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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crime and violence soared in twenty-first-century Venezuela even as poverty and inequality decreased, contradicting the conventional wisdom that these are the underlying causes of violence. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela explains the rise of violence under both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—leftist presidents who made considerable investment in social programs and political inclusion. Contributors argue that violence arose not from the frustration of inequality, or the needs created by poverty, but rather from the interrelated factors of a particular type of revolutionary governance, extraordinary oil revenues, a reliance on militarized policing, and the persistence of concentrated disadvantage. These factors led to dramatic but unequal economic growth, massive institutional and social change, and dysfunctional criminal justice policies that destabilized illicit markets and social networks, leading to an increase in violent conflict resolution. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela reorients thinking about violence and its relationship to poverty, inequality, and the state.
Introduction : gone -- Disappearance and the search -- Keep the bones alive -- Unearthing life -- Disappearance and the cemetery -- The usefulness of capricious knowledge -- The disappearable subject -- From disappearance, presence -- Muted martyrdom -- Make live, make disappear -- "I just want to live" -- Acknowlegments -- Appendix : reading life through disappearance : a note on method.
"Raising the Living Dead is a new history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system in the middle decades of the twentieth century that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. The main idea of the book is that, in the region, multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and imperfectly enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation. Specifically, Alberto Ortiz Díaz argues that scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead" (an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners). These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also their mental health counterparts (psychologists and psychiatrists), social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz is able to tell a story that goes beyond structural and social control debates. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography and few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons"--