Prison, Home, Garden Carceral Idylls and (Re)Thinking Detention in Robert Glas' Justice Beyond Revenge. Recalling Louk Hulsman (2024)

By romanticizing 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 in which two structural metaphors generally associated with the prison play a central role, that of the home and the garden. These metaphors tend to obfuscate the violence of penal systems and should thus be identified and critiqued, even when used for positive goals 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 to outline trajectories of change.