CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
In Carceral Citizens, anthropologist Caroline M. Parker offers an ethnographic portrait of therapeutic communities in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Americas. As nonprofits nested within the carceral state, therapeutic communities serve as reeducation and recovery centers for the mostly male drug offenders who serve out their sentences engaged in manual labor and prayer. The most surprising aspect of these centers, however, is that their “graduates” often remain long after the completion of their term, working as self-appointed peer counselors in a mixture of volunteer and low-wage positions.
Parker seeks to explain this dynamic by showing how, in these therapeutic communities, criminalized men find new and meaningful ways of living in the shadow of the prison. Through their participation in the day-to-day functioning of the centers, they discover and cultivate alternative forms of belonging, livelihood, and citizenship, despite living within the restrictions of the carceral state. Situating her study against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, and with findings that extend across Latin America, Parker challenges common assumptions about confinement, labor, and rehabilitation. By delving into lives shaped by the convergence of imperialism, the carceral state, and self-help, she offers a fresh understanding of the transformations of labor and social life brought about by mass incarceration.
Incarceration has vast and unequal impact on Black and white health and wellbeing. Research conducted primarily in North America describes incarceration’s racialized impacts beyond prison walls, where racial minority families are locked into racialized and durable cycles of disadvantage. Yet in Latin America, the links between incarceration, racism, and human health and wellbeing are both underexamined and misunderstood. The region is frequently mischaracterized as homogenously ‘mixed race’ rather than racially plural, and existing research focuses on disease outbreaks inside prisons, omitting incarceration’s family- and community-level health impacts. This mixed-methods program of community-based participatory research will illuminate incarceration’s racialized health impacts in Latin America. Working with a cross-national multi-sectoral network of stakeholders, it uses newly available racial disparities data to create the first ever portrait of racial inequality across prisons and community health in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Comparative ethnography in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico maps and conceptualizes how incarceration perpetuates racially unequal profiles of health and wellbeing among families and communities. Community partners participate in the development of public engagement strategies to shape public conversation about incarceration’s impacts at the local level, culminating in policy recommendations for mitigating the community-level harms associated with racialized systems of incarceration.
This project is funded by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award (2024-2029)