Carceral geographical perspective on Turku Spinhouse, 1820–1825

Abstract

From the 1820s onwards, Turku Spinhouse was a place of forced labour for women who had been incarcerated for vagrancy. This article explores how the sparse administrative source material, dating from the early 1820s, can be analysed by using frameworks originally developed by carceral geographers. The research questions are: what kind of policies were employed by prison administration when making decisions on prison space, and what kind of scopes of action were open to prisoners in this space. The key findings are, first, that the different functions of prison were present simultaneously as carceral layers, the density of which varied over space and time. Second, the prison sickroom, church and the room reserved for Roma inmates may have been interpreted by prisoners as intermediate zones, where they could behave more freely than elsewhere. Third, the inmates’ bodies were not necessarily inscribed by prison, because the conditions in the Spinhouse were not worse than those of an average poor person of the time, and because the prison administration took measures to avoid the stigmatization of the inmates.