Book Review: Carceral Communities in Latin America: Troubling Prison Worlds in the 21st Century by Sacha Darke, Chris Garces, Luis Duno-Gottberg and Andrés Antillano (eds)
| Author | Omar Phoenix Khan |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221135959 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Sacha Darke, Chris Garces, Luis Duno-Gottberg and Andrés Antillano (eds), Carceral Communities
in Latin America: Troubling Prison Worlds in the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2021; 420
pp.: 9783030614980, EUR 119.99 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Omar Phoenix Khan, University of Bath, UK
What is the nature of imprisonment in Latin America? The edited collection complicates
this question by illustrating the realities of multiple and competing systems, views, and
dynamics, revealing diverse machinations of carceral conviviality. The authors make it
clear that the everyday realities and modalities of survival are far more complex than
the common-sense understanding among many criminal justice practitioners and theorists
that chaos and violence reign in prisons. The collection is a vibrant ethnographic offering
that also demands the reader consider epistemological points of departure. It aims to prob-
lematize historical imbalances and underscore the necessity of contemporary pluralities.
The collection reads as a series of strong arguments for questioning everything we
think we know about the Latin American carceral landscape and provides provocation
on further pertinent and overlooked questions. The book challenges the reader to question
the validity of northern or historical theories of punishment in Latin American contexts
by examining convergencies and divergencies from hegemonic understanding. Analysis
of the increase in prison rates has typically focused on a ‘punitive turn’or a ‘new pen-
ology’, which obfuscates the post-colonial systems’complexities and distinct coloniality.
This collection instead asks questions beyond positivist comparative observations and
provides detailed interpretivist analysis. Some authors reflect on Durkheimian notions
of social equilibrium maintenance via performative assertions of community and the
establishment of behavioural boundaries in Latin American contexts where prisoners
are primarily left to self-governance. Others question traditional conceptual distinctions
in the sociology of imprisonment, such as between staff and prisoner or formal and infor-
mal dynamics of power, and whether it is accurate to claim a division between the prison
and outside communities, with many speaking to blurred boundaries, or what Andrés
Antillano and Luis Duno-Gottberg (Chapter 18) call a ‘porosity of confinement’(p. 378).
The first chapter discusses Foucault’s work and its canonical resonance throughout
the discipline. Immediately we are drawn into considering to what extent the
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(2) 350–354
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806221135959
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
To continue reading
Request your trial