Paper short abstract

Brazil’s 2006 Drug Law removed prison for drug use but increased penalties for trafficking. Lacking clear criteria, it expanded police and judicial discretion, fueling mass incarceration and racialized distinctions between “users,” “dependents,” and traffickers.

Paper long abstract

Until 2006, Brazilian law made no distinction between those who used drugs and those who trafficked them: both were subject to imprisonment. With the enactment of the 2006 Drug Law, drug users were exempted from imprisonment, while penalties for drug trafficking were significantly increased, with the minimum sentence raised from three to five years of imprisonment. A substantial body of research has shown that, by failing to establish clear and objective criteria to distinguish users from traffickers, the law created broad police and judicial discretion. In practice, this has led to a sharp increase in incarceration for drug trafficking, disproportionately affecting young, black, and poor individuals. In one of my studies conducted in forensic psychiatric hospitals in Brazil (CNJ, 2024) — hybrid institutions intended to confine the so-called “criminally insane” — we found that, over the past decade, these institutions have increasingly received people diagnosed with disorders related to drug use. In my current research, which analyzes judicial decisions concerning individuals confined in forensic psychiatric hospitals in the state of São Paulo, I identify a racialized differentiation between two figures: the “user,” decriminalized under the 2006 Drug Law, and the “dependent.” The latter, framed as a “social problem,” is only partially decriminalized: although exempted from criminal punishment, they are subjected to a security measure in a forensic psychiatric hospital, a penal-psychiatric institution that imposes a minimum, but no maximum, period of confinement, which may continue as long as psychiatric evaluations deem the individual to pose a “danger to society.”

Paper short abstract

The paper examines how black struggles against the German asylum–deportation system have exposed its carceral nature and articulated an abolitionist, anticolonial/imperialist critique grounded in everyday forms of resistance, which offers insights for contesting the current authoritarian turn.

Paper long abstract

The (West) German asylum–deportation system expanded under neoliberal austerity from the 1970s onward, in parallel with carceral regimes elsewhere. Migrant led organising, emerging in the 1990s, challenged its humanitarian image as well as its colonial and fascist legacies. Black activists argued that asylum operated not as a universal human right but as a racialised carceral apparatus policing those disposessed and displaced by extractivist accumulation in the South and East—whose profits enriched the North and West and were maintained through war and authoritarianism. Drawing on fieldwork and organising between 2015 and 2025 with West Africans threatened by deportation, this paper shows how they extended this critique, grounded in everyday forms of fugitivity and organised resistance to deportation, confinement, policing, and criminalisation at a time when Germany was internationally celebrated for “welcoming refugees”. I argue that the knowledge produced through these struggles offers key insights for contesting the current authoritarian turn. While critiques centred on international protection often overlook the global processes that produce “migrants” and “refugees”, the black abolitionist critique enables us to see how these very processes—including warfare and genocide “abroad”—fuel far right and fascist forces and the expansion of carceral apparatuses “at home”. This entails a radical questioning of the state and calls for (re)connecting struggles.

Paper short abstract

The paper addresses the recursive carcerality of containment projects aimed at Italian agrocapital's labour force. Starting from today's encampment archipelago, housing migrant farm workers across different districts, I draw on archival and historical sources to trace its carceral genealogies.

Paper long abstract

The paper addresses the recursive carcerality of projects of containment aimed at Italian agrocapital's labour force. Starting from today's encampment archipelago, which houses migrants employed in the agrifood sector across different districts, and drawing on archival and historical sources (and their occlusions), I trace the carceral genealogies of spaces that feel like prisons to those that inhabit them today, on account of restrictions on movement, intimacy and conviviality that are predicated on processes of racialisation. The very places where these encampments are located today have been the experimental grounds for forms of containment across the contemporary period, since whose dawn a drive to the rationalisation of both agriculture and state governance led successive polities (from the Kingdom of Naples to the Kingdom of Italy, the Fascist regime and the Italian Republic) to resort to convict labour for works of land reclamation, among others. Directed against the idle poor - racialised southern peasants and semi-nomadic sheperds who became the target of policies of reform and discipline in the wake of processes of primitive accumulation -, these projects did not always materialise, but arguably inflected a much wider range of practices of labour containment that, for all their differences, reverberate in the present.

Paper short abstract

This paper traces how the European fight against human smugglers has moved from visible border enforcement to the hidden realm of prisons in Italy. It adopts an abolitionist perspective to unpack enemy-making processes and challenge the naturalization of migrant illegality.

Paper long abstract

Over the last decade, the arrest of “human smugglers” has been a key element of the European border spectacle (De Genova, 2002). More recently, however, as disembarkation procedures have become more securitized and concealed, arrests at the border gradually declined (Italian Ministry of the Interior). By contrast, the number of people detained in Italian prisons for facilitating unauthorized mobility steadily increased (Italian Ministry of Justice). Moving away from the public spotlight of the borders, counter-smuggling activities now mostly unfold within the walls of the prison system.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sicily with individuals criminalized for migrant smuggling, this paper addresses the restlessness, incoherence, and ambiguity of the political discourse surrounding the criminalization of facilitation. It adopts an abolitionist perspective as ethical positioning and theoretical framework to investigate the genealogy of the crime, ultimately bridging migration and prison studies through a transnational perspective (Schiller, 2004). In doing so, the research aligns with those targeted by the international criminal justice system, privileging their self-representations over institutional narratives. Their lived experiences of confinement are hence conceptualized within a transnational system of control and containment. Facilitators emerge as “sorting agents” who simultaneously expose, disrupt, and possibly reinforce (Achilli, 2024) state selection tactics of social differentiation (Khosravi, 2007). By examining such processes of “enemy-making” through carcerality and unpacking the naturalization of “migrant illegality,” the paper advances an abolitionist critique that historicizes carceral border regimes and opens for newly thinkable futures.

Paper short abstract

This is an overview of Sweden’s prison abolition movement, focusing on KRUM in the 1960s-70s. Based on interviews with former activists, their engagement is understood using theories of prison abolition and prefigurative politics. KRUM at the time is seen through today’s punitive trend in Sweden.

Paper long abstract

The “carceral state” tells us something about society and, more generally, about norms of governance (Ortner, 2016). In spite of demands for harsher punishment in many parts of the world, there are also counter-movements to reform and abolish prisons, and for example, in the United States, activists and scholars situate contemporary incarceration in the historical context of racism and slavery (Davis et al. 2022, Gilmore 2007, Kaba 2021). Still, in today’s political climate in Sweden, it seems unthinkable that prison abolition could gain influence. The political aim is to increase the prison population fourfold, contrary to the broader European trend of declining prison populations. Surprisingly, and in spite of the contemporary Swedish political trend, the pioneers of the prison abolition movement are to be found in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s. This presentation focuses on the core of the movement, the pioneers in KRUM (The National Swedish Association for the Humanization of the Prison and Probation Service). How was KRUM even possible, and how can we understand the activists’ engagement? The presentation is based on interviews with core members of KRUM, at the time 20-25 years old, now in their 70s and 80s. The aim is to shed light on the activists through Thomas Mathiesen’s (1972) theories of prison abolition and “the unfinished”, in combination with the concept of “prefigurative politics” (Juris 2008; Monticelli 2024). The KRUM-activists at the time are viewed in the light of today’s punitive trend in Sweden.

Paper short abstract

The contribution examines the expansion of carcerality, including criminalization, surveillance, and punitive welfare provisions, enabled through the Swedish police’s (now annual) production and circulation of lists of so-called ’vulnerable areas’.

Paper long abstract

The contribution examines the expansion of carcerality under Sweden’s incumbent government and how criminalization operating across a range of policy fields fuels an authoritarian turn of the Swedish welfare state. Carcerality here includes expanded surveillance and police powers, increased collaboration and data sharing between police and social welfare authorities, expanded grounds for deportation – including for political dissidents – and a historical expansion of the prison system, which will also incarcerate young children. This contribution focuses on how these measures are organized through the Swedish police’s (now annual) production and circulation of lists of so-called ’vulnerable areas’. These lists have come to justify a range of surveillance, control and criminalization measures targeting areas inhabited by racialized and socioeconomically marginalized people. The contribution analyzes these lists as a form of social knowledge production, and examines how listing practices enable and reorganize repressive state interventions, enforced through policing, criminalization as well as through targeted social welfare interventions, and public-private partnerships across urban areas.

Paper short abstract

Debtor's prisons in Germany are much older than often assumed. Tracing legislative landmarks from 1871-2025, this paper traces the persistence of this carceral technique. It reveals how windows for abolition were closed by "humane" reforms that paradoxically entrenched this punishment of the poor.

Paper long abstract

Debtor's prisons, or: incarceration for lack of payment of a fine (Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe), constitute Germany’s most frequent cause of incarceration, yet they remain marginalized in academic discourse. Whenever Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe (EFS) is talked about, misconceptions are widespread. To address this gap, this paper examines the corpus of legislative amendments and laws from 1871 to the present, tracing carceral logics of this punishment of poverty, mapping the tension between windows for abolitionist alternatives and the actual persistence of this technique of power, which has been described as "unkillable" (Boegelein).

Contrary to the misconception that EFS is a Nazi-era relic, the analysis reveals a 150-year continuity of converting debt into confinement. The genealogy highlights historical windows where non-carceral paths were conceivable and criticism was widespread—from Weimar-era concepts to the Covid-19 moratorium. However, the legislative record demonstrates a stubborn perpetuation of this carceral technique. The latest reform from 2023, which merely halved sentences, exemplifies how the state re-legitimizes the criminalization of the poor rather than building social justice within the legal justice system. While framed as humane, reforms have paradoxically entrenched the criminalization of poverty, e.g. by introducing or upholding the "net-income principle" and removing payment grace periods, thus perfecting the bureaucratic mechanism of "punishing the poor."

Ultimately, this contribution provides a foundational overview of a class-based penal system. It demonstrates how carcerality operates through administrative law to manage surplus populations, identifying the closed windows of the past as vital lessons for the current abolitionist struggle against the intersection of racial capitalism and punishment.

Paper short abstract

How is life around an offshore migrant detention centre? Based on ongoing fieldwork with the residents of Gjadër (Albania), this paper examines how the imposition of Italian carceral borders echoes, reverberates, and refracts experiences of confinement in the village’s landscape and history.

Paper long abstract

Gjadër is an isolated village of 200 people in northern Albania. Since mid-2024, an outsourced-for-profit Italian migrant detention facility for over 1,000 detainees has stood at the village entrance. This paper explores how the inception of the offshore detention site resonates with both prior and concurrent forms of confinement.

Albania’s socialist regime restricted citizens’ mobility both across and within national borders, and punished trespassers with incarceration and forced labour. Gjadër’s residents began emigrating following the collapse of the dictatorship. Now, elderly people with vivid memories of state socialism face new forms of isolation and stuckedness as younger generations flee. After the atheist regime’s fall, Catholic nuns established a mission in Gjadër, managing employment, shelter, and support for women fleeing violence across the country. Care for women is administered through institutionalisation, centralising resources and opportunities around religious providers.

Both past socialist policies and current capitalist and racial infrastructures have, over time, contributed to shaping degrees of unfreedom, confinement, and options for making a life in the village. How do these different events mirror each other in Gjadër’s residents’ lives? This paper interrogates the concept of carcerality by fragmenting and analysing it through the scattered experiences of Gjadër’s inhabitants, not to pinpoint which of them engenders ‘carcerality proper’, but to identify refracting and echoing dynamics and processes which have long structured the village’s social landscape. By recomposing and visualising these refractions side-by-side, space opens up to understand border and carceral abolitionism in inextricable ways.

Paper short abstract

This presentation examines how Germany's criminalization of the Kurdish freedom movement produces carcerality beyond prisons through asylum, residence, and citizenship law—revealing how administrative power serves transnational counterinsurgency rather than racial capitalist labor extraction.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines how criminalization of the Kurdish freedom movement in Germany manifests carcerality beyond the prison, revealing transnational counterinsurgency warfare through citizenship governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork including courtroom observation, interviews, and administrative documents, I trace how anti-terrorism legislation enables repression extending far beyond criminal prosecution to traverse asylum, residence, and naturalization law.

While §129b of the German criminal code targets select individuals as alleged PKK functionaries, migration governance operationalizes the nebulous concept of "Zusammenhalt" (cohesion/solidarity) to cast suspicion over Kurdish social life as such. Attending legal demonstrations, frequenting Kurdish associations, or showing solidarity with political prisoners becomes grounds for asylum rejection, deportation orders, denial of family reunification, and blocked naturalization. This produces what one interlocutor described as "a ban on political life as such," constraining Kurdish relationality through pervasive surveillance and the chilling effects of arbitrary enforcement.

This constellation of criminalization and carcerality does not primarily serve racial capitalism's familiar logics of labor subordination, though these remain a side effect. Rather, the convergence of humanitarian and security logics in citizenship governance reveals how liberal democracies weaponize administrative power for geopolitical friendship. Germany's ritualized convictions and administrative silencing of Kurdish activists function as a proxy site for Turkey's counterinsurgency warfare, rendering citizenship not merely a mechanism for policing national orders of belonging, but an operational instrument for cross-border repression of abolitionist revolutionary movements challenging the international state system itself.

Paper short abstract

This paper presents a feminist abolitionist ethnography of gender carcerality in female prisons in Portugal, analysing continuities and variations in gender configurations in carceral regimes from 1954 to the present.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a feminist abolitionist ethnography of gender configurations in prison regimes comparatively analysed from 1954 to the present day in the Tires Female Prison, founded in 1954, and in the Santa Cruz do Bispo Female Prison, founded in 2005.

The research involved an experimental feminist ethnography in action, in which I performed multiple roles as researcher, volunteer and activist.This feminist ethnographic drift moved across different temporalities and spaces, from inside the prison to its margins, engaging with diverse intersubjectivities, institutions and organisations entangled in the carceral system. From this process emerged the concept of gender carcerality, which structured the long-term and inter-institutional analysis of the permanencies, continuities and variations of gender configurations in the prison regimes of Tires and Santa Cruz.

A feminist genealogy of the prison historically situates gender configurations in prison regimes and the prison assistential complex, identifying continuums of gender carcerality embedded in a heteropatriarchal, colonial and racist status quo present in contemporary Portuguese society. Analysing gender configurations through the perceptions of prison professionals enabled the identification of permanencies, continuities and variations that reveal the gendered prison apparatus operating through informal practices within prison regimes. The women and transgender individuals entangled in gender carceral continuums, through their speech and writings, not only illuminate gender carcerality and the reproduction of carcerality, but also teach us about resistance and struggle.

This feminist abolitionist anthropological research highlights the role of gender carcerality in the reproduction of carcerality and in sustaining a white imperialist heteropatriarchal governmentality of life.

Paper short abstract

By analyzing Montevideo’s urban and carceral interrelations, this paper examines how residents of carceralized spaces navigate and sometimes resist carceral logics in their daily life, offering insights into alternative, less punitive imaginaries of urban life beyond neoliberal carceral dynamics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the urban and the carceral, based on ethnographic research conducted in one penitentiary institution and three historically marginalized neighborhoods in Montevideo. Drawing on residents’ narratives and experiences, it analyzes how everyday life is shaped by the prison and by carceral dynamics that extend beyond prison walls, and the strategies individuals develop to endure them.

Exclusion, confinement, discipline and repression are not limited to the penitentiary sphere; they deeply affect the most disadvantaged sectors of the city. Some narratives reveal a significant paradox: for certain individuals, life in some prisons may at times appear less “carceral” than life in a city perceived as increasingly hostile. In these cases, prison can function as a temporary space of relative security and stability, where basic needs are met and routines and social ties are established, while outside the prison practices of exclusion, criminalization and control intensify. From this perspective, the carceral is not exclusive to the penal system but constitutes a normalized form of social and spatial organization within the neoliberal city.

By examining how the neoliberal city and its carceral logics affect inhabitants of Montevideo, and residents’ everyday strategies to navigate and endure them—which at times take the form of resistance—this paper aims to problematise the tensions between the urban and the carceral, and to offer glimpses into alternative imaginaries of urban life and less punitive ways of organizing it, opening an antagonistic horizon to the carceral and the neoliberal metropolis.