Introduction: the prison as playground In the context of globalisation, prisons appear anomalous. Against a background of global economic fows, migration, and technologically induced connectivity, prisons seem fxed and isolated places, out-dated in their spatial separation of criminalised others from law-abiding citizens more generally. The boundaries of the prison are, however, not so easily fxed. On a global scale, surveillance sys- tems feed into harrowing mechanisms of social sorting (Bigo 2008) that connect the prison and detention to structural inequity (Alexander 2010; Wacquant 2014; Fassin 2017). In relation to how prison systems organise time, Michael Hardt has noted: When you get close to prison, . . . you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the high- est concentration of a logic of power that is generally difused throughout the world. (Hardt 1997, 66) In this sense, the prison is a heterotopia par excellence: it functions on the basis of a controlled opening and closing that partly isolates it from society, yet ofers a concentrated lens on understanding logics of power that resonate globally. These logics, preoccupied as they are with “the problem of human emplacement,” deter- mine the principles of “propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, spotting, and classifcation of human elements” deemed appropriate to a given society (Foucault 2008 [1967], 15). Apart from heterotopias of deviation, prisons are also exotic heterotopias (Fou- cault 2008, 18; Fludernik 2005, 24). In globally circulated flms and series, for instance, the prison often emerges as a site of horrifc excitement, on which fan- tasies of punishment, escape, and rugged criminality are indiscriminately pro- jected. In what follows, I want to inquire after a third interpretation of the prison as heterotopia that is located in the tension between the prison as place and the prison as (imaginative) discourse. Foucault has famously equated this type of heterotopia with the fgure of the mirror, “a sort of simultaneously mythic and 11 The prison as playground Global scripts and heterotopic vertigo in Prison Escape Hanneke Stuit