The Carceral Reproduction of Neoliberal Order: Power, Ideology and Economy in Venezuelan Prison

Antillano, Andrés

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-98602-5_5

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Activists and officials worried that airing internal differences could jeopardize the entire project. This tended to transform debates about the relative success or failure of any program or official position — be it health care (Cooper 2019), oil extraction (Strønen 2017), infrastructure (Kappeler 2017), housing (Martinez et al 2010), higher education (Ivancheva 2017), prison reform (Antillano 2017; Fischer-Hoffman 2020), or participatory democracy (Schiller 2018; Wilde 2017) — into existential debates about the survival of the movement itself. Crime was particularly dangerous because the issue crossed class and party lines.…”

Section: Mobilizing the Will To Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The will to security: Law, order, and the shifting terrain of popular struggles

Samet

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.

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Section: Mobilizing the Will To Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The will to security: Law, order, and the shifting terrain of popular struggles

Samet

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…Although they relied on carceral collectivism to regulate interpersonal relations among prisoners as well as to ensure the smooth running of the regime routine and prison production, the formal authorities nonetheless held the upper hand in power relations, engendering a co-governance model rather than the prisoner self-rule found in penal systems of state abandonment in Latin American countries (Symkovych, 2018a, 2023b; cf. Antillano, 2017; Darke, 2013; Nunes Dias and Salla, 2017). Similarly, despite devolving, albeit mostly informally, considerable power to the prisoner underworld to self-regulate, the prison commander was nonetheless informed, engaged, and visible in the most minute, if not mundane, aspects of prison daily operation, as I explain next.…”

Section: Penal Self-governance and Compromised Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Prison order through the hyperopticon, collectivism, and atomisation: The surveillance and disciplining of Ukrainian prison officers

Symkovych

2022

Theoretical Criminology

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Bentham's idea of the panopticon has long influenced the theorisation of prison order. However, this model of control has been applied almost exclusively to prisoners. Drawing on ethnographic work in Ukraine, I argue that the disciplining of prison officers through institutionalised mutual surveillance was just as important to the maintenance of prison order. Broadening the theorisation of prison order by introducing the concept of hyperopticon, I argue that prison order in a Ukrainian prison hinged on two opposites: collectivism of prisoners and atomisation of prison officers, both depending on the system of multifaceted and excessive surveillance.

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“… 8. Scholars have identified similar dynamics in the US (Skarbek, 2014), Brazil (Stegeman and de Almeida 2020; Dieter and Freitas Jr, 2020), Honduras (Carter, 2022), and Venezuala (Antillano, 2022). …”

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confidence: 99%

Carceral community in the time of COVID-19: Isolation, adaption, and predation

Fontes

2022

Punishment & Society

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State failures to protect prisoners from COVID-19 have made prisons key “hotspots” of infection, particularly in the “new mass carceral zone” of Latin America. In Guatemala, which has the 3rd most overcrowded prison system in the world, such failure was a tragedy foretold. Longstanding hostility towards criminalized populations ensured that prisoners would be left to fend for themselves. This does not mean, however, that we should cast the prison as merely another “zone of abandonment” nor prisoners as helpless victims. Instead, drawing on the concept of “carceral community” and prison ethnography, this article maps how prisoner-leaders, entrepreneurs, extortionists, visitors, and officials navigate the absurd contradictions exposed in the collision between pandemic protection protocols and prison realities. This article explores a disavowed carceral community's efforts to make sense of, adapt to, and leverage the pandemic's constraints in the never-ending struggle to survive, profit from, and project power over and beyond prison life. The informal and the illicit articulate with government pandemic policies to create a volatile but deeply resilient modus vivendi, albeit with dire consequences for the most vulnerable on both sides of prison walls.

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The Carceral Reproduction of Neoliberal Order: Power, Ideology and Economy in Venezuelan Prison

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

The will to security: Law, order, and the shifting terrain of popular struggles

The will to security: Law, order, and the shifting terrain of popular struggles

Prison order through the hyperopticon, collectivism, and atomisation: The surveillance and disciplining of Ukrainian prison officers

Carceral community in the time of COVID-19: Isolation, adaption, and predation

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