Visions of Prisons: Wars, Walls, and Watching

By 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 conflict 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 continue to perpetuate an urban environment that imagines 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520423224
• ISBN13: 9780520423220
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 276 Pages