ICCJ Annual Lecture 2025

"Punishment and authoritarianism in Latin America: a palimpsestic perspective"

In this work I seek to understand the presence and intensification of authoritarian discourses and practices in the contemporary penal field in Latin America. The starting point is the description of a series of recent events that illuminate a dynamic of this type in the prisons of an Argentine province. Here I emphasise the significant historical weight in Latin American scenarios of authoritarianism as governmental rationality (Dean, 1999; 2002; 2025), within the framework of dictatorial regimes but also outside them, both inside and outside the penal field (Sozzo, 2005; 2016). To this end, I briefly explore the history of the establishment of the Prison Services and its strong links with the police and military institutions, which have given them a series of authoritarian organisational and cultural features that persist to this day. The processes of transition to democracy did not translate into structural reforms of the Prison Services, although there were various attempts at transformation of varying intensity developed at different times and places by diverse social and political actors which, in general, had limited effects (Hathazy & Muler, 2018; Hathazy, 2016; Narciso, 2020; Claus & Sozzo, 2023). Unlike certain perspectives linked to the discussion of ‘path dependence’ in the penal field (Schoenfeld, 2010; 2014; Dagan and Telles, 2014; Rubin, 2023; Rubin, Yeomans and Guinney, 2023), I try to show how this persistence of authoritarian control practices is the product not only of “initial conditions”, a series of decisions and policies that produce “feedback effects”, but also an agentic process, which has the prison authorities and guards as its key actors, resisting successive attempts at transformation, even in the face of “critical junctures” generated by various “external shocks”, in a field always characterised by constant struggle (Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2015; 2017). In this sense, these modes of exercising control in prisons are not just a ‘layer’ in the penal field that remains the same over time and produces its effects in successive layers (Rubin, 2016) but mutate, at least partially, as a consequence of subsequent innovations, giving rise to a kind of ‘metamorphosis’ (Castel, 1995; Sozzo, 2007; 2015) that gives the penal field a palimpsestic configuration (Quinn et al, 2020; Goodman & Quinn, 2023). In this direction, I show how, first, authoritarian control practices in prison settings became less evident and intense, even resorting to ‘outsourcing’ during times and spaces when attempts at democratisation -including building mechanisms of monitoring and supervision- had some force. And, in a present marked in some Latin American scenarios by a new wave of ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall et al, 1978; Hall, 1980; 1985; Sozzo, 2016a; 2016b), they take on a more open character, including forms of controlled visibility in the public sphere and strong support from the “political arm of the state” (Garland, 2011). Based on this exploration, I am interested in contributing to problematising, more generally, how we think theoretically in studies on punishment and society, the presence of the past in the present, inertia or continuity - as opposed to a certain obsession that reigned for a couple of decades since the 1990s, with the exploration of change (Sozzo, 2018a; 2018b; 2023).

This event will be held at 4pm in the Great Hall, Lanyon Building, QUB on Thursday 6 March 2025.