This chapter explores inmate rule and religious mediation within a complex power structure that regulates and rationalizes violence inside a Venezuelan prison. It argues that the State seemingly delegated (or relinquished) the internal control of the facility to prisoners. In turn, the “inmate government” delegated certain regulatory and disciplinary functions to the Evangelical community. In this manner, the structural issues of Venezuelan and Latin American penitentiaries intertwine with a very particular context in which, it is argued here, a state-within-the-state instrumentalized religious structures to consolidate its power and regulate violence. The first two sections describe the way in which evangelicals understand/represent the current power structures in the prison, and the relationship between the religious and the secular. The rest explains the economic and social functions fulfilled by the religious sphere in the prison.

Denuding Surveillance at the Carceral Boundary

Spiritual Life and the Rationalization of Violence: The State Within the State and Evangelical Order in a Venezuelan Prison

Border, Ghetto, Prison: Cocaine and Social Orders in Guatemala

In 2016, the Colombian's National Penitentiary and Prison Agency (INPEC) reformed the prison regulation to add anti-discrimination measures in favor of the LGBT population. Recognizing the disciplinary function of the prison complex, this text will analyze the INPEC’s rule through a queer approach to law, proposed by Dean Spade. This study argues that anti-discrimination measures of INPEC establish a dynamic effect on trans people deprived of freedom’s right to free development of personality. The result is due to that the prison reform is a triumph to LGBT activism as well as it perpetuates a binary and essentialist discourse of sexuality. The article aims to expose that anti-discrimination reform of INPEC is a queer law: a technique degrading and protecting, at unison and in a contradictory way, the trans life.

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El dilema del cuerpo penitenciario: Corporalidad trans en el sistema carcelario colombiano

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul. Foucault shows the development of the Western system of prisons, police organizations, administrative and legal hierarchies for social control - and the growth of disciplinary society as a whole. He also reveals that between school, factories, barracks and hospitals all share a common organization, in which it is possible to control the use of an individual's time and space hour by hour.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Introduction Part I. The Logic of Sovereignty: 1. The paradox of sovereignty 2. 'Nomos Basileus' 3. Potentiality and law 4. Form of law Threshold Part II. Homo Sacer: 1. Homo sacer 2. The ambivalence of the sacred 3. Sacred life 4. 'Vitae Necisque Potestas' 5. Sovereign body and sacred body 6. The ban and the wolf Threshold Part III. The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern: 1. The politicization of life 2. Biopolitics and the rights of man 3. Life that does not deserve to live 4. 'Politics, or giving form to the life of a people' 5. VP 6. Politicizing death 7. The camp as the 'Nomos' of the modern Threshold Bibliography Index of names.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.

Publics and Counterpublics

Written in the intense political and intellectual ferment of the early years of the Weimar Republic, "Political Theology" develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that marks Carl Schmitt as one of the most significant political and legal theoreticians of the 20th century.Focusing on the relationship between political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues that the essence of sovereignty lies in the absolute authority to decide when the normal conditions presupposed by the legal order obtain. Because the norms of a legal system cannot govern a state of emergency, they cannot determine when such an exceptional state holds or what should be done to resolve it. Thus every legal order ultimately rests not upon norms, but rather on the decisions of the sovereign.Schmitt underpins this analysis of sovereignty and its commitment to the priority of decisions over norms with a "political theology," which argues that all the important concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, and a sociology of the concept of sovereignty, which argues that the conceptualization of the jurisprudence of an epoch is linked to the conceptualization of its social structure.He concludes with an attack on liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental moral and political decisions.Schmitt's unerring sense for the fundamental problems of modern politics and his systematic critique of the ideals and institutions of liberal democracy, a critique that has never been answered, distinguish him as one of the most original figures in the theory of modern politics. "Political Theology" is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Denuding Surveillance at the Carceral Boundary

Citations

Spiritual Life and the Rationalization of Violence: The State Within the State and Evangelical Order in a Venezuelan Prison

Border, Ghetto, Prison: Cocaine and Social Orders in Guatemala

El dilema del cuerpo penitenciario: Corporalidad trans en el sistema carcelario colombiano

References

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Publics and Counterpublics

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

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