The extended effects of incarceration in Latin America

This chapter examines the extended effects of incarceration from a perspective that differs from existing ones, emphasising communication circuits between prisons and their immediate surroundings and the flows of people and goods that circulate there. It is well known that the variety of economic, occupational, family and civil damages caused by the imprisonment of an individual affect not only their relatives but also the communities to which they belong. Even less explored, however, perhaps due to the specificities of incarceration in Latin America, is the role of detainees’ relatives in the dislocation of prison logics and their incursion, with regulatory potential, in spaces different and distant from prisons, as well as the involvement of these relatives in the production of the prison order. Based on a long-term and multi-sited ethnography study, carried out in Argentina, the first part of the chapter explains how incarceration escapes the prison space to settle in family groups and depend, exclusively, on the women of said groups. The second part deals with the bureaucratic aspect of the execution of sentences as a gateway to the families of detainees and a parallel materialisation of the convergence between the penal system and the assistance system, focusing on the active role played in this regard by social workers, members of the prison treatment teams.