Prisoners as Infrastructure in Latin America: Entrepreneurship, Materiality, and Technology

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - I

Abstract

This paper examines how prisoners rebuild failing carceral infrastructures from the inside out in Latin America. My main argument suggests that prisoners have turned themselves into infrastructures of carcerality in order to solve problems of corruption, overcrowding, and violence. For instance, inmates-led physical reconstruction in Ecuadorian and Peruvian prisons shows how the creation of new spaces of concealment enables unauthorized transactions, how prison cells become real estate opportunities rather than state surveillance devices, and how prison communal renovations and repairs reduce interpersonal violence in the wings. My empirical findings and discussion draw on 15 years of anthropological work on imprisonment that include long-term participant observation in Quito's men maximum-security prison between 2003 and 2005, archival work after the penitentiary was decommissioned in 2014, and an ongoing collaborative ethnography on Latin American carcerality with “Arbolito,” my long-time research interlocutor and friend. In conversation with Science and Technology Studies, my intervention attempts to interrupt and reframe theorizations and debates about the carceral state within prison ethnography and security studies.

Author

• Jorge Nunez, Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography