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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Belgium’s humanized detention model generates new bureaucratic governance. Through ethnography of the “Penitentiary Village,” it shows how humanitarian aims and repressive policies merge into intensified information‑based control shaping prison life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the bureaucratization of population governance in the Belgian context of detention humanization policies. The ethnographic research takes place in a newly-build prison – the “Penitentiary Village” – presented as model for the future, focusing on rehabilitation. The facility symbolizes the national policy for prison humanization through high-scale campus-like architecture, staff reform and technological devices enabling detainees to circulate and undertake administrative tasks in so-called "autonomy". However, despite humanization settings, the functioning of the prison is deeply shaped by growing repressive penal and social policies, leading to unprecedented carceral inflation. Prison governance thus faces simultaneously exigences of high-flow management and meaningful rehabilitative work, requiring staff to provide deeper individual support to a growing population in ever less time.

This paper shows how this conjunction of humanitarian and repressive turn in penal policies, along with the juridicization of the prison (with external legal monitoring) leads to a process of rationalization and bureaucratization of prison population. This process operates through individual information management: psychological evaluations, disciplinary & behavioral observation files, ... shaping decision-making for spatial distribution (open or closed regimes) and sentence regulation (conditional release, …). Following Ben Crewe’s work on neopaternalist power, arguing that the modern penal control relies less on the direct use of force than on surveillance and incentive based regulation of conduct, the presentation will discuss how detainees and staff negotiate these written traces, and how they affect power relationships and prisoners’ trajectories – a “softer” governance with insidious, yet durable effects on their lives.