Carceral community in the time of COVID-19: Isolation, adaption, and predation
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221129425 |
| Author | Anthony W Fontes |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
Carceral community in the
time of COVID-19:
Isolation, adaption, and
predation
Anthony W Fontes
School of International Service, American University, USA
Abstract
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 3
rd
most overcrowded prison system in the world, such failure was a tra-
gedy foretold. Longstanding hostility towards criminalized populations ensured that pris-
oners 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 help-
less victims. Instead, drawing on the concept of “carceral community”and prison eth-
nography, 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 pan-
demic policies to create a volatile but deeply resilient modus vivendi, albeit with dire con-
sequences for the most vulnerable on both sides of prison walls.
Keywords
prisons, carceral community, Central America, COVID-19, ethnography, carceral
geography
Corresponding author:
Anthony W Fontes, School of International Service, American University, USA.
Email: awfontes@american.edu
Article
Punishment & Society
2023, Vol. 25(4) 1062–1079
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745221129425
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Pavón Prison, Guatemala. April 2020
“If the virus gets in,”wrote Rosario, “We all die.”
1
Rosario has been incarcerated in Pavón Prison—a“prison farm”in Guatemala—for
over two decades. He was a teenager when he was sentenced to serve 50 years for murder.
He has survived countless riots that have left dozens dead, dismembered, burned, or
blown to pieces. In 2007 he lived through the “Retaking of Pavón”and witnessed
state agents tie up seven prisoner leaders who were later executed (Amnesty
International, 2010). In 2016 a stray bullet grazed his ear 20 feet from where assassins
gunned down Pavón kingpin Byron Lima. His lungs are scarred from several bouts of
tuberculosis. During his tenure, Pavón’s population grew from around 1200 to more
than 4000 (Andrew, 2021). For the last several years he has served as a Segundo—
second in command for his sector of 200-odd men. After COVID-19 prompted a
prison system-wide lockdown, Rosario helped to organize sanitation procedures, refur-
bish his sector to reduce overcrowding, and identify prisoner extortionists. He will for-
mally qualify for parole in 2023. Every night he prays that he will survive to see that day.
With his TB-scarred lungs, Rosario has reason to fear. In this time of “unprecedented
global vulnerability”(Yancy, 2020), prisons have emerged as key “hotspots”where gov-
ernments have been unable or unwilling—or both—to halt the spread of COVID-19
(Burki, 2020). In Central America, and across the “new mass carceral zone”of Latin
America, mass incarceration in extremely underfunded and degraded facilities has
created profound levels of overcrowding, leaving prisoners particularly vulnerable to
disease (Darke and Garces, 2017; Hathazy and Müller, 2016; Klaufus and Weegels,
2022; Woods, 2016). Now, much ink has been spilled analyzing states’failures to
protect imprisoned populations from the COVID-19 pandemic (Byrne et al., 2021;
Fernández, 2021; Marmolejo et al., 2020; Romero et al., 2021).
2
Since early 2020, inter-
national dictums and prescriptions for protecting vulnerable prisoners have proliferated
and spread throughout the world (Amnesty International, 2021; Dutheil et al., 2020;
Human Rights Watch, 2020). However, putting such advice into practice is quite
another matter. In Central America—and to varying degrees across the Western
Hemisphere—responses to COVID-19’s threat in prisons have followed a familiar and
frustrating script: public health experts warn of massive outbreaks behind bars; govern-
ments respond with “plans”to protect the most vulnerable inmates; the plans are only par-
tially executed, or as in Guatemala, not at all (Alvarez, 2020; Cuevas, 2020).
3
In Central America, these abject failures of humanitarian “call-to-arms”—importuning
state institutions to live up to biopolitical ideals of modern liberalism—stem from tired,
tragic fantasies (Wilkinson, 2020). Namely, that Central American penal states in fact
exercise sovereign control within their overcrowded and underfunded prisons, and that
Central American publics would ever be willing to aid vulnerable prisoners in
moments of shared peril. Governments across the region are erstwhile partners in man-
aging prison life, oftentimes abdicating daily governance entirely to prisoners themselves
(Darke and Garces, 2017; Fontes and O’Neill, 2019; Weegels, 2020). Meanwhile,
popular frustration with high levels of insecurity—alongside cycles of spectacularized
Fontes 1063
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