Abstract
While prison authorities enforce the penitentiary both as a dumpster for “animals” and a reformatory for “doubly failed” men, prisoners’ lives and livelihood become doubly precarious. Disposed of through a politics of mediated naming and shaming, their commonplace refrain of being stuck in the “cemetery of the living” grounds this chapter’s focus on the practices prisoners engage in to reckon with and to undo their social disposal, largely arranged around the ideal of penal reeducation and “change of attitude”. Yet how do these changes articulate with(in) the violent realities of the “cemetery,” and the challenges prisoners face during their “social reinsertion”? Drawing from extensive field research in the Nicaraguan prison system, this chapter seeks to problematize the institutionalization of disposal by analyzing (former) prisoners’ parallel engagement in performances of violence and change.
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Notes
- 1.
I was co-organizer and co-facilitator of this prison theater training program together with my husband, a Nicaraguan theater director and actor. The program formed my access to two prison facilities: a regional penitentiary and a city police jail. In all, I conducted 31 months of graduate and doctoral field research between 2009 and 2016, 25 months of which were spent with prisoners participating in these theater training program. I also followed up with them post-release, and conducted a series of interviews with former prisoners from capital city penitentiary La Modelo. As the majority of my research collaborators were also theater program participants, I do not specify the name of the program or the location of the prison facilities and use pseudonyms throughout the chapter to safeguard their anonymity.
- 2.
Nicaragua counts eight regional penitentiaries, including La Modelo, and one women’s prison. It is important to note that the penitentiary law does not apply to police jails which, therefore, are under no obligation to organize reeducational programs.
- 3.
The Sandinista revolutionary junta signed and ratified the American Human Rights Convention in September 1979, followed by the ratification of civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights in 1980. The human rights as declared by the United Nations were taken up in the new political constitution ratified in November 1986 (La Gaceta 1979, 1980, 1987). The second coming of the Sandinista government, however, has barred human rights organizations from inspecting the country’s prison system since 2008, despite increasing citizen reports of human rights violations. As of the 2018 anti-government protests, the situation has further deteriorated and both armed state violence and political imprisonment have returned.
- 4.
I refer to prisoners with the masculine prefix as the great majority of Nicaraguan prisoners are men, and my research has been focused on male prisoners.
- 5.
The total amount of prisoners in the penitentiary system was 5064 in 2000 and rose to 21,351 by 2020—an incarceration rate of 322 per 100,000, much on par with the rest of the region (PDDH 2000; Ministerio de Hacienda 2020). Implementation of anti-youth crime policies led to a significant increase in incarceration in the late ‘90s, doubling in only three years from 3692 in 1996 to 7198 in 1999 (Walmsley 1999, 2000). The number of prisoners dropped back down to 5064 in 2000 (PDDH 2000: 12) remaining relatively stable for the next five years at 5610 in 2006 (Walmsley 2007). Since the return to power of the FSLN and with the expansion of the police force and the implementation of anti-drug policies, it had shot up to 10,569 by 2015 and further doubled to 21,351 over the past five years (Walmsley 2015; Ministerio de Hacienda 2020). It is important to note that the official capacity of the Nicaraguan penitentiary system was only 5125 in the mid-‘10s (CENIDH 2014).
- 6.
I have argued elsewhere (Weegels 2018) that the sector targeted by both anti-youth violence and anti-drug policies remained much the same over the past two decades.
- 7.
Similar trends took place in Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador.
- 8.
In the month of December 2015, the city police jail that the prisoners I worked with were held at held an average of 175 pretrial detainees and 275 convicted prisoners, functioning at more than 300% its capacity. Only 35 prisoners participate in the rehabilitation program at the local community center. By comparison, the regional penitentiary I conducted research at was also steadily overcrowded, though much less so, holding between 700 and 1000 convicted prisoners between 2009 and 2013, thus running at 130–190% its official capacity. Throughout, according to the Penal Reeducation Direction’s internal reports, 70% of the prison population participated in a variety of reeducational programs and sports and cultural activities organized on the prison’s premises. It must be noted that by law, once convicted, a prisoner should be transferred from the preventiva (pretrial police jail) to the sistema penitenciario (penitentiary system), but many irregularities occur—both by sending detainees directly to the prison system (as has been done with many political prisoners since 2018), and by keeping convicted prisoners in police jails, as is still the case at present for the city police jail where I conducted my research.
- 9.
The official slogan of the National Penitentiary System is “Serving the People with Vocation, Dignity and Humanism” (www.migob.gob.ni/spn/ last visit 30 March 2016).
- 10.
- 11.
See Weegels (2018) for an in-depth exploration of the mediated representation of policing and youth crime on the Nicaraguan televised news.
- 12.
Though the latter depends on a variety of factors relating to the prisoners’ outside position (see Weegels 2017).
- 13.
Yet many protests at La Modelo center around penitentiary personnel abuse of authority—one such instance was caught on film by a prisoner with a smartphone on 21 December 2015, and can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdQL2Kl_tIQ, visited 13 August 2020.
- 14.
Nicaraguan prisons are not built as panopticons and they do not have electronic surveillance systems. Though the outer perimeters are secured by guards armed with automatic-weapons, rounds in the corridors of the cellblocks are walked by unarmed guards bearing truncheons. During rounds, the open iron-bar fronts of cells are peered into, however, visibility into the cell is usually impaired by series of hammocks and bags with personal belongings which are hung from the bars. Prisoners hence spend much time un- or under-surveilled by authorities.
- 15.
“Denuncian maltrato”, article published in the popular newspaper Hoy and on their website, with a link to the video report that the inmates shot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyWRakohAec, visited 30 March 2016).
- 16.
This is especially clear in the extensive reporting, especially by print media, on the predicament of political prisoners since the 2018 anti-government protests.
- 17.
Participants in both prison theater groups formed my key pool of research collaborators. Each group consisted of a fluctuating amount of regular participants, generally between eight and fifteen. A large share of my research participants, including interviewed former prisoners that did not participate in the prison theater training program, were released before the end of their sentences.
- 18.
Between September 2015 and January 2016, I was generally at the community center from Monday through Friday, for three to seven hours a day, during the intense physical theater trainings, hanging out over lunch, listening to music, rapping, dancing, sharing food, meeting family, and waiting for tortillas around the corner; but also on the tour of the prison theater play with the whole group throughout the province packed into the minivan, talking, joking around, and vouching for the group’s good behavior. I also spent ten Sundays on end traveling with former prisoners (two of whom just-released members of the community center prison theater group) to a radio station in another city, talking about prison, discrimination and post-release life on air between slots of reggaeton, but mostly during the long bus and car rides there.
- 19.
In most media, the National Police and government received significant credit for creating the opportunity for these youth to have participated in a cultural program with such an outcome. Effectively, the discourse of Nicaraguan exceptionalism played an important part in uniting both Sandinista and oppositional news outlets in their positive appreciation of the prison theater tour.
- 20.
See Cheliotis (2014) for a comparable analysis of the use of temporary release in a Greek prison.
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Weegels, J. (2021). Beyond the Cemetery of the Living: An Exploration of Disposal and the Politics of Visibility in the Nicaraguan Prison System. In: Darke, S., Garces, C., Duno-Gottberg, L., Antillano, A. (eds) Carceral Communities in Latin America. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61499-7_14
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