Deinstitutionalization, individualism and punitive claims: in particular, the “cacerolazo against the release of prisoners” at the dawn of the pandemic

Abstract

The processes of deinstitutionalization and individualism offer a reading key of the present social formations crossed by contemporary punitivism. We can conjecture, in turn, that the pandemic has exacerbated punitive expressions and the processes of individualism and deinstitutionalization in which they are inscribed. Immersed in a complex of individual uncertainties about the circulation of a virus that was presented as lethal, these moral actors tried to immunize themselves against the otherness constituted by the figure of the prisoner. The withdrawal in on oneself, immanent to contemporary individualism, (re) empowered by confinement so as not to be contaminated by the virus, intensified the danger of otherness, radicalized a unique risk, outside of the real dangers of contagion that covid-19 showed : that of the prisoner still locked up in a different environment from the prisoner. In an apparent paradox, the "cacerolazo against the release of prisoners" promoted a denunciatory control of another who could not be contacted, but who was awarded a singular, diffuse affectation. That is to say, we are witnessing the call for the annihilation of otherness from the outside, not only for health emergency conditions, but also for security-criminal pretexts. But this paradox is not such if it seeks to be analyzed as an exacerbation of the series of punitive manifestations within the framework of individualism and de-institutionalization processes that began approximately 50 years ago. This reading key would allow us to understand the "#Cacerolazo30A", not as an irrational episode of our social life, but in full logic with the processes of individualism and deinstitutionalization.