Making space for mental health care within the penal estate

In this paper we explore the enfolding spatialities of control and care within the penal estate through analysis of the creation of a unit for prisoners with serious mental illnesses (SMIs). Prisons have increasingly become the key institutions for mental health care provision, yet serious mental illness disrupts the self-government upon which contemporary prison regimes are based. Our analysis highlights the ‘trouble’ institutions face in making space for mental health care; in trying to fit different control-care regimes into existing carceral environments. We argue that the different actors that have made space for this control-care have been open to potentiality. Developments have been experimental, emergent and incomplete; often not officially challenging wider institutional processes, but eluding them. What emerges is an institution within an institution with a certain level of spatial autonomy but constrained in its transformative potential.