RESISTING “BARE LIFE”: PRISONERS’ AGENCY IN THE NEW PRISON CULTURE ERA IN COLOMBIA

Abstract

This paper addresses the individual and collective agency of the prisoners within the Colombian prison system. From the early 2000s onwards, the Colombian authorities with the full support of the Federal Bureau of Prisons of the United States undertook a reform of the prison system, termed New Prison Culture, a policy that was carried out within the framework of Plan Colombia, the seven billion dollar US antinarcotics and counter-insurgency programme for the country. The advent of the New Prison Culture reaffirmed the unprecedented tightening of the screws in relation to criminal law and repressive practices that Colombia started in the middle of the 1990s.

In a similar fashion to most policy transfer processes, the local characteristics of the receiver region play a key role in understanding how an outside model is implemented in a new setting. This paper asserts that the US prison model entered into conflict with the embedded practices and representations of the old prison culture in Colombia. More particularly, it is argued that one of the main obstacles the US model faces in Colombia is the prisoners’ customs inherited from the old prison culture, which is marked, among other things, by a long history of both prisoners’ social movements and everyday survival techniques inside the hostile and dangerous prison space. In line with other authors who consider that the conceptualization of the prison should place a greater emphasis on the agency of prisoners, this paper focuses on the prisoners’ low intensity everyday resistance.

Key words: Colombia, carceral geography, US prison model, New Prison Culture, policy mobility.