The Prison-Based Gang and its Gendered Absence: Impressions of a Missing Carceral Form (original) (raw)

2017, Incarceration across the Americas: Transnational Perspectives on the Prison Industrial Complex and Globalization, University of North Carolina

In this paper, I compare the regimes of imprisonment at two prisons located within the same penal compound in Northeast Brazil: Feminina, a prison for women, and PLB, a prison for men. In this comparative analysis, I employ a gender lens and the concept of “carceral forms” to unpack an observation voiced by a Feminina visitor: “pessoal da Feminina sempre são desfavorecida” (folks of Feminina are always disadvantaged). These “folks” (prisoners and visitors of Feminina), according to the speaker, are disadvantaged vis-à-vis folks of the compound’s six men’s prisons. The concept of carceral forms helps to suspend assumptions about the location and nature of carceral boundaries, rendering “carceral closure” as a processual possibility to be investigated. In short, carceral forms are emergent unities joining together heterogeneous components – namely, elements that have come to be distinguished as carceral are fused with other (‘non-carceral’) sociocultural phenomena. Carceral forms result from a process of mutual constitution and embody the impossibility of distinguishing absolutely between properly carceral and non-carceral constituent parts. In this paper, I consider two carceral forms: the prison visit and the prison-based gang (which exerts considerable control over territories beyond the prison as well as state agents). While prison-based gangs operate within most of the penal compound’s prisons, this carceral form is notably absent from Feminina. Yet, the ‘normalization’ of this form in the compound, and throughout Brazil. means that, in certain respects, it is a present absence, an absence that is felt. With a focus on the domain of visitation, drawing on findings from ethnographic research conducted in and around Feminina and PLB, I explore possible explanations for and implications of the conspicuous “nonexistence” of a prison-based gang at Feminina. What emerges is a picture of gendered and unequally harsh regimes of imprisonment. That is, it seems that folks of Feminina do tend to be disadvantaged within the compound. In turn, their experiences of a particularly harsh regime of imprisonment both register and underlie the atomization of Feminina’s prison population at the same time as they reflect, reinforce, and produce ideas about gender and the “triple deviance” of female prisoners.