From the 90s onward, the disproportionate growth of the incarceration rate in the Global North rapidly generated concern, first in academia and then, in some cases, within governments, regarding the social costs or collateral damage of incarceration (Hagan, Dinovitzer 1999). The first term tended to present the counterpoint to the neoliberal discourse that emphasized the expense that detainees represented for the state; the second term, on the other hand, reinforced a kind of “inevitability” of such damages that would accompany the situation of imprisonment. Both, without intending to, brought about a shift in dislocation of the prison, focusing on a population that, while not physically incarcerated, was intensely affected by the experience of imprisonment: the families of detainees. These families are located in the “external shadow” of prisons (Adler and Longhurst 1994), in the sense that academic research, reports from monitoring teams or external observers, and even journalistic accounts have historically focused on making daily life in penitentiary establishments visible without including the prison population. really This issue persisted even though the number of families affected—according to estimates by non-governmental organizations such as Relais Parents for the European continent—was already significant. This is not to say that families were absent from the interests of academics, researchers, and politicians, but the way they were studied was more closely linked to etiological concerns—in the sense of identifying those responsible for the detainee's deviance—unlike what would happen from the 90s and 2000s onward, when interest in these families tended to focus on how they coped with the incarceration of one of their members and the violence that the prison system in general fostered during family visits. The focus of analysis shifted toward the unintended consequences of imprisonment, albeit still in a limited sense. This shift, however, did not translate into a central role—academic or political—for the family or for the status of being a relative of detainees. In fact, most current research continues to address the “invisibility” of the family members of incarcerated individuals (Mauer and Chesney Lind, 2002), as passive recipients of unintended consequences or as co-participants in the social cost of imprisonment. Far from being problematized, this situation is the starting point for research that focuses on those aspects of prison confinement that involve the families of detainees, highlighting the extent to which the living conditions inside the prison extend... beyond the walls. The effects of imprisonment involve, on the one hand, the spillover of the penalty onto the families of the detainees and their colonization by prison logics; on the other hand, the porosity of prisons that can hardly be thought of in terms of a total institution (Silvestre 2012; Ferreccio 2014). Research on this subject differs according to the scope attributed to this spillover: firstly, there are those that are limited to the family sphere, noting the added economic precarity that confinement generates, the feminization of the universe of family members (Ferreccio, 2018) –explainable from the gendered care tasks– with the consequent overload of women in charge of the economic and emotional support of the non-incarcerated family as well as the incarcerated member (whether male or female) and, to an increasing extent, the over-exposure of the children of incarcerated people, unfolding here a series of variants that, for reasons of space, we will only list: problems in learning, socio-affective difficulties and, mainly in the Global North from an openly positivist perspective, the possibility of the “hereditary transmission of the tendency to delinquency” (Farrington, Coid and Murray 2009). Secondly, and especially in those countries with high incarceration rates, although also in those where it is not equitably distributed in the population (Breen, 2008; 2010), we find still very incipient research that deals with the territorial concentration of the extended prison experience (Ferreccio, 2017 a; b), that is, the fact that the families of detainees inhabit specific areas of cities, in which the prison no longer appears as a distant and fearsome threat but as another agent of socialization (Garland, 2001), a probable destination of the life trajectories that can be found in that territory: the prison experience ceases to be an isolated and difficult to communicate event to become a kind of homogenizing variable of the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood.  This has generated a series of questions that are currently under discussion and that relate, above all, to the effectiveness of formal social control where the flows between the prison and the neighborhood in question are intense (for example Clear 2006, Clear and Rose 2009). Authors who have addressed what we might call a “massive and concentrated collateral effect” of incarceration (Ferreccio, 2017a; 2017b) refer to three aspects: the impact on the employment prospects of people living in over-incarcerated neighborhoods (Holzer, Raphael and Stoll, 2004; Holzer, 2009) since the purchasing power of those who circulate in these areas has been significantly weakened, the greater economic strain for families living there (Geller, Garfinkel and Wester, 2011; Sabol and Lynch, 2003; Wildeman and Wester, 2010) and the reduction of opportunities for children with detained relatives, as their risks of becoming involved in the juvenile criminal justice system (Rose and Clear 2004) and dropping out of school increase (Murray 2005). However, the urban areas where the prison experience is concentrated – which are the neighborhoods where the detainees come from and where their families live – present two homogenizing characteristics: the first, the level of building and housing deterioration; the second, the high rates of lethal violence that they register, in fact, a large part of their inhabitants are organized in groups that depending on the national context will be called gangs, brawls, gangs, juntas or maras. Despite the proximity of the phenomena, or the fact that incarceration is concentrated in the area in which these groups operate, social research has addressed these problems autonomously and without linking one phenomenon to the other.  In general, these youth groups with more or less violent practices have been studied from an ecological perspective or by resorting to the theory of social disorganization, neglecting the territorial aspect, the context in which they are formed and thus contributing to the dehistoricization of their formations. The present proposal of Working Group intends to be established at this moment of the investigations in order to, through a reinforcement of the comparative empirical moment, know and describe the circuit (Santos, 2006) that has been established between a) the impoverished neighborhoods of the urban peripheries where the prison experience is concentrated, b) the families of the detainees and c) the prisons.  Likewise, once the scope of the "vicious circle" established between these three elements has been established and described, it will delve deeper into the knowledge and explanation of the youth groups found in these neighborhoods, to describe and explain the extent to which these can represent extensions of prison logics or dislocations of the prison in the neighborhoods.

Research on relatives of detainees is all in its very early stages. As we explained in point 2, this “initial” state is not found in the Global North, where various studies have attempted to address the problem generated by the mass imprisonment Upon realizing that the mass they were considering—that is, the incarcerated population—was only a portion of the population actually affected by imprisonment, which was primarily comprised of the detainees' families, it was noted that the efforts of those investigations seem to retain, as a backdrop, the ideology of social defense. In some cases—clearly observed in relation to the children of detainees—this ideology has contributed to the creation of a "population to be managed" in order to avoid the potential "risk of delinquency" these children would face. In our region, a few studies have made progress in exploring and describing the multiple and complex relationships that the prison—as an institution and, therefore, with productive, not merely repressive, capacity—establishes with a wide variety of environments (see, for example, Silvestre 2012), attempting to demonstrate how these environments are colonized by prison logic or how difficult it seems to resist its "contamination." This proposal adheres to the broader trend of seeking to de-incarcerate one element of the neighborhood-family-prison circuit in order to identify how prison logics and the culture of the incarcerated population leave the physical space of the prison to re-establish themselves on the streets, in a continuously self-reinforcing cycle. To this end, the following methodological and theoretical prerequisites are: a) a willingness to analyze in relation of the various elements of the circuit that allow for their dynamic interpretation; b) the abandonment of uni- or bi-directional lines; c) their replacement by the notion of flows that subsume these lines but transcend them; d) the analysis in terms of social space, territory(ies), and circuit. This last notion, formulated several decades ago by the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, allows for the incorporation into the theoretical analysis of those affected by the prison system but absent from research on the subject: initially, the relatives of detainees as subjects who inhabit both the interstices of the prison institution and the urban peripheries, and who not only reciben the effects of the prison system but can actively intervene in the production of prison and urban order. In a second phase, following the trajectories of family members, the study proposes to move towards the neighborhoods where they reside, considering them as “social spaces” (Zomighani Jr., 2013) in which prison logics are dominant and the widespread and dense prison socialization seems to project its effects on social control. The field of research has been gradually but continuously shifting from the interstitial or liminal spaces (Moran, 2015; Bosio, 2017) where family visits take place, representing a first movement of family members towards the prison (Chantraine, 2004; Ricordeau, 2008; Silvestre, 2012; Ferreccio 2012, 2015, 2017a) – through the security measures for the entry of family members, in particular the body search (Gual, 2011, 2015; Ferreccio, 2013, 2015), making family members a field of study connoted first by their “invisibility,” second by their “collateral economic impact,” and third by the “over-exposure of the children of detainees” (Hagan and Dinovitzer, 1999; Parke and Clarke-Stewart, 2003; Mancini, 2015; Aiello, 2017). Only very recently, and based on the results of preliminary research, have some authors (see Clear 2008) suggested the existence of a constant relationship between the flows of prison admissions and releases and the level of conflict recorded in the neighborhoods of origin of the detainees, considered as “territories of influence” of the prisons.. One of the most interesting studies from this perspective is the one conducted by Clear and Rose in Tallahassee, USA. There, they found that a large proportion of the people they interviewed in the poorest neighborhoods of that city had had a family member in prison within the last five years. It was from this observation that they began to investigate the effect of the configuration of “incarceration” as normal social fact (Durkheim, 2016 [1895]) could have an impact on social relations within the neighborhoods where the families mostly live, questioning, in particular, the configurations that informal social control adopted in the face of a reality of formal social control that was both widespread and geographically concentrated (see Clear and Rose, 2008). Also relevant are the studies by Braman (2004) on the employment difficulties faced by the family of the incarcerated, since this fact hinders the employment prospects of the rest of the family, and Le Blanc (2004), who focuses on the effects on young mothers who are not incarcerated, whose lives are completely regulated by the criminal justice system. Incarceration, even as an indirect experience—which is what we hypothesize regarding family members—conditions the life trajectories of these individuals and their choices, both in terms of political participation and integration into the labor market. In our region, research on gangs, criminal groups, or organized crime groups has tended to focus on social relations within these groups, as well as on the process of their formation or “recruitment,” dedicating little effort to relating these groups to the prison experience that most of them have undergone. In the analysis of these individuals' life trajectories, the period in prison is not given priority in relation to the other data that make up their life stories, such that it has been difficult to hypothesize relationships between these groups inside and outside of prison or to trace the continuities and discontinuities between their prison and neighborhood experiences within the same group. This proposed Working Group aims to bring together the ongoing research of those who also propose to be members of the group: Gutiérrez Rivera on Honduran gangs, Telles (2017) and Mallart (2019) on the Cracolândia phenomenon in Brazil, Mancini (2015) on the relationships between young people from low-income neighborhoods in Argentina and state agents, Bosio (2017) regarding Pentecostal organizations operating inside and outside Argentine prisons, and Ferreccio (2017a, b) on the possibility of mapping the areas of origin of detainees. Until now, the neighborhoods in relation with /influenced by Prisons have been studied as spaces of economic deprivation without considering the effects that the concentrated prison experience in these territories could have on socialization within the surrounding neighborhood or on regulating its levels of conflict. Similarly, prison research has not progressed in identifying the effects of the strategies employed by incarcerated youth to reproduce, within prisons, the neighborhoods from which they come. This Working Group aims to recover the emerging research in this field produced in our region, fostering a dialogue among them that should allow us to understand (or approach) the true scope of incarceration in contemporary societies of the Global South. This recovery will prioritize, from a theoretical perspective, the aforementioned categories of circuit, territory/territorial strategies, and social space, incorporating from the field of migration the analytical category of forced mobility to designate the large number of people who are removed. de and returned a The same neighborhood can be affected by multiple and successive incarcerations and releases. To understand this, it will be necessary to define incarceration rates at the neighborhood level, the informal social control experienced in these neighborhoods, and the levels of tolerance among residents regarding conflictive behaviors. Countries in the Global South need to analyze the social effects of incarceration when it becomes massive and geographically concentrated in certain neighborhoods of our cities, which, in the process of returning to prison, are overrepresented within the prison system. The weakening or increased vulnerability of these neighborhoods, which seems to expose them to a greater degree of criminal activity, as well as the ghettoization of their residents' likely social relationships (Layperonnie 2008), are phenomena that can be related to the circuit relationships in which they find themselves. Understanding how definitions and regulations regarding the use of violence "circulate" from the neighborhood to the prison and vice versa, through the primary channel of the families of detainees, determining the level of tolerance that the inhabitants of these neighborhoods, socialized in the prison experience, have regarding prohibited behaviors but also regarding penal control agencies, and finally, establishing the discontinuities and continuities between the groups – gangs, brawls, gang-like youth, gangs, maras – of young inhabitants of these neighborhoods inside and outside the prison, will allow the formulation of social intervention strategies with the effectiveness of interrupting the communication flows established between the various elements of the circuit.