Societies Contoured Along Penal Power
by Michael Welch, author of Visions of Prisons: Wars, Walls, and Watching
The genesis for the book Visions of Prisons reaches back to year 2014 while I was a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the Department of Social Policy. From London, I took a short flight to Belfast in order to conduct fieldwork on the “peace lines” separating the Catholic and Protestant communities. As a “cultural” Irish-American Catholic, I was really taken back by the enduring residue of colonial ambitions. In particular, I detected the impact that a low-level war—the “Troubles”—has had on present-day lives shaped by contemporary surveillance. It seemed to me that local people were always conscious of the “other”—whether they be Catholic or Protestant.
A few years later, I relocated to Berlin to study the remnants of the Berlin Wall where a similar vibe has surfaced. Since I work by developing case studies, a comparative approach to the peace lines and the Berlin Wall became evident. I returned to Belfast and Berlin to photograph more urban nuances produced not only by walls but also post-conflict society. In Belfast there are more peace lines now than in 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement marked the end of the Troubles. With the demise of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall has been largely demolished, with the exception of several stretches of the partition. What I noticed in both Belfast and Berlin was the ongoing fascination of their respective walls, especially by foreign tourists—myself included. Clearly, I was not the only person strolling around with a camera determined to capture the contemporary of images post-conflict.
The following excerpt is from the preface of the book.
The Berlin Wall is inseparable from the memories it triggers. I myself hold a few such recollections, albeit somewhat vicariously. In the 1980s, my artist friend James (a pseudonym) and I were enlisted into the culture wars of New York City to be fought in defense of art against censorship and other right-wing assaults on women, gays, and people of color. For my part, it provided the foundation for a book titled Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest. For James, it opened international doors for his artwork. Soon thereafter, he was invited to Berlin to paint the Wall as cultural resistance to the Cold War. Upon receiving his instructions from fellow artists, James was warned to be vigilant because the East Berlin authorities were scooping up activists who dared to defile their barrier from the evil West. Sure enough, while immersed in a creative painting session, James realized he was being watched, and therefore, made a run for it. Sometime later, he obtained a visitor’s pass to tour East Berlin across from the American sector. While milling about, he was approached by a few unpleasant police officers who showed him a polaroid of him decorating the Wall. The evidence was clear, and James was hustled off to detention for several hours before being scolded and sent back to the West.
The story of James captures many of the ideas contained in this book, which explores how prisons feed continuous loops of wars, walls, and watching, a phenomenon I refer to as “visions of prisons.” To extract the political and cultural meaning of those ideas and their undercurrents, I will share with you my recent analyses of Berlin, a city finally unwalled. Additionally, we shall delve into a pair of cities in Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry, whose recent histories of conflict are inscribed on their urban landscapes, which retain noticeable residue, including partitions that attract worldwide tourists and street artists who canvas those remnants with colorful messages about oppression and injustice. For readers familiar with my previous work, this undertaking should be viewed as the third leg of a trilogy connecting The Bastille Effect: Transforming Sites of Political Imprisonment (2022) and Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment (2015). Along the way, research on relevant sites, namely barriers, exhibitions, and museums, allow us to form critical interpretations of societies contoured along penal power and punitive imaginations.