Prison, home, garden

In romanticising the prison, the aesthetic register of the carceral idyll insists that incarceration can be successful as long as it takes place under the right conditions, thus keeping the prison available for social acceptance over time. This chapter offers a close reading of Robert Glas’s art exhibition Justice Beyond Revenge. Recalling Louk Hulsman (2024) in which two metaphors that are generally used to produce positive imagery around the prison play a central role: the home and the garden. These metaphors can easily perpetuate the violence of penal systems and should thus be identified and critiqued, even when used for positive ends in reformist and abolitionist discourses. At the same time, however, I argue how Glas’s exhibition – in presenting the carceral and the idyllic side by side – allows for a revaluation of metaphoric structures in outlining trajectories of change.