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In/Out: Revisiting the Relationships Between Prisons and Slums in Latin America

Andrés Antillano (Central University of Venezuela, Venezuela)

Punishment in Latin America: Explorations from the Margins

ISBN: 978-1-83797-329-3, eISBN: 978-1-83797-328-6

Publication date: 21 November 2024

Abstract

We propose to see, regarding the Venezuelan context and at the same time in dialogue with the literature on Latin American prisons, the prison through the prison-neighborhood correspondence. This includes, for example, looking at how the prison organizes crime outside, attributes social and reputational capital, extracts and redistributes illegal profits, export/import modes and logics of action and domination. The purpose is to (a) discuss the “hydraulic” theses on prison gangs, dominant in North American literature, which explain their emergence through conditions endogenous of the prison, and instead put the emphasis on the dynamics of exclusion and the “lumpen economies” in which the poor subsist, and (b) nuance the perspectives on the relations between prison and community from the point of view of the peripheral South, marked by high rates of exclusion, informality, and an economy strongly dependent on commodities and a significant labor surplus population, in contrast to the industrial economies of the Global North.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

This work involves different investigations carried out over the last ten years in prisons, poor neighborhoods of Caracas, and illegal economies. For this reason, I cannot but thank those who accompanied me in these investigations, such as Chelina Sepúlveda, Verónica Zubillaga, Iván Pojomovsky, Keymer Ávila, José Luís Fernández-Shaw, Desmond Arias, Benjamin Lessing, Alberto Alvarado, Francisco Sánchez, Rebecca Hanson, Amarylis Hidalgo and Luz Ortiz. Also, I want to thank UNICEF, the Ministerio del Poder Popular para el Servicio Penitenciario, the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF), and the Red de Activismo e Investigación para la Convivencia (Reacin). I thank Ivan Pojomovsky, Jennifer Martinez, and Luis Duno-Gottberg for their comments and suggestions.

Citation

Antillano, A. (2024), "In/Out: Revisiting the Relationships Between Prisons and Slums in Latin America", Dal Santo, L. and Sozzo, M. (Ed.) Punishment in Latin America: Explorations from the Margins (Perspectives on Crime, Law and Justice in the Global South), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 109-129. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-328-620241006

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited