In my research, I explore the predatory practices of private companies that offer goods and services to prisoners and their families via e-commerce platforms. I argue that this type of carceral consumption may engender illegitimate differences between prisoners and thus reproduce social inequalities within and outside the carceral state. My next steps include exploring the scope of e-commerce practices in different dimensions of the US criminal justice system and their impact on their targeted consumers (primarily, low-income women of color).
Prison, Love, and Consumption
Biographies of Justice
In my dissertation project, I engage with the field of policy implementation to answer an important question: How do policy reforms continue and endure over time? I examine the program of penitentiary defense, a major public policy enacted in 2009 that provides legal counseling to convicted prisoners in Chile. Through in-depth interviews, archival research, and direct observation, I find that the public attorneys in charge of prisoners’ legal counseling reconstruct their memories from their distant pasts to explain their present professional commitment to prisoners’ human rights. These personal and collective narratives inject defensores’ work with meaning and ensure the continuity of the program in face of adversity.
Incarceration Trends in Chile and Latin America
Currently, I am part of an international research team that is analyzing incarceration trends. We are currently gathering comparable information across countries, identifying the differences and similarities of population trends, and examining the political, cultural, and economical causes of the recent expansion of prison rates in the region. We also examine Chile’s decline in prison rates, a unique phenomenon that raises critical questions about taken-for-granted knowledge about contemporary punishment in Latin America. My article with Javiera Farías and Ignacio Walker “Evolution of the Penal Population in Chile from 1991 to 2007” is the first research paper published in Chile that compares intra-regional data using inferential statistics to isolate the effect of criminal justice reform.
