How What We Ask Shapes What We Can Imagine: De-Coupling Design and Punishment – Space and Culture Special Issue, Inside Inside

This article looks at the way questions drive possibilities in design through the lens of contemporary efforts in design to reform policing and incarceration and abolitionist organizing to end them. It asks how increased discourse in public-interest design about the violence of policing and incarceration and the structures of the carceral state has led to design proposals for enhanced spaces to both police and cage people, and proposes prison industrial complex abolitionist organizing as a framework and process for actually de-coupling design and punishment.

This article developed through conversations and work over many years with students, colleagues, comrades, and friends. I am grateful to those who read, gave feedback, offer spaces the talk with audiences, and who have been asking questions for many years.

You can access the article and the full special issue, edited by Christine McCarthy, at Sage Publications (Space and Culture, Volume 25 Issue 3, August 2022)

You can download this article without hitting a paywall here.