Living between inside and outside: the disciplined domesticities of prison staff quarters in the UK’s Victorian-era prisons

Carceral geography has critiqued the notion of a clear binary between the inside and outside of prisons, revealing that the prison boundary is porous, and that the prison materialises in multiple forms outside of its apparent margins. However, extant scholarship focusing on (formerly-)incarcerated individuals and others whose engagement with the prison is involuntary, has tended to elude prison staff experiences of these porous and permeable borders. In this article, drawing on a large ESRC-funded study of the Victorian-era prison estate in the UK, and focusing on prison staff living accommodation, we consider the implications of a porous prison boundary for prison staff, and trace the ways in which the prison can also reach beyond its formal perimeter walls into their social and domestic lives. We suggest that unlike for (formerly-)incarcerated persons and communities involuntarily engaged with the prison, the staff experience of this permeability may be less clear-cut and more equivocal.