Prisoner Capture: welfare, lawfare and warfare in Latin America’

07/09/18 CEDLA LECTURE
Prisoner Capture: welfare, lawfare and warfare in Latin America’s prisons
Fiona Macaulay, University of Bradford

This talk focuses on the forms of legality and illegality produced by, and within, prison systems in Latin America. The region saw prison populations surge since the early 1990s, rising well over five-fold in some, leading to a serious structural crisis in the criminal justice system. The state either committed violence against prisoners, permitted violence between prisoners, or ceded the carceral space to the prisoners themselves. The talk develops the concept of “prisoner capture”, a double-sided phenomenon of illegality in the state’s practices of detention on the one hand, and informal, or parallel, governance exercised by those that it detained, on the other. State authorities held tens of thousands of people in extended and legally unjustifiable pretrial detention, and frequently denied convicted prisoners their legal rights, including timely release. These multiple illegalities on the part of the state in turn encouraged the emergence of prisoner self-defence and self-governance organizations. This resulted in “prisoner capture” of a different kind, when inmates took over the day-to-day ordering of prison life. In turn, this produced a parallel normative and pseudo-legal world in which inmates adjudicated on and disciplined other inmates in the absence of state officials within the prison walls. What can Latin American prisons and penal practices add to the field of socio-legal studies in the region and for the dominant socio-legal literature on prisons and imprisonment?

VENUE: CEDLA, Roetersstraat 33, Amsterdam – Lecture room 2.02 – 2nd floor
TIME: 15:30h