Imagining the Invisible: Judicial Epistemology, Carceral Regulation, and the Liberal State

ABSTRACT In many systems judges exercise judicial review over prison officials' decisions. However, judges are often symbolically, institutionally, and practically distant from prison realities. In the current paper, we explore how judges negotiate their limited epistemological awareness of prison through the lens of epistemic injustice. Drawing on interviews with 17 (retired) Israeli Supreme Court justices regarding their prison administrative review decisions, we identify three epistemic gaps: first, the prison's heterotopic nature; second, the tension between commitment to liberty and authorizing the “pains of imprisonment” at sentencing; and third, the division of labor between sentencing and prison phases. The findings suggest that judges bridge these epistemological gaps through three imaginaries: (a) “ epistemic distancing ”; (b) “ epistemic assimilation ”; and (c) “ parallel epistemology ”. These epistemic imaginaries allow judges to compensate for their experiential absence but also structure their judicial oversight, shaping how courts administratively regulate imprisonment without fully confronting its lived realities. The findings show how judicial imaginaries of prison are shaped through top‐down narrative constructions rather than bottom‐up experiential encounters and include self‐produced “epistemic estrangement” from the prison world. We further examine the implications of these epistemic blind spots, demonstrating how they enable the legitimization of carceral power while obscuring and marginalizing the lived experiences of incarcerated individuals.