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Paper short abstract

This paper employs a public policy analysis lens to explore an intervention programme focused on the family relationships of prisoners in Spain.The programme constitutes a mechanism for the observation, evaluation and supervision of both prisoners and the social environment of prisoners.

Paper long abstract

Prison social work has become a key tool in the prison system, specifically as a means of observing and assessing the social environment of prisoners. In Spain, the primary functions of social work are centred on the assessment of the prisoner's social environment and the identification of support and control resources outside the prison. This is done in anticipation of the prisoner's environment being able to provide a safe and controlled environment during leave and parole. However, in the Spanish system, until now, the participation of social work in both intervention programmes and in its relationship with prisoners' families has been limited and superficial and has hardly any tools of its own for assessment, monitoring and intervention.

In 2022, the Spanish prison system launched the Alianzas Programme, a guide to social work intervention in prisons. Our paper employs a public policy analysis lens to examine the intervention guide, conferences and the instructions for implementation. Our analysis will show how the programme conducts the professionals in a way that obscures practices of responsabilization to the families while reinforcing positions of inequality along gender, class and racial lines.

Alianzas is configured as a means of innovation that imports elements from social psychology, as well as from circles of support and responsibility for the analysis and intervention of family relationships. Furthermore, thereby also reinforcing the position of a feminised and little-recognised profession in the prison environment.

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Paper short abstract

This paper compares contemporary prisons in Niger and Tokugawa-period Japan to analyze delegated authority to incarcerated people as a technology of government. It questions resource-deficit explanations and examines delegation as a mode of power structuring obedience and internal hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

This paper compares two carceral configurations distant in both time and space: contemporary prisons in Niger and the Kodenmacho prison in Tokugawa-period (early modern) Japan. Drawing on ethnographic research on Niger and on the historiography of punishment in early modern Japan, it examines forms of prison govenrment based on the delegation of authority to incarcerated people.

Rather than treating such arrangements mainly as pragmatic responses to limited resources or staff shortages, the paper approaches delegation as a technology of power in its own right. In both settings, prison order relies on selected incarcerated people entrusted with organizing everyday life, relaying information, and enforcing internal discipline. These mechanisms produce internal hierarchies and differentiated regimes of privileges and sanctions through which obedience is manufactured and authority exercised at a distance. Far from signaling a simple retreat of the state, they actively organize relations of power and responsibility within the prison.

By bringing together these “unlikely” cases, the paper uses comparison to raise broader questions about delegated authority as a political rationality of carceral government, and to move beyond Western-centered and resource-deficit explanations.

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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses migrant regularisation case files as carceral data infrastructures. It shows how legal status depends on accumulated documents shaped by fragile relations of care, where translation, registration, and bureaucratic attention enable rights while simultaneously disciplining lives.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines migrant regularisation through arraigo and “exceptional circumstances” as a form of carceral data infrastructure centred on the administrative case file (expediente). Rather than treating documentation as a neutral requirement, we analyse the case file as a technology of governance that produces credibility, deservingness, and legal legibility by translating lived experiences into administrative categories such as permanence, integration, social ties, economic means, and public order.

Drawing on ethnographic research on regularisation processes in Spain, we show that legal status depends on the accumulation of documents whose validity is neither technical nor automatic. The production of a viable case file relies on fragile and often invisible relations of care: interpreters who translate accurately, police officers who carefully register personal data, social workers who draft reports, and NGOs and lawyers who organise evidence and guide applicants through complex procedures. Minor errors, mistranslations, or inattentive bureaucratic encounters can compromise entire applications, turning administrative details into mechanisms of exclusion.

We argue that the “quality” of data is fundamentally relational. Care plays an ambivalent role, simultaneously enabling access to rights and disciplining migrant lives by standardising narratives and producing normative expectations of legitimacy. In this sense, regularisation procedures operate as a continuum of control that extends carceral logics beyond prisons and detention centres into everyday bureaucratic encounters.

By conceptualising the case file as a socio-technical and affective assemblage,this paper contributes to transnational debates on carcerality, highlighting how governance is enacted through documentation, care, and data practices that produce forms of confinement without walls.