Volume 28, Issue 7
Territories of incarceration | Sabrina Puddu
I remember as a child travelling from the city to my parents’ village and, along an alternative route that we occasionally chose, passing through a settlement that was unlike anything we had encountered earlier in our journey. The car proceeded at a slow pace. We could not stop in the transit. We would curiously stare at the few men busy in some kind of manual labour on the edge of the road or in the fields far away. But eye contact must be avoided. My mum would raise her hand in salute to those in grey uniform who were standing, waiting, or chatting in the main square, or leading a flock to the sheepfold. Eventually, a road sign told us that we had exited a penal colony, but a few minutes later another unusual situation was presented to us: a little cluster of homesteads. It was a form of living that, at the time, we found very awkward — who would want to live in such isolation in the countryside and outside of the cosy and compact social and material fabric of our villages? On arrival at our destination in the village, people would ask with a sigh if we had passed through the colonies — the penal and the civilian ones. The villagers seemed to recognise that the territory that we had experienced had been constructed to reshape their spaces and habits. CONTINUE READING
Bird's eye view of Penitentiary House, by Joseph Gandy, 2 July 1799, Soane office, RA Lecture Drawing, SM 13/1/19, courtesy of Sir John Soane's Museum, London.
Lisa Haber-Thomson
Colónia Agrícola Correccional (formerly the reform farm school) of Vila Fernando, showing a ‘Family Room’ of the First Division, n.d. (c. 1930s), courtesy of Direção-Geral do Património Cultural
Ricardo Costa Agarez & Marta Macedo
Checkpoint before the entrance of the commuter’s train in the underground plant, ZATO 26, drawn by the author, 2022, based on web images available in the public domain, n.d.
Katya Larina
Imprisoned youth at Nisida reformatory [Riformatorio giudiziario agricolo di Nisida], unknown photographer, n.d., in Dino Grandi, Bonifica umana: decennale delle leggi penali e della riforma penitenziaria, 2 vols (Roma: Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia, 1941), II, p. 18, reproduced as fair use
Dario Melossi
Vue Générale du Village de Mettray, lithograph by Jean-Alexandre Thierry, 1844, courtesy of Archives Départementales d’Indre-et-Loire.
Giaime Meloni & Sabrina Puddu
Inmates working the sewage fields, 1930, photographer unknown, courtesy of the Prussian Heritage Image Archive / bpk, Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Hollyamber Kennedy
Land work performed by the imprisoned colons in the agriculture penal colony of Castiadas, Sardinia, photographed by Alberto Lattuada, 1942-1950, courtesy of Alinari Archives-Lattuada Archive, Florence, LAA-F-000334-0000
Sabrina Puddu
The market in Portolago, 1936, courtesy of the General State Archives, Leros
Beth Hughes & Platon Issaias
‘There was a moment when, straddling the fence, his trousers hooked on a barb, he was an easy shot against the silver-blue sky; then he unpicked himself and was away, tiptoeing across ground surprisingly like the ground inside the fence’. J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 98, first publ. in 1983. Fence at Loskop farm, Limpopo, South Africa, photographed by Hanneke H. Stuit, 2022.
Hanneke H. Stuit