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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Swiss penal system, this contribution seeks to complicate the relationship between state care and state violence, moving beyond binary conceptions of both.

Paper long abstract

This contribution reflects on ethnographic research into state-provided alternatives to imprisonment in Switzerland. In this setting, “care” has become central for professional practice: sentenced people are addressed as “clients” (Klient:innen), social workers replace the traditional role of wards, and “caretakers” (Betreuer:innen) accompany individuals throughout their sentences. Drawing on ethnographic material from this field—which is inherently punitive and thus retains state violence at its core—this paper seeks to complicate the relationship between state care and state violence, and to move beyond binary understandings. Rather than evaluating whether state servants act in caring ways or exercise violence, it argues for a shift in analytical attention towards how care and violence emerge as relationally, situationally, and practically entangled—or even as the same thing—in the everyday of the penal system.

The paper invites reflection on how we can critically analyse such caring modes of punishment and their role in confronting and addressing precarity and vulnerabilities—precarity and vulnerabilities that the criminal justice system itself simultaneously intensifies, as extensive empirical research has shown. Ethnographically engaging with everyday practices may help not only to grapple with this paradox but also to illuminate this often normalised status quo as a form of slow, ordinary violence; one that obscures the socially selective conditions under which state punishment operates, while maintaining the collective and often hostile fiction of punitive (and no other form of) justice as inevitable and unquestioned.