RT Article
T1 Carceral community in the time of COVID-19: Isolation, adaption, and predation
JF Punishment & society
VO 25
IS 4
SP 1062
OP 1079
A1 Fontes, Anthony
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1862623287
AB State failures to protect prisoners from COVID-19 have made prisons key “hotspots” of infection, particularly in the “new mass carceral zone” of Latin America. In Guatemala, which has the 3rd most overcrowded prison system in the world, such failure was a tragedy foretold. Longstanding hostility towards criminalized populations ensured that prisoners would be left to fend for themselves. This does not mean, however, that we should cast the prison as merely another “zone of abandonment” nor prisoners as helpless victims. Instead, drawing on the concept of “carceral community” and prison ethnography, this article maps how prisoner-leaders, entrepreneurs, extortionists, visitors, and officials navigate the absurd contradictions exposed in the collision between pandemic protection protocols and prison realities. This article explores a disavowed carceral community's efforts to make sense of, adapt to, and leverage the pandemic's constraints in the never-ending struggle to survive, profit from, and project power over and beyond prison life. The informal and the illicit articulate with government pandemic policies to create a volatile but deeply resilient modus vivendi, albeit with dire consequences for the most vulnerable on both sides of prison walls.
K1 Carceral geography
K1 Ethnography
K1 Covid-19
K1 Central America
K1 carceral community
K1 Prisons
DO 10.1177/14624745221129425