Carceral Domesticity: Care and Optimistic Coercion in Prisoners’ Households, Chile

Abstract

This research examines how Chilean crime prevention policies deploy a distinctive form of optimistic coercion that operates through practices of care in households affected by incarceration. The Chilean state maintains an ambivalent stance toward prisoners' families, simultaneously viewing them as potential risk factors and as victims requiring preventive intervention and care. Through an analysis of women heads of household participating in anti-crime programs, this study reveals how carceral domesticity functions as a control mechanism that contains—both spatially and temporally—populations deemed prone to deviance. The concept of carceral domesticity illuminates how coercion operates by confining and stigmatizing domestic spaces in low-income communities. This research demonstrates that carceral domesticity, fundamentally intertwined with the policing of social order, serves as a mechanism for containing tensions arising from intersecting forms of inequality: gender hierarchies, class antagonisms, and colonial violence.