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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.