Carceral Infrastructure Planning: Regional Prison Expansion and the Making of Punishment Futures in Victoria, Australia

Victoria has often been touted as Australia’s “progressive” penal state with one of the lowest imprisonment rates in the country. Its prison population has increased significantly over the past two-and-a-half decades, however. The upward trend in incarceration has been seized on by state planners and private firms as a major infrastructure project opportunity, purporting to stimulate job creation in regions precipitously managing the decline of traditional manufacturing and agricultural land use. To extend the field of abolition geography and further understandings of the local-level drivers and techniques of prison expansion, this article provides an in-depth case study of planning for Victoria’s newest prison, Western Plains. Through close examination of the multiscalar practices and processes that bring a prison into being, I illustrate how planning normalizes and reproduces incarceration through techniques of obfuscation, expediation, pacification, and persuasion. Rather than simply the respondent or by-product of law-and-order politics, carceral infrastructure planning generates its own logics and cultures of penal expansion and is actively materializing punishment futures.