Double liminality: Transitional imprisonment and the ambiguities of the open prison

Abstract

This analysis reconceptualises open prisons as institutions of suspension rather than bridges to freedom. Extending penal liminality theory, it advances the concept of double liminality to explain how ‘transitional imprisonment’—custody whose boundary remains permeable in both directions—governs through compounded ambiguity. Drawing on qualitative research in English open prisons, the study theorises how prisoners are suspended between two thresholds: regression to closed prison conditions and conditional release. Over-institutionalised in sanction yet under-institutionalised in support, open prisons generate three dimensions of suspended experience, namely, institutional ambiguity, fractured identity, and temporal suspension, operating as a governance technique. By framing open custody within the logics of neoliberal conditionality and responsibilisation, the study offers a framework for analysing institutional doubleness, where the demand for autonomy coincides with its denial. It contributes to emerging debates on penal transformation, temporal power, and carceral governance through withdrawal.