Moore, Hollis Leigh

Preliminary abstract: My doctoral research examines how increasing rates of imprisonment, and the concentration of carceral effects, shape social relations in Mata Escura, a low-income neighbourhood in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Mata Escura encompasses a penal compound and formed, in part, as families moved to the area to be closer to incarcerated kin. Brazil's prison population is currently experiencing notable growth, more than doubling in the past decade. Such growth means that, for some groups -- including non-prisoners -- the prison is becoming one of the primary social institutions that structures experience and, thus, subjectivity. Yet, most studies seek to understand the social realities of imprisonment through frameworks that construct the prison as a 'world apart.' This approach prevents us from identifying and understanding the social effects of imprisonment -- and of uneven social distributions of incarceration -- on households and heavily penalized low-income neighbourhoods. My study encompasses spaces such as prison waiting areas, a shelter/school for children of prisoners, prison visitors' homes, evangelical storefront churches, and the main entrance of the penal compound where creative entrepreneurs sell products/services to prison visitors. I focus on everyday practices (i.e. commensality and parenting), kinship rituals (birthdays, baptisms, funerals, etc.), and gendered social relations (between/among men, women, and children prisoners and non-prisoners) that traverse prison walls in order to reveal some often overlooked aspects of imprisonment. What is really at stake with this project is the question of how people maintain and (un)make social relations under conditions of crisis and, thereby, (re)produce, work with and against, but also exceed carceral logics.