Prison Degrowth Project

Geo-ethnography of carceral reductionism and non-penal alternatives

This research program, based at the University of Geneva within the Department of Geography and Environment of the Faculty of Social Sciences, is funded for a duration of five years by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Over the last decades over-incarceration and prison overcrowding have grown in most countries around the globe, including Switzerland and in particular its French-speaking region. This "prison crisis" and its connection with the "punitive turn" initiated in the 1980s, first in the United States and then in a large part of the world, have been extensively studied in the social sciences by criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, political scientists, and geographers.

Initiatives that go against this punitive shift have been relatively underexplored to date. Nevertheless, they exist in the form of State policies aimed at reducing reliance on incarceration or grassroots initiatives to experiment non-punitive approaches to justice. This research project is primarily rooted in the field of carceral geography, with an interdisciplinary approach (policy mobilities, sociology of confinement, criminology) and focuses on the analysis of alternative models as possible pathways towards carceral degrowth.

Link to the research project on the SNSF website