Desde una mirada foucaultiana, la evolución de los modos de ejercer el poder punitivo no sigue una progresión lineal, sino que las nuevas y viejas prácticas, lógicas y discursos del gobierno de la penalidad mutan, se hibridan y se ensamblan. A partir de un estudio cualitativo de los módulos de respeto de mujeres en el sistema penitenciario español, este trabajo analiza las prácticas contemporáneas de la penalidad mediante una mirada a los ensamblajes de tres formas fundamentales de ejercicio del poder: soberanía, disciplina y gubernamentalidad, desde un enfoque feminista. El estudio desvela que el funcionamiento de los módulos de respeto, bajo un paraguas de responsabilización, moviliza lo que se ha denominado “estrategia de la redomesticidad”. En este sentido, determinadas tendencias históricas del castigo femenino —particularmente, el énfasis en la construcción de un modelo de domesticidad basado en los atributos tradicionalmente asociados a las mujeres como el cuidado del entorno, la sumisión y la obediencia— aparecen reforzadas. Por otro lado, se muestra la implementación de determinadas “tecnologías de la libertad”/“tecnologías de ciudadanía”. Estas prácticas adoptan perfiles particulares en su interacción con las características tradicionales del castigo en el Estado español y particularmente el castigo de las mujeres. En los módulos de respeto se introducen formas de clasificación, responsabilización y gobierno en la distancia que articulan su ejercicio a través de la disciplina, el castigo y la obediencia, propias de la historia de la penalidad en España.

Si bien la lección de Michel Foucault en el Collège de France del 1 de febrero de 1978, que popularizó la noción de gubernamentalidad, ya se había publicado previamente, el análisis postdisciplinario no captó la atención de la sociología del castigo y la criminología hasta la aparición de los cursos Sécurité, territoire, population y Naissance de la biopolitique en 2004. Ambos cursos tuvieron un impacto notable en los debates sobre políticas y racionalidades punitivas, que vieron en ellos las claves analíticas para pensar un distanciamiento de la prisión disciplinariaen las condiciones de la nueva economía del castigo del cambio de siglo. En ese marco, nociones como gubernamentalidad y dispositivos de seguridad sirvieron para explorar las nuevas racionalidades punitivas que remitían al gobierno de riesgos y a la gestión de los grupos humanos excedentarios. Sin embargo, esta literatura decretó con excesiva celeridad el ocaso de la penalidad disciplinaria. El presente trabajo analiza la pervivencia de formas normalizadoras de control y castigo mediante el estudio de tres dimensiones de la penalidad contemporánea: a) la emergencia de nuevas manifestaciones de la prisión disciplinaria; b) la consolidación de una racionalidad disciplinaria en una etapa de prisión sin fábrica y el gobierno coactivo de los grupos migrantes. Con ello, el artículo incide sobre algunos debates de especial importancia en materia de economía política del castigo, llevándolos más allá del impasse que supuso la lectura reduccionista de la noción de gubernamentalidad en el ámbito de las políticas penales.

For criminologists and legal scholars, the globalisation of crime and justice is perhaps the defining event of recent decades. In this context, international criminology and criminal justice journals should provide an appropriate forum for scholars worldwide to communicate. However, our previous research has shown that they do not function this way. Top international journals have low levels of international participation, with high proportions of Anglo-American authors, editors, and data. We concluded that they still function as vehicles of communication between the Anglo-American community and from this community to the rest of the world. We argue that the process of internationalisation offers an opportunity to develop scholarly approaches that are not only more evenly distributed in geopolitical terms, but also better scientifically substantiated. The self-sufficiency of the Anglo-American framework as an epistemological position is less acceptable today than in the past. Despite the criticisms, this chapter shows that there has been no serious change in the pattern of publication in the criminal sciences in recent years. Anglo-American dominance is significant and persistent across the dimensions examined in the top ten international criminology and criminal justice journals over a 10-year period, with the dimension of editorial membership being the most pronounced, followed by the authorship dimension. Instead of being more inclusive of national diversity, we see only slight shifts between the main actors in the field. Internationalisation remains an unfinished task.

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As Brazilians navigate the ethical complexities of a family member's incarceration, they generally strive to do what is “good” and “right” according to ethical criteria that emerge from everyday life. Yet, under carceral pressure, their carefully considered words and deeds often come to be evaluated as breaches. The narrative of one Afro-Brazilian woman's fraught transition, from prison visitor to prisoner without visitors, illustrates how state-organized punishment can cause people to exhibit poor judgement in the eyes of those who matter most. Drawing on findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in/around prisons in Bahia, Brazil, this article approaches prison visitation and nonvisitation through the anthropological lens of “ordinary ethics” to explore how incarceration disrupts life for targeted groups by shaping without determining ethical judgment. Ultimately, the carceral production of group-differentiated susceptibility to ethical breach constitutes an injurious effect of classed, gendered, and racialized state violence, illustrating the political unevenness of ethical experience.

This article seeks to describe the history of the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Privados de la Libertad (SUTPLA), a unique experience of unionisation of incarcerated workers in federal prisons in Argentina. It examines its moments of emergence, consolidation and decline, drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the Federal Men’s Prison in the city of Buenos Aires, including observations, focus groups and interviews with prisoners, prison officials and external actors linked to this experience. First, the article explains how this initiative was possible, describing the practices of the incarcerated workers, but also of the external actors linked to the University of Buenos Aires’ programme of university education in prisons and the trade union movement, in the context of a favourable political climate linked to post-neoliberal governments. Second, it describes the consolidation of the SUTPLA, paying particular attention to its forms of collective organisation, struggle and resistance, how they were structured by the language of (prison and labour) law and its main effects. It then focuses on the decline of this experience and the conditions that help to understand it, both inside and outside federal prisons. In order to make sense of the style of collective organisation, struggle and resistance that SUTPLA incarnated, the article turns to the idea of ‘censorship’, originally introduced by Thomas Mathiesen, but mutating its original connection to an atomistic landscape. In this way, the use of the language of (labour and prison) law is highlighted as a defining feature that distinguishes it from other traditional forms of collective resistance and struggle by prisoners in Argentina and, more generally, in Latin America.

Recent scholarship on carceral mobilities critiques conceptualizations of carceral spaces as fixed and stable, and movements within or around sites of confinement as linear and horizontal. According to this critique, criminological studies of imprisonment have typically embraced what Turner and Peters (2017) [‘Rethinking mobility in criminology’, Punishment & Society 19(1), 96–114] term a ‘sedentarist ontology’ by failing to consider the complexities of prisoner mobilities in the lived experiences of the carceral. We draw on qualitative interview data from the Prison Transparency Project, a multiyear study initially across four research sites in Canada focused on former prisoners’ narratives of their carceral experiences, to identify and analyze the multifaceted mobilities that characterize prison life. We focus on three aspects of carceral mobilities: the use of psychotropic medications to produce docility, the coercive (im)mobilities of physical restraints and the ‘prison on wheels’ (i.e., prisoner transport vehicles). Using the concept of ‘kinetic immobility’, in which prisoners’ bodies are immobilized so they can be coercively moved (or not) through space and time, we consider the degree to which the theoretical work on carceral mobilities aligns with lived experiences of incarceration, as narrated by research participants.

Prisons are inherently emotional environments where both staff and prisoners engage in a continuous process of emotion management while working and living in carceral spaces. This paper explores how Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) values and norms shape how predominantly nonuniformed staff manage compassion inside the prison environment. This includes when and to whom they are allowed to express compassion, when they need to hide or suppress the expression of compassion, and how expressing compassion toward prisoners can elicit feelings of disgust among some staff. We argue that, in the emotional arena that is prison, compassion is (re)configured into an individualized and compulsory emotion by way of CSC's organizational emotion culture that emphasizes punishment and control (the security-care nexus) rather than a transformative act that helps to resist the harms of incarceration and encourages healing. Compassion thus becomes a disciplinary apparatus whereby staff self-discipline as they alter their own emotional orientation toward their work, prisoners, and other staff and as a practice to collectively surveil, evaluate, and regulate one another. We contend that compassion bound to questions and practices of security stifles rehabilitation in this environment and that health and other care work must be reintegrated into community settings.

This conceptual article offers new ways to map and understand the role of transparency in carceral governance. Mobilizing our expertise in our respective fields of study, we comparatively reflect on case studies of carceral transparency in Argentina, Canada, and Spain. In each, we decentre forms of transparency favoured by carceral authorities by considering the range of mechanisms and actors at play in the production of transparency. Taken together, our accounts of cultures of transparency in prisons and migrant detention facilities in the global north and south highlight absences and presences of different means of generating transparency across carceral sites and denaturalize northern and state-centric ideas about carceral transparency. Ultimately, our juxtaposition of three cultures of transparency reveals the range of means of generating carceral knowledge and the potential scope for its dissemination. Amidst persistent human rights violations, this work underlines the need for further southernized research on transparency to shape possibilities of carceral governance.

Nearly 25 years ago, Leanne Weber published a groundbreaking article outlining why criminologists should pay close attention to migration detention As Giuseppe Campesi pointed out to me one year ago, there are as many reasons for border criminology and crimmigration scholars to thoroughly examine the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum.

The significance of the EU Pact cannot be overstated. After more than eight years of migration management turmoil and intense political negotiations, EU institutions have managed to pass a widest ranging mobility policy package that will alter the migration and asylum landscape in Europe for years to come. This is not a minor milestone. The scope of this change is arguably unprecedented in the field of EU migration and asylum law, going far beyond the scale of previous legal reforms enacted in e.g. the early 2000s and from 2011 to 2013. Consequently, the EU Pact will have a vital impact on issues such as deportation and pushbacks practices, forms of migration detention and containment, the policing and digital surveillance of noncitizens and racialized groups, and more generally bordering practices across Europe, which are critical topics for border criminology and crimmigration scholars.

Informed by the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Amilcar Cabral and Grace Lee Boggs, this paper considers the role a journalism education rooted in the liberal arts can play in the age of climate change and COVID-19. By pursuing such an educational path, journalism students can acquire the requisite skills to thrive in a professional newsroom, while contributing to the sustainability of life on earth. The journalism classroom can become a place of imagination which militates against feelings of alienation. It can become a site of solidarity, compassion, and freedom dreams. It is in the classroom where journalism students can learn to question fearlessly, listen deeply, and recognize the value of the stories and critiques of their classmates and instructors. By employing a dialogical method of teaching committed to ending all forms of domination and grounding a pedagogy of care, a classroom ethos can be cultivated that will affirm and restore the humanity of students wounded by the ravages of a global pandemic and change a world in peril.