"Confraternidad Carcelaria as De-secularized Justice? On the religious uses of ‘avowal’ in Ecuador's Penal State"

• In Event: Precariedad y mundos carcelarios en América Latina II (Brasil, Ecuador y Perú)

Abstract

La confraternidad carcelaria is a religious NGO that is part of Charles Colson’s International Prison Fellowship and deeply informed by the Brazilian “APAC” model of redemptive prison governance. For confraternidad members, Christian technologies of the self must be central to any true inmate “rehabilitation”. In this talk, I examine volunteers’ attempts to reimagine the inmate’s life behind bars as an opportunity to “avow” (“declarar”) novel and personally redemptive religious convictions—salutary for prisoners and the NGO volunteers alike. Foucault’s recently re-published 1981 lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain (2014) attempt to theorize “avowal” as the place of discourse that would bind together his otherwise disconnected genealogies of discipline (Discipline and Punish) and subjectivity (Histories of Sexuality, volumes 2 & 3). The charitable work of Confraternidad volunteers similarly collapses distinctions between discipline and care for the self in a highly successful Christian rehabilitative regime—creating a novel space for the prisoner’s self-transformative agency. Confraternidad-affiliated inmates perform their ‘rehabilitation’ in a well-choreographed, NGO-led regime of religious and civic expression. Yet the peculiar work of such religious ‘avowal’ has ironically taken place inside a penal state undergoing unprecedented forms of 'securitization' to incapacitate inmates’ political influence, or to erase the violent forms of life unleashed by the hypertrophy of penal state expansion during the war on drugs. My talk will conclude with observations on the voluntaristic discourse of avowal and the waning regime of inmate “rehabilitation,” demonstrating the de-secularized role of ‘justice” in the contemporary penal state.

Author

• Christopher E Garces, Cornell University