Carceral care and control: Im/possible imaginings of systemic change in Amsterdam

• In Event: PWG - Correctional staff and institutional culture

Abstract

Looking 'North' from the South, this paper seeks to compare the operationalization of ‘carceral care’ and control in the Netherlands, informed by my findings on Nicaragua's hybrid carceral state. Although Nicaragua has taken a distinctly authoritarian turn since the brutal repression of massive anti-government protests in 2018, my ethnographic work in and around its penal system has informed the way I ‘ask the other question’ (Matsuda, 1996) in the Netherlands. Similar to the re-education of ‘anti-communitarian elements’ in Nicaragua, carceral control in the Netherlands appears to be expressed through the care and temporary exclusion of those projected as disruptors of everyday order. Based on collaborative participatory action research around the ways in which criminal justice interventions reproduce and/or mitigate the development of geographic, social and legal inequalities in Amsterdam, I question how ‘the urban’ and ‘the carceral’ intertwine in the implementation of interventions that are supposed to be beneficial for both society and the subjected person. Yet alongside the paternalistic functioning of welfare policies, an increased securitization of care efforts can be discerned, producing new forms of carceral control and ‘care’ that are expressed both inside and outside the prison proper through hybrid institutional chains, more often than not exacerbating racialized, classed, age and gender inequalities. Drawing particularly from field work conducted with justice-involved young adults and justice professionals working toward systemic change, I present my findings from a critical and anticolonial perspective and explore how we might go about contesting carceral expansion even when it masks as care.

Author

• Julienne Weegels, University of Amsterdam