Tony Fry
Prisons: Learning From the
Borderlands
The Studio at the Edge of the World/University of Tasmania
The Borderland and the ‘in between’
Global borderland trends:
- Structural abandonment of underclasses
- Informal settlement and an illegal life
- Conflict and climate change displacement and criminalization of movement
- Ever increasing and overcrowded prison populations
- Ever increasing prison camps run by the same corporation that run prisons
- Ever increasing representation of underclasses in prison (eg USA) 1:15 ratio
Afro-Americans
- Globally ever more women are being imprisoned (50% increase since 2000)
- Increasingly prison staff are undertrained, overworked, underpaid, exposed to
disease and corrupt
Imperatives against business as usual
• A critical debate over ideas reactive to criticality and the glocal
• Strategies in time:
• The generation and valorisation of new kind of institution
Confronting reality in time
• Prison: transformation/abandonment/recreation* as the new institutionCampsCamps to Towns and Cities
• Post-nation zones of resettlement in an era of dispersed nations and megaregion hegemony
* Institutions of adaptive education: post-prison induction into creative ontologies able to form entrepreneurial collectives – An example