The experience of imprisonment on prisoners’ families
This article describes the characteristics of a growing – and paradoxically little explored – population in Argentina – prisoners’ families. This population has many aspects, as we discovered during ethnographic work with family members and detainees in male and female prisons in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. We first deal with the way in which relatives define themselves as “invisible”, not only in terms of the state and its welfare policies but also in relation to prison services. The second part explores the difficulty of creating associations for families, caused in part by the distinction between families that collaborate or not with the penitentiary system, as well as by prison violence, which affects relationships outside prison. The third part describes the state of denial (Cohen, 2008) adopted by many women as a way to deal with body search. Finally, the last part illuminates the (new) centrality of the family as a category used to differentiate between inmates and, consequently, its redefinition in terms of prisons. In short, we show the existence of a bi-directional relationship that makes the family, while “outside” prison, both an integral part of the prison system and affected by the prison logics.