POWER PLOTS IN PRISON AND ITS UNCERTAINTIES. A HERMENEUTICAL PROPOSAL THROUGH A CASE STUDY ON INISA WORKERS

Abstract

Far from configuring environments of totalizing and absolute power, where the prisoners are anchored in an obsequious and docile passivity, prison settings unfold on contingent matrices marked by strong turbulence, configuring a daily atmosphere that is subject to multiple zones of systemic uncertainty. Thus, traversed by various sources of material and symbolic violence, the intersubjective field formed between workers and inmates develops from indeterminacy,

On these coordinates, the production of the daily order is not achieved through a unilateral imposition of rules, but labor practices are mainly oriented towards a linking craft of order, where the semantic perimeters that regulate the daily activities are highly informal and are the result of situational agreements product of complex processes of dialogical negotiation, where the prisoners hold agency capacity. What are the feelings, discourses and practices of workers in relation to the negotiation processes involved in the production of daily order? How do they operate in violent scenarios permeated by risk, where the rules are changing and diffuse?

Through a qualitative case study carried out on the workers of the National Institute for Adolescent Social Inclusion (INISA), this article has as its main objective the construction of a hermeneutic framework that establishes visibility on the subjective experience of workers with adolescents internees, taking as a reference the dialogical and negotiated configuration of the daily order of confinement, demarcated by contingency and subject to multiple plots of power and influence.