today’s Prison Industrial Complex?
What is the Context for Today’s PIC? maps the historical shift from the modern Welfare State to a “carceral” state, in which order is achieved less by assuring the basic needs of communities and individuals and, instead policing and imprisoning the behaviors of survival, rebellion and illness that grow from those needs not being met, disenfranchisement and systemic inequality, as the state’s function shifts from care to force, apprehension and detention.
Both maps were made from a surplus of information and research accumulated in the production of the many pieces of the Corrections Documentary Project, but which cannot fit neatly into a photograph or video, lending instead abstract visual representations to the complex workings of a growing and distributed system.
