Chris Garces

Informal Prison Dynamics in Africa and Latin America

Investigating prison dynamics across the global south would appear a matter of urgent scholarly and policy concern. For while notable transfers of bureaucratic and security technology — namely, human rights discourse and the control prison — have migrated from the former metropolitan centers to former colonies, in the postcolonial world itself informal prison dynamics remain curiously part and parcel of punitive enclosure. These unofficial, self-regulatory dynamics often turn into a source of deep-seated misunderstanding between criminal justice establishments and the local and international communities which house them. Here we seek merely to outline how exploding incarceration rates and human rights discourse, in countries as far flung as Ecuador, Brazil, and Uganda, exhibit a set of ‘undisclosed’ institutions and problems typically ignored in penological debate as well as in most calls for humanitarian prison reform.

Abstracting the checkpoint: American fantasy-lives and security nightmares

Popular contemporary film and music aestheticize what is already well known throughout the Americas, but cannot be spoken at the state’s threshold: the global expansion of checkpoint architecture as the voyeuristic mechanism of state securitization. From Baauer’s Harlem Shake and Sean Paul’s She Doesn’t Mind, to Latin American films such as Maria Full of Grace and Por Sus Propios Ojos, I demonstrate the erotics of power simultaneously concentrated and disavowed within the space of the checkpoint. As a form of “security sexualization”, checkpoint technologies require the physical, optical or digital stripping of human bodies – a gatekeeping procedure of sovereign command, intrinsic to the satisfaction of security officials’ professional duties, in which denuding surveillance is rhetorically denied any sexual content. This article opens up critical discussion about the fantasy worlds of security sexualization as such, pointing attention to necessary filmic “abstractions” of the security state’s imposing homosociality, and the way in which checkpoint surveillance resists being represented at all.