Available From UC Press

Visions of Prisons

Wars, Walls, and Watching

Michael Welch

Visions of Prisons is an inquiry into the enduring meaning of containment and surveillance in post-conflict societies. With a focus on the partitioned cities of Northern Ireland and divided Berlin, Michael Welch details how war led to the construction of walls that in turn produced coercive forms of watching. Long after the end of the armed conflicts that first gave rise to these structures, the walls continued to perpetuate an urban environment that imagined certain people kept inside a designated social space and others kept out. Merging penology with surveillance studies, Visions of Prisons grounds its theoretical exploration in the author’s own photographs, which invite readers to participate in an interdisciplinary visual analysis of salient sites in the former East Germany and Northern Ireland.

Michael Welch is Professor at Rutgers University and Visiting Professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He is author of several books, including The Bastille Effect and Escape to Prison.

"Visions of Prisons shows how carceral violence haunts former conflict zones in Northern Ireland, East Germany, and beyond. Adroitly weaving together personal and historical accounts, Michael Welch takes readers on a tour of memorials, museum exhibits, and urban architecture to theorize the tenacious imprint of punitive imaginations. The book illustrates how instead of providing security, separation walls and surveillance practices are more likely to breed conflict, fear, and paranoia."—Torin Monahan, author of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

"With Visions of Prisons, Michael Welch has achieved a rare feat, providing a genuinely fresh and engaging study of an institution that is very familiar but very difficult to see in a new light. It is the final installment of a trilogy and here the comparative method is used in deft case studies of Northern Ireland and Berlin, indicating how the remnants of wars, walls, and watching inform larger techniques of social control, surveillance, and containment. The book is a penetrating and disturbing dissection of visual control in and beyond post-conflict societies. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about understanding the contours of penal power and is a book that lingers long in the memory."—Eamonn Carrabine, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Essex“Visions of Prisons is the capstone work of a monumental trilogy. Michael Welch uncovers the paradoxes and terrors of observation, walls, and control not only with analytic insight but also with interpretative compassion. This is a landmark for cultural criminology today.”—Philip Smith, author of Punishment and Culture"Through photographs and rigorous fieldwork, Visions of Prisons transforms how we ‘see’ surveillance in modern society. It is a compelling conclusion to Welch’s ambitious prisons trilogy and a major contribution to the development of a visual criminology.”—Shadd Maruna, author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

276 pp.6 x 9Illus: 25 b/w figures

9780520423220$34.95|£30.00Paper

Apr 2026