The Making of Prison Land

Dr Emma Russell, La Trobe University, Australia

This talk focuses on the multiple, layered histories of the Ravenhall Prisons Precinct on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.

Combining field visits with documentary analysis of the official administrative process of prison land-making, Emma will explore how localised contexts are embedded in global networks of capitalist accumulation and production, in which prisoners becomes commodities and endangered species become impediments to carceral development. To build this analysis, she examines practices of surveillance and quantification of ecosystems that form part of the biodiversity ‘offset management plan’ for the Ravenhall Correctional Centre, the third prison sited in the precinct, which opened in 2017.

Emma considers how the bureaucratic management of non-human animal and plant species on the Ravenhall site is underpinned by colonial and economic rationalist paradigms of conservation (Corson and Campbell, 2023; Fletcher et al., 2021) that both enable and constrain the production of prison lands. By combining insights from carceral-abolition (Gilmore, 2022) and ‘more-than-human’ geographies (Margulies, 2023), she will show how attending to both the living and nonliving qualities of prisonscapes can reveal additional ‘valences’ of violence that accompany a prison’s imposition on the landscape.

This talk is based on a working chapter of Emma’s current book project titled, Sensing the Carceral State, co-authored with Poppy de Souza. The book seeks to develop a multidisciplinary, anti-carceral and decolonial framework to understand how space and the senses are integral to the organised violence and contemporary transformations of the carceral state. Experimenting with creative methodologies, the chapters in the book examine a range of different sites and practices through the lenses of space and the sensory, including racialised policing, prison construction, and resistance to the mobile border.

Biography:

Dr Emma Russell is a Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Crime, Justice & Legal Studies Major. She is based in the Department of Social Inquiry in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at La Trobe University.

Prior to joining La Trobe in 2018, Emma was a Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University (2016-2017) and a casual academic at Monash University (2012-2015), where she completed her PhD. Emma has also worked and volunteered in the community sector, developing community resources and public forums on prison justice issues.

Emma's research investigates the carceral state, including policing, prisons, borders, and criminal legal processes, with a particular focus on themes of space, power, and resistance. Her work cuts across critical and queer criminologies, carceral geography, and socio-legal studies, and seeks to develop creative research methods for understanding and challenging punishment and its social effects.

The seminar is in-person only and will take place in the Gannochy Room (248) within the Wolfson Medical School. Campus map here.

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Photo credit: Ravenhall Prison Project | Gymer Bailey Architects.

SCCJR Seminar: The Making of Prison Land