“You have to endure it”: Institutional moralities, gender imaginaries and performances of change in Nicaraguan prisons

Abstract

In Nicaragua, the penitentiary system claims to work toward prisoners’ “change of attitude” through “penal reeducation”, understood here as a system of patriarchal care that seeks to maintain notions of respectable masculinity and the heteronormative family, which are also promoted in the community policing model. Reproducing stigma rooted in moral notions marked by gender and class, these state policies generate particularly “disposable” subjects in the social imaginary, ready to be detained, incarcerated and worked upon through both sociopolitical and penal practices of exclusion and control. Once inside prison, the patriarchal penal violence and care that the prisoners are subjected to inevitably impacts their performances of “change”. Drawing from long-term ethnographic prisons research, this article exposes both the gendered workings of penal reeducation and the notions of masculinity that the participants in reeducational programs deploy and confront to (re)present their “change of attitude”, contributing as such a critical gender analysis to the study of Latin American prisons.