Carceral Communities in Latin America

Carceral Communities in Latin America
Author: Sacha Darke
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2022-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9783030615017

This book gathers the very best academic research to date on prison regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Grounded in solid ethnographic work, each chapter explores the informal dynamics of prisons in diverse territories and countries of the region – Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic – while theorizing how day-to-day life for the incarcerated has been forged in tandem between prison facilities and the outside world. The editors and contributors to this volume ask: how have fastest-rising incarceration rates in the world affected civilians’ lives in different national contexts? How do groups of prisoners form broader and more integrated ‘carceral communities’ across day-to-day relations of exchange and reciprocity with guards, lawyers, family, associates, and assorted neighbors? What differences exist between carceral communities from one national context to another? Last but not least, how do carceral communities, contrary to popular opinion, necessarily become a productive force for the good and welfare of incarcerated subjects, in addition to being a potential source of troubling violence and insecurity? This edited collection represents the most rigorous scholarship to date on the prison regimes of Latin America and the Caribbean, exploring the methodological value of ethnographic reflexivity inside prisons and theorizing how daily life for the incarcerated challenges preconceptions of prisoner subjectivity, so-called prison gangs, and bio-political order. Sacha Darke is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University of Westminster, UK, Visiting Lecturer in Law at University of São Paulo, Brazil, and Affiliate of King’s Brazil Institute, King’s College London, UK. Chris Garces is Research Professor of Anthropology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, and Visiting Lecturer in Law at Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, Ecuador. Luis Duno-Gottberg is Professor at Rice University, USA. He specializes in Caribbean culture, with emphasis on race and ethnicity, politics, violence, and visual culture. Andrés Antillano is Professor in Criminology at Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuala.

Carceral Communities in Latin America

Carceral Communities in Latin America
Author: Sacha Darke
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2021-03-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030614999

This book gathers the very best academic research to date on prison regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Grounded in solid ethnographic work, each chapter explores the informal dynamics of prisons in diverse territories and countries of the region – Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic – while theorizing how day-to-day life for the incarcerated has been forged in tandem between prison facilities and the outside world. The editors and contributors to this volume ask: how have fastest-rising incarceration rates in the world affected civilians’ lives in different national contexts? How do groups of prisoners form broader and more integrated ‘carceral communities’ across day-to-day relations of exchange and reciprocity with guards, lawyers, family, associates, and assorted neighbors? What differences exist between carceral communities from one national context to another? Last but not least, how do carceral communities, contrary to popular opinion, necessarily become a productive force for the good and welfare of incarcerated subjects, in addition to being a potential source of troubling violence and insecurity? This edited collection represents the most rigorous scholarship to date on the prison regimes of Latin America and the Caribbean, exploring the methodological value of ethnographic reflexivity inside prisons and theorizing how daily life for the incarcerated challenges preconceptions of prisoner subjectivity, so-called prison gangs, and bio-political order. Sacha Darke is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University of Westminster, UK, Visiting Lecturer in Law at University of São Paulo, Brazil, and Affiliate of King’s Brazil Institute, King’s College London, UK. Chris Garces is Research Professor of Anthropology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, and Visiting Lecturer in Law at Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, Ecuador. Luis Duno-Gottberg is Professor at Rice University, USA. He specializes in Caribbean culture, with emphasis on race and ethnicity, politics, violence, and visual culture. Andrés Antillano is Professor in Criminology at Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuala.

Sharing This Walk

Sharing This Walk
Author: Karina Biondi
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2016-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469630311

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities. Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

Cultures of Confinement

Cultures of Confinement
Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501721267

Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.

Prisons, Inmates and Governance in Latin America

Prisons, Inmates and Governance in Latin America
Author: Máximo Sozzo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2022-04-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030986020

This edited collection addresses the topic of prison governance which is crucial to our understanding of contemporary prisons in Latin America. It presents social research from Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina to examine the practices of governance by the prisoners themselves in each unique setting in detail. High levels of variation in the governance practices are found to exist, not only between countries but also within the same country, between prisons and within the same prison, and between different areas. The chapters make important contributions to the theoretical concepts and arguments that can be used to interpret the emergence, dynamics and effects of these practices in the institutions of confinement of the region. The book also addresses the complex task of explaining why these types of practices of governance happen in Latin American prisons as some of them appear to be a legacy of a remote past but others have arisen more recently. It makes a vital contribution to the fundamental debate for prison policies in Latin America about the alternatives that can be promoted.

Conviviality and Survival

Conviviality and Survival
Author: Sacha Darke
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2018-07-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319922106

Brazilian authorities continuously fail to comply with international norms on minimal conditions of incarceration. Brazil's prison population has risen ten-fold since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s. Its prisons typically operate at double official capacity and with 100 prisoners for each guard on duty. At the same time, however, the average Brazilian prison is not as disorderly or its staff-inmate relations so conflictual as our established theories on prison life might predict. This monograph explores the means by which Brazilian prisons function in the absence of guards. More specifically, the means by which prison security and inmate discipline is negotiated between prison managers, gangs and the wider inmate body. While fragile and varied, this historical tradition of co-produced governance has for decades kept most prisons in better order and enabled most prisoners to better survive.

Neoliberalism from Below

Neoliberalism from Below
Author: Verónica Gago
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-10-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822372738

In Neoliberalism from Below—first published in Argentina in 2014—Verónica Gago examines how Latin American neoliberalism is propelled not just from above by international finance, corporations, and government, but also by the activities of migrant workers, vendors, sweatshop workers, and other marginalized groups. Using the massive illegal market La Salada in Buenos Aires as a point of departure, Gago shows how alternative economic practices, such as the sale of counterfeit goods produced in illegal textile factories, resist neoliberalism while simultaneously succumbing to its models of exploitative labor and production. Gago demonstrates how La Salada's economic dynamics mirror those found throughout urban Latin America. In so doing, she provides a new theory of neoliberalism and a nuanced view of the tense mix of calculation and freedom, obedience and resistance, individualism and community, and legality and illegality that fuels the increasingly powerful popular economies of the global South's large cities.

Carceral Worlds

Carceral Worlds
Author: Hanneke Stuit
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2024-07-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1350298077

We live a world in which the number of prisons is growing and experiences of incarceration are increasingly widespread. Carceral Worlds offers a necessary and timely contribution to understanding these carceral realities of the globalized present.The book asks how the carceral has become so central in life, how it manifests in different geographical locations and, finally, what the likely consequences are of living in such a carceral world. Carceral Worlds focuses on carceral practices, experiences and imaginaries that reach far beyond traditional spaces of confinement. It shows the lasting effects of colonial carceral heritage, the influence of prison systems on city management, and the entrapping nature of digital infrastructures. It also discusses new urbanized forms of migrant detention, the relation between prisons and homelessness, the use of carceral metaphors in the everyday, and the carceral implications of the uneven distribution of climate risk across the globe. The volume brings together work from scholars across the world and from a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, offering a fresh approach to the carceral as a central vector in modern life.

Representing the Barrios

Representing the Barrios
Author: Rebecca Jarman
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2023-05-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822989719

Against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and the growth of a global economy powered by carbon, Rebecca Jarman argues that in Venezuela, urban poverty has become one of the most important resources in national culture and statecraft. Attracting the attentions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from within and beyond the limits of Caracas, the barrios are fetishized in the cultural domain as sites of rampant sex, crime, revolution, disease, and violence. The appeal of the urban poor in entertainment is replicated in the policies of autocratic leaders who, operating within an extractivist matrix that prizes the acquisition of land and capital, have sought to expand their reach into these densely populated territories. Sometimes yielding to commodification, the barrios also have resisted exploitation by exceeding the terms of their representation in hegemonic culture and politics. Whether troubling the narratives that profit from poverty or undermining class-based stereotypes with experimental aesthetics, the barrio as a shifting set of coordinates consistently evades appropriations of disenfranchisement. Mapping the recurrent tensions, anxieties, conflicts, aspirations, and blind spots that characterize depictions of the barrios, Rebecca Jarman elaborates a dynamic cultural analysis of the history of poverty in the Venezuelan capital.