This thesis looks at the thresholds of control present within various geographies of incarceration, and seeks to challenge current hierarchies of control in order to defy the isolated nature of the carceral landscape.  Lousiana’s State Penitentiary will be indirectly studied through three carceral sites: a school, a FEMA trailer park, and a housing project. This network of carceral geographies becomes a network of interconnected moments of incarceration, scattered outside the prison’s formal barriers, to create a network of landscapes of incarceration: a carceral archipelago.

The prison proper is a state of exception, exempt the juridical order of the sovereign nation state. However, un-incarcerated members of the subproletariat face similar disenfranchisements to those of prisoners: denied access to cultural capital, exclusion from social redistribution, and denied political participation [Loic Wacquant]. These invisible barriers are turned into palpable mechanisms of control in the form of gates, fences, visitor entrances, panoptic surveillance, and blur one’s rights and freedoms. These barriers of surveillance and control evident in the prison leak into public and private spaces economically marginalized populations frequent, such as public housing, spaces of refuge, schools, and street corners. 

Barriers are often viewed as hard distinctions that demarcate the beginnings and ends of a static space. However, liminal space suggests a less clear delineation that blurs the boundaries between states of exception and the rest of society. Thus, while a fence may represent the hard barrier between binary spaces, liminal space represents the full extents of the threshold beyond the tangible barrier.  Each site maintains a progression of liminal thresholds that will be examined and reconfigured. By dissecting each threshold of control within the school, FEMA trailer park, and housing project, there is the potential to alter the larger hierarchies of control that embody the carceral archipelago.