2 research outputs found
Closed circuits : kinship, neighborhood and incarceration in urban Portugal
The notion that prisons are a ‘world apart’, with their
walls severing prisoners from their external relationships, and
incarceration an interruption, ‘time away’ spent in a separate social
universe, has provided an adequate framework for understanding the
social realities of imprisonment in the past. But it has also created an
analytical dead angle that prevents us from identifying the ramifying
social effects of concentrated incarceration upon both the prison and
heavily penalized lower-class neighborhoods. This article addresses these
effects with data from an ethnographic revisit of a major women’s prison
in Portugal, where the recomposition of the inmate population that has
accompanied the rapid inflation of the country’s carceral population is
especially pronounced and entails the activation of wide-ranging
carceralized networks bringing kinship and neighborhood into the prison
as well as the prison into the domestic world. The analysis focuses on the
ways whereby these constellations have transformed the experience of
confinement and the texture of correctional life, calling for a
reconsideration of the theoretical status of the prison as a ‘total
institution’ and for exploring anew the boundary that separates it (or not)
from outside worlds.Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research