Entre o bairro e a prisão: tráfico e trajectos

The notion that prisons are a ‘world apart’, with their walls severing prisoners from their external relationships, and incarceration an interruption, ‘time away’ away from society spent in a separate and isolated social universe, has provided an adequate framework for understanding the social realities of imprisonment in the past. But it has also created an analytical dead angle that prevents us from identifying the ramifying social effects of concentrated incarceration upon both the prison and upon heavily penalized lower-class neighborhoods. I address these effects using data from an ethnographic revisit of a major Portuguese women's prison where the recomposition of the inmate population that accompanied the rapid inflation of the country’s carceral population is especially salient and entails the activation of wide-ranging carceralized networks bringing kinship and neighborhood into the prison as well as the prison into the domestic world. This paper focuses on the ways in which those constellations have transformed the experience of confinement and the texture of correctional life, calling for a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the prison as a closed or total institution and for exploring anew the boundary that separates it (or not) from outside worlds.Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research