2 - Idylls (and Horrors)

Summary

Looking down on the islands and the expanse of water of the carceral archipelago, we wonder about the relationship between the parts and the whole, and the difficulty of distinguishing figure and ground. Are prisons islands – discrete yet connected or might it be more fruitful to think of water itself as the constraining phenomena? Land or water as preferred metaphor for confinement? Fixed locations or fluid spaces of betweenness? (Or the air above them? Or tectonic plates beneath?)

(Armstrong & Jefferson, 2017, p 245)

This chapter functions as something akin to a literature review. We certainly do not pretend to provide some form of systematic or empirical review of the literature on islands, but rather, in the best traditions of qualitative writing, we have selected information-rich sources to provide foundations for the chapters that follow. First, we note that criminology has always had some interest in geographies, but perhaps reflecting its modernist birth in Western Europe, criminology has been largely obsessed with urban life. Rural criminologists have sought to correct this bias, but only recently has their work adopted interpretive and critical approaches that interrogate how crime problems are constructed in the countryside and who constructs such visions of crime in rural contexts. Even when accounting for this turn, islands remain largely invisible in the context of rural criminology.

We also draw on fictional accounts of islands and crime and attempt to provide some foundations for an interpretive or cultural approach to island criminologies. In doing so, we extend the concept of ‘islandness’, which has significantly informed island studies, to account for two broad polar visions of islands – island idylls and island horrors. These concepts, we contend, are best operationalized through the lens of power relations. We argue here for a criminological approach to small-scale and remote societies that conceptualizes both place and space.

Social sciences, space, and place

Geography is obviously important to a project of island criminologies. In particular, geographies which account for power relations are useful in charting the place of islands as produced through discursive practices. Drawing on Raewyn Connell's (2007) work, Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo (2016) have joined others to call for a decolonization and democratization of criminological knowledge, which they argue has privileged the epistemologies of the Global North.