Resocialization,gender and the Global South: A critical analysis of the concept through women's experiences in prisons in Peru

In this article, I engage in a critical feminist, decolonial analysis of how prisons seek to ‘resocialize’ women, by drawing on research with current and former Peruvian female prisoners. In so doing, I contribute to an enduring body of scholarship on women's imprisonment, which has found it to reproduce traditional gender norms (see Bosworth, 1999; Bosworth and Kaufman, 2013; Carlen, 1983; Carlen and Worrall, 2004; Howe, 1994; Moran et al., 2009). In Latin America, specifically, critical scholars have argued that Catholic mandates have sought to transform female prisoners to reproducers of care (Aguirre, 2003; Calandria and González, 2021; Guala, 2016). Prisons here seek to dominate and domesticate women through moralizing punitive and paternalistic mandates in order to transform them into docile and submissive subjects (Ballester, 2021; Bracco, 2022a; Cacopardo and Malacalza, 2019; Carranza, 2016; Guala, 2016; Romero-García, 2017).

At the same time, the women are not entirely passive. Rather, as I will demonstrate, women's prisons are shaped by informal-customary dimensions as well as by more formal-institutional ones. In multiple, informal ways, female prisoners create subjective and collective transformations that I define as forms of ‘self-discovery’, ‘governance of common goods’ and ‘entrepreneurial’. Below I examine each of these actions in more detail.

Methodological approach

This article draws on conversations with Peruvian women who were either currently or formerly in prison over two different periods. ¹ The first stage was a six-month ethnographic study in Santa Monica, Peru, in 2018. In that period, I visited the prison four days a week for four to five hours each day, during which I circulated without the supervision of staff. This time provided me the opportunity to have formal and informal conversations with the women while observing their daily activities including workshops (e.g. labour and educational) and leisure time on the patio. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 incarcerated women whom I met between two and four times each, producing approximately 50 hours of audio-recorded dialogue. The second stage of the research included interviews with three former prisoners from Chorrillos 2, a smaller women's prison located next to Santa Monica in 2021. These semi-structured interviews, which lasted about an hour each, were also audio-recorded.

In both parts of the research project, I asked the women about their experiences of the formal resocialization processes in prison. We discussed how their everyday practices, actions and reflections connected to their personal transformations and to ‘new’ capabilities that they believed would be useful for their life after imprisonment. Both prisons were medium security, and all the research participants used the same language to address the resocialization process (INPE, 2018).

Although I do not have specific data about the women I spoke to, it is possible to provide a general demographic profile based on the first (and only) national census of the penitentiary population nationwide (INEI, 2016). More than half the women in prison in Peru (59%) are single. The majority (88.3%) are mothers. Most (around 58%) have not completed elementary or secondary school. Regarding employment status, 86% were dedicated to being a houseworker before imprisonment. ² Regarding ethnicity, 54.4% self-identify as Mestiza, 16% as Quechua or Aymara, and 7.7% as Afro-Peruvian. ³ Most women (68.5%) are in prison for the first time, while 95.3% did not use a weapon and 90% had not consumed any drugs at the time of their conviction.

For the data analysis, I first transcribed the interviews, read the transcripts several times to familiarize myself with the data (Braun and Clarke, 2006) and connected the transcripts with my field notes. I then thematically organized the data into categories that responded to the research questions. From there, I identified emerging themes that distinguished a formal-institutional dimension from one I considered to be an informal-customary one.

Finally, I recognized my positionality in the research process, both during fieldwork and the data analysis stage. As such, I aim to distance this study from the metaphor of an objective truth, of the voyeuristic perception of prison and prisoners, and to intentionally be vulnerable and empathetic while also trying to eliminate hierarchical power dynamics between the researcher and researched. I approached my research as a technology of care (Bracco, 2022a), seeking to take care of all participants (including myself), engaging in respectful and empathetic relationships.

The failure of resocialization and the negotiated practices in Latin American prisons

The Peruvian Constitution defines resocialization through three axes: re-education, rehabilitation and reincorporation (Urias, 2001). To accomplish it, a custodial sentence must be accompanied by a treatment process, which is based on diagnosis, prognosis, classification and an individualized psychological programme. Thus, prison staff propose strategies and mechanisms to modify prisoners’ attitudes and behaviours so that once the sentence has been completed, men and women deprived of their liberty may reincorporate into society in healthy and wholesome conditions and do not re-offend (Montoya, 2008; Mosquera, 2015; Saenz, 2007).

Many studies in Latin America refer to the impossibility of penitentiary institutions accomplishing the resocialization processes, pointing to an array of structural characteristics including: overcrowding, corruption, precarious infrastructure and lack of human and material resources (Antony, 2007; Ytokazu, 2021). In March 2020, the National Penitentiary Institute of Peru (INPE) reported that 210 psychologists were working with a penitentiary population of 97,493 prisoners (INPE, 2020). One hundred and seventeen psychologists were based in Lima, where the ratio was just one psychologist for 393 prisoners. ⁴ At Santa Monica, which is the main women's prison in Peru, there are three psychologists to classify, evaluate and conduct individual and group therapy for more than 750 prisoners. Unsurprisingly then, according to INPE, in March 2020, only 10.8% of female prisoners received any institutional psychological service (INPE, 2020).

Beyond logistical challenges, the concept of resocialization is epistemologically problematic. On the one hand, it promotes an individualistic perspective of criminality and transgression, obscuring the structural inequalities that lead to offending. In colonized, patriarchal societies like Peru, inequalities based on class, race, ethnicity and gender are fundamental in analysing criminalization and imprisonment. Those variables create intermingled processes that propel a matrix of oppression and racialized-gendered identities (Espinosa, 2016; Espinosa Miñoso, 2014; Galindo, 2015; Lugones, 2008). Groups such as indigenous communities or economically deprived populations, who are generally marginalized from wealth, power and formal opportunities, have higher imprisonment rates (Segato, 2007). According to the official statistics, women in prison are mainly economically deprived, have had limited access to formal education and labour opportunities, have been victims of violence and sexual abuse and are young single mothers (INEI, 2016). Qualitative studies have found similar results. In their research about women sentenced for drug trafficking in Peru, for example, Fernández et al. (in press) interviewed 57 prisoners. They highlighted that 84% of participants had been victims of domestic or sexual violence, 43% were pregnant during adolescence and 66% worked in precarious conditions before imprisonment since childhood or adolescence.

An individualistic perspective of crime overlooks these structural social inequalities. Thus, prisoners are usually seen as transgressors, undisciplined and immoral citizens (Aguirre, 2009). By contrast, research that incorporates a gender lens views female prisoners as those who have been distanced from their role as reproducers of care imposed by a colonial-patriarchal structure (Aguirre, 2003; Bracco, 2022a; Constant, 2016; Guala, 2016). As such, resocialization includes a moralizing and re-feminizing component through religion, education and labour. Their feminization is based on stereotypes of what is considered an appropriate ‘woman’ based on the colonial-patriarchal project. Therefore, prisoners are re-educated, seeking their adaptation as ‘normal’ female citizens through the acquisition of the habitus of a stereotypical Euro-centred bourgeois-class woman (Romero-García, 2017).

The concept of resocialization also hides Latin America's political and societal punitive turn. In the last 30 years, national governments in Latin America have adopted a populist punitive attitude towards crime (Cacopardo and Malacalza, 2019; Sozzo, 2016, 2022), legislating harsher laws and sentences. This fact has been evident in drug trafficking, which has undeniably impacted the overrepresentation of women sentenced for this crime in Latin America (Coba, 2015). Similarly, in April 2022, former President Pedro Castillo proposed the legislation of a new law to administer chemical castration to perpetrators of sexual violence (De la Quintana, 2022). These laws have been criticized for their ineffectiveness to reduce crime, populism and vindictive individualistic approach while ignoring structural patriarchal issues in Peruvian society (Acosta, 2022). Nonetheless, harsher punishment for crime remains popular among many in the society. For example, according to a survey by the Peruvian Public Opinion Institute (2019), 50% of the population demands harsher penalties towards crime, reflecting the broader Latin American authoritarian political and social culture (Portocarrero, 2010).

Prisons in Latin America have been generally defined by precariousness and deficiencies. However, more recently, criminologists from Latin America have begun to move beyond this one-sided conceptualization and have started to analyse everyday praxis in prisons. By recognizing prison as a site of co-governance, prisoners are not only seen as submissive to ‘top–down’ power, but as capable of performing semi-autonomous actions inside prison, for example, engaging in activities to produce economic resources and creating solidarity groups among prisoners that are not formally institutionalized. In such ways, prisoners themselves engage in transformative individual and collective processes they perceived to be resocialization actions—which are nevertheless significantly distant from resocialization's more formal, institutional meaning.

Resocialization's dual and intermingled conceptualization

In this section, I develop two dimensions of resocialization: the formal-institutional one, and an informal-customary version. Although these dimensions are experienced interdependently in prison, I distinguish them for analytical purposes. The formal-institutional dimension is linked to the modern-colonial-patriarchal project, which seeks to moralize female prisoners through symbolic discourses and practices linked to patriarchal bourgeois femininity. It propels a dichotomous conceptualization of womanhood that differentiates between ‘correctness’ and ‘incorrectness’. By contrast, informal resocialization discourses and practices create subjective transformations. To illustrate, I focus on three semi-autonomous paths that enable women to reconfigure themselves inside prison: (1) self-discovery; (2) governance of common goods; and (3) entrepreneurship roles.

The formal-institutional dimension of resocialization

The formal-institutional dimension of resocialization includes classification, evaluation, a therapeutic process led by psychologists and social workers, and educational and labour workshops. These dimensions are mandatory activities that seek to mould the women, through symbolic moralizing discourses and practices linked to modern-colonial-patriarchal femininity. Thus, beyond their structural precarity and corrupt system, the Peruvian women's prisons are institutions that have an individualistic pathological perspective of criminality and reproduce ‘civilizing’ heteronormative gendered discourses and practices that establish dichotomous hierarchies between those who are considered ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women.

Most of the Peruvian prison population is located in the ‘Ordinary Closed Regime’ (INPE, 2020). The first step of resocialization in prison is to classify prisoners. At the Ordinary Closed Regime, there are three levels: minimum, medium and maximum security. A multidisciplinary team, which includes a psychologist, a social worker and a lawyer, determines the location of the women in a specific prison with a particular treatment regime (INPE, 2020).

Despite the fact that security regimes usually refer to different prisons, in Santa Monica, female prisoners are classified by minimum, medium or maximum security in the same prison. Santa Monica prison has three pavilions: A, B and C, which are formally considered the minimum, medium and maximum security, respectively. Women in pavilion C are considered problematic and are unable to apply for penitentiary benefits; those who have advanced in their process and internalized the rules of the prison are in pavilion B; and those who are considered to be calmer and resocialized are in pavilion A.

In the maximum-security stage (pavilion C), prisoners are meant to be subject to stricter discipline than those categorized in medium- or minimum-security stage (pavilions B and A), have less time at the patios and fewer visits (INPE, 2020). However, despite the fact that female prisoners are formally categorized in different security regimes, in practice, the security procedure is the same for all of them. For example, all women, regardless of their classification, have to be outside their cells during the day (between 7.30 a.m. and 5.30 p.m.), the pavilion fences are closed by 6 p.m. and the lights are off at 10 p.m. Twice a day (morning and afternoon), security staff organize la cuenta (countdown of women in each pavilion).

My ethnographic findings suggest that psychological assessments are based on how prisoners ‘fit’ according to the modern colonial-patriarchal imaginary of women. In Santa Monica, prisoners are expected to be delicate, respectful, silent, faithful and submissive to authority. They must dress ‘properly’; not shout, swear or engage in physical violence; respect formal rules without hesitation; and distance themselves from pills, violent conflicts and homosexual encounters or relationships. If not, they are viewed as ‘maladapted’; for example, a psychologist from Santa Monica says: ‘some of the women are maladapted. They gamble, use drugs, and drink. They are 35–40 years old, but because of their lifestyle, they seem much older.’ In Peru, activities such as drinking, gambling or taking drugs are often related to hegemonic masculinity and performance in the public sphere (Cáceres et al., 2002), which tend to be associated with the immersion in illegal-criminal activities.

Traditional gender mandates also discipline sexuality. Notwithstanding significant changes to the field of psychology over the last 30 years (Gallegos, 2014), Latin American women's prisons continue to pathologize homosexuality and trans populations (Coba, 2015; Constant and Rojas, 2011). Conjugal visits are only formally approved with persons of the other sex and with whom prisoners have cohabited or to whom they are married. As in the Global North, Latin American feminist scholars have likewise documented that work and education in prison generally focus on reinforcing habits and occupations traditionally ‘assigned’ to women, such as cooking, cleaning and making handicrafts or fashion (Antony, 2007; Azaola, 2005; Boiteaux, 2015; Guala, 2016). Participants claimed that women's prisons in Peru offer ‘technical courses with no official value such as cosmetology, cold ceramics and art’. In other words, the workshops are associated with domestic chores and the production of handicrafts. These are considered ‘feminine’ activities that can be carried out in their homes or care and reproductive work (Ariza and Iturralde, 2015; Tronto, 2006).

Another significant aspect of formal-institutional education and labour workshops is the institutional precariousness and corruption that prevail in their management. INPE, Peru's National Penitentiary Institute, is the government agency responsible for the administration of Peruvian prisons; it organizes education and labour workshops in female prisons, such as textile, confection, cosmetology, arts and crafts, cooking and computing. The prisoners must pay a tuition (around US$5 per month) to participate in those workshops. Besides the tuition, prisoners have to buy their tools and material from external providers. ⁵ This leads Patricia, ⁶ a prisoner in Santa Monica, to argue that ‘only the INPE [Peru's National Penitentiary Institute] workshops have [formal-institutional] value. In labour [workshops], they only pass attendance lists. They consider that you have worked if you pay. Otherwise, participation is not counted.’ So, when Patricia states that only INPE workshops have value, she means that only these formal-institutional activities are considered for purposes of sentence reduction. While prisoners may work informally in these workshops, the INPE does not acknowledge that participation if they do not pay for the tuition. So, formally, it appears as if they are not working during their imprisonment.

Finally, some of the women I interviewed raised concerns about the individual and group counselling or education and labour activities offered by the institution. Naia, for example, who had spent 20 years in prison in Lima, referred to the punitive approach of prison staff during the individual and group counselling sessions. As she manifests: ‘They [INPE's staff] compete to see who is more drastic, who has “more ovaries” ⁷ to morally and psychologically harm us [female prisoners]. They think this is the way they are going to correct us.’ The staff ‘works with the same programmes yearly’, she went on. If we consider that women in Peru are generally sentenced to between five and 10 years (INEI, 2016), it is clear that the activities become repetitive. As Naia continues:

Resocialization is a simple cliche, a name. What are you going to resocialize from? […] They simply comply in giving you little sheets of paper to, as they say, reflect on. Read this sheet and reflect, read this reading and reflect. And the truth is that in the 20 years, they are the same sheets.

In sum, the institutional process of resocialization in Peru reproduces the gendered essentialism of the modern-colonial-patriarchal project (Espinosa Miñoso, 2014) and the re-feminization of women in reference to the stereotype of a typical bourgeois woman (Romero-García, 2017). The female prisoners must attend these mandatory activities to apply for penitentiary benefits. Moreover, instead of being transformative, those treatment activities are seen as bureaucratic procedures that they need to follow to show their ‘good’ attitude towards resocialization.

The informal-customary dimension of resocialization

In contrast to these formal institutional practices, there are discourses and practices at the informal-customary dimension that do create transformative subjective processes that could be associated with resocialization. Nonetheless, these actions are distant from the institution and connect to prison's grey area where female prisoners may engage in semi-autonomous paths that enable them to reconfigure themselves inside prison.

The formal-institutional and the informal-customary dimensions are not separate sites. Rather, prisons should be understood as a site of interlegality (De Sousa Santos, 2002), in which both dimensions are lived in an interactional and intersubjective manner, superimposing and interpenetrating the subjects’ actions and minds while also acting independently (De Sousa Santos, 2002). Following Kaes (1985) and his psychoanalytical analysis of institutions, there are unconscious group alliances that provide bonds and a psychological sense of the subjects’ positionality in a particular institution. For Kaes (1985), psychic life is not exclusively centred in a personal unconscious, but a portion of its identity is linked to institutions as a social and cultural formation. Thus, institutions precede us, regulate our relations and impose on us.

Using the concepts of De Sousa Santos (2002) and Kaes (1985) allows us to see how everybody inside prison—staff and prisoners alike—moves and performs in the spectrum of institutional-customary, having multiple variations and dynamism according to the persons involved, the place, the time and several other elements. Thus, I suggest that staff and prisoners mostly perform in an interlegal arena, which intermingles formal-institutional and informal-customary aims: they fluctuate in the continuum between the expectancy of order and security, and the desired therapeutic goal of autonomy and well-being. Nonetheless, each group (staff and prisoners) also has (un)conscious alliances depending on their positionality within the institution and will take a stand in one or other extreme of such continuum in situations of open conflict, crisis or when their role feels diminished in the situation. For example, Naia describes prison staff performing in this interlegality. Sometimes they try to improve prisoners’ well-being and create connections with them. However, when they are creating a more solid alliance with prisoners, the institution (INPE) seeks to neutralize it:

There are good psychologists, there are good social workers, and there are good lawyers. But those good ones are few and are not allowed to work. The INPE doesn’t let them work, […] doesn’t give them the facilities. [INPE] just close the door for them. They are between a sword and a wall. There is always a boss, the boss, for example … social worker X can be empathetic and say I will help you, but the boss, her boss, doesn’t want to give permission, doesn’t want to do things.

For many women, imprisonment is a subjective milestone, a site where they can establish an identity division: themselves before and after prison. When they talked about their sentences, there was a shared view that their time in prison was a pre-determined turning point in their lives, a challenge sent to them by a higher entity to provide necessary life lessons for them that would enable them to have a different, happier life after their release. As Janina says:

my daughters write me letters … my eldest daughter said to me ‘mum, this, what has happened to you is going to end, and at last we are going to be happy; you are going to be able to do everything, at last, we are going to be able to travel to Spain to a bar to see all the handsome boys who pass by’. And what I always remember about her is because my daughters are Christians, they always told me that God's timing is perfect and that he writes in crooked lines.

In their informal conversations with one another, women subtly transformed their view about imprisonment from a ‘time of punishment’ to a ‘time of learning’; a path to self-discovery. This introspective journey enabled them to construct a different perspective of themselves, their life and their relationships. As Katherine states: ‘I feel with each passing day that I am getting stronger, more courageous.’ In the same vein, Elma describes how she sees herself after her time in prison and what she had learned during the conviviality with other female prisoners:

A lady who has changed her character, her patience, her patience has been strengthened, isn’t it? And knowing how to understand others, right? Why do they act like that? Why do they think like that? And … that gives me doesn’t it, the ability to put up with other people? Know how to understand the above all because if I understand other people who are not my family, who are not my blood, then I can understand my children, my grandchildren, and the patience it gives me here. As they are my blood, my family, I will have much more patience, right?

As already mentioned, the political structure of prisons in Peru, as in other countries in the Global South (see Sozzo, 2022), involves the active participation of prisoners to maintain order and security, as well as to organize goods and services within prison. The prison operates through co-governance between authorities, prison staff and prisoners. Thus, the managerial functioning is co-produced and co-financed by prisoners and held by the semi-autonomous (Moore, 1973) role of prisoner-delegates (Bracco, 2022a, 2022b). Delegates, elected by authorities and prisoners, have a fragile yet legitimate power. These prisoner-delegates act as ‘interface brokers’ (Long, 1999: 1). In the case of Santa Monica, interface brokers maintain the equilibrium between order and autonomy. More concretely, the delegate must be able to negotiate with the authorities and create strategies to keep a sense of equilibrium of power between the authorities’ need for order and security while maintaining or improving prisoners’ well-being and semi-autonomous actions inside prison (Bracco, 2022a). As Maria, an ex-prisoner, suggests: ‘[prisoner-delegates are] the bridge between the authority and the girls, isn’t it? In case they see what the needs are and what is missing. That's the … the work that the delegates do. They are a bridge.’

To discuss how the governance of common goods involves subjective transformations that install capabilities on women, I discuss the case of Ana. During my fieldwork, Ana was living in prison with her one-year-old son and was the delegate of the mothers’ pavilion. She describes her plans to improve their living spaces:

For me, the delegation was more for my pavilion, the well-being of my pavilion. I wanted to make many improvements and do many things that needed to be done in the pavilion. [I wanted to make] a toilet, the ones we have in the bathrooms are disastrous, to change the structure, to make everything ok, especially the bathrooms for the children, right? So, I had projects for that, the environment, the whole pavilion to be decorated, the structure, and each room with its curtains, because I like to live well inside our possibilities, but well, right? Everything in its place. So, I wanted to manage all these projects when I took over as a delegate because before I also wanted to collaborate and do many things, but often it is not so possible when you don’t lead something.

Through the delegate's role, prisoners ironically fortify attributes generally associated with traditional masculinity. Considering the quote above and the one below, Ana clearly describes how in their role, they learn to negotiate, organize debates, communicate effectively, possess organizational skills, speak in public and dialogue rationally and strategically:

All the meetings call us delegates all the time, even for small things, the meeting with the prison's Director, the problems in the pavilion, everything that happens. And the problems in the pavilion are a burden on everyone when you are a delegate because they [the authorities] tell us ‘why don’t you manage discipline, why don’t you manage your pavilion, everything must be ok. What problems are there? And you mention that there are problems with this person, but what are you there for? You solve it, and they call our attention to us if there are problems in the pavilion.’ As they say, ‘Put your belt on tight’ and make sure to do things right. So, with so many calls for attention from the prison Director, I got a bit serious. Maybe, let's say, I didn’t even try to raise my voice or anything, I just told my compañeras in a meeting and the little group that always tries to make me look bad. So, they start shouting and talking. In the end, everybody is talking, and nobody is listening to each other. So, for the first time in my life, I raised my hand, I don’t have such a high voice but with my hand I clapped loudly, and I said [to the prisoners at the pavilion's general assembly], ‘girls, please, let's start raising our hands one by one, and we can talk, and we can’t understand because this way the meeting is not going to end’.

In that sense, in their practices at an informal-customary dimension, women transform their selves and fortify capabilities to perform in the public sphere. Therefore, traditional femininity re-configures and subverts the notion of caregiver in a macro-political arena, fortifying their political agency in their role as delegates.

The third path where women reconfigure themselves is to create entrepreneurship roles in prison. Recently, INPE's authorities had signed contracts with private companies to manufacture their goods by contracting prisoners. In Santa Monica, there are two private companies that manufacture jeans and leather. Women apply for these jobs and are hired because of their ability to sew. Their payment is a commission on their daily production. Working full time, including weekends, their salaries oscillate between 40 and 50 soles (US$10–13) per week. Although these are economically paying jobs that provide the mandatory hours of labour to access penitentiary benefits, the prisoners often avoid these jobs. As one woman says:

They take advantage because here, it is true, they invest. At least the jeans workers have improved the second floor because there has been no other investment, and they train them, but they pay them very little. Even less than the basic wage, apart from the fact that they don’t have insurance, they don’t have any benefits. So, it is exploitation.

An entrepreneurship called ‘The Queen's’ created by a prisoner named Medalith offers a glimpse of how this dual system operated. Although Medalith was the owner of the only formally registered micro-entrepreneurship coordinated by prisoners in Santa Monica, her mode of operation was an example for other prisoners who also wanted to propel their micro-enterprises. Before she was transferred to Santa Monica, a non-governmental organization (NGO) trained Medalith to make shoes in another prison, where she had a working space where she could practise and teach other prisoners. There, she had first planned her entrepreneurial venture. As she recalled:

I am not going to repair shoes [for private companies who contracted female prisoners], I am going to make them. And the Director told me: ‘who do you think you are? The Queen?’ And that is how The Queen's was born. Take notice of the apostrophe … we produce what the Queen wears.

In 2011, Medalith was transferred to Santa Monica, where there was no shoe workshop. To address this gap, she presented a project to the then-Director. As she recalled:

there was no one in ceramics, so we cleared the workshop […] the people from CEAS [the NGO Comisión Episcopal de Acción Social] came to train the girls once again, and I, with what I could, also trained the vast majority of the girls who worked with me, and we opened the workshop.

Medalith stated she would not close her entrepreneurship. She was evicted from the shoe workshop and sent to a remote abandoned location in prison. Three women followed her, and with them, she re-organized her workshop. To start, she relied on interpersonal relationships with other prisoners in the Tailor and Confection workshop to sew their products, asked her son to purchase machinery, equipment and materials, and asked the other prisoners to maintain confidence in her project. In other words, although it was not a formal workshop, she still needed other prisoners to work with her to create the products and generate economic incomes. By 2018, Medalith had officially formalized ‘The Queen's’ and was registered as the only company in a women's prison. ⁸ In this workshop, Medalith selects, trains and monitors other prisoners. When I interviewed her, she had hired eight to 10 women that she trained and paid by item.

From an economic perspective, Medalith is a co-producer of the formal labour workshops at Santa Monica. Her work substitutes the state's responsibility, as she organizes a labour workshop that should be offered by the INPE. She also offers unpaid training and the economic and material provisions to her peers who may be defined as contract workers to ensure her entrepreneurial sustainability. In my conversations with the women who worked with Medalith, they expected to develop medium- to long-term plans which involved the creation of micro-entrepreneurships. There is an incorporation of the ‘market’ narrative, the expectation of becoming autonomous or being ‘their own bosses’ and acquiring business skills, which may make women more appreciated in a productive-salaried sphere. To achieve this in Santa Monica, prisoners negotiate with authorities and prison staff to develop their brands and services, contract their peers (formally registered in the INPE's workshops) and fortify their professional and technical skills while creating emotional care network among themselves.

These encounters also involve a collective care network between prisoners. In other words, there is also ‘solidarity through a caring relationship’ (Stewart, 2011: 47), which is embedded within an emotional connection among the prisoners who work together. Every Monday morning, Medalith conducts a meeting with all her staff to discuss possible conflicts among workers, reflect on values that may be beneficial to their empowerment and how they may concretely apply them in their everyday lives inside prison and after release. Consequently, Medalith pursued the creation of her brands while providing psychological reassurance and empowerment to her workers. Moreover, she hopes that every woman who works at ‘The Queen's’, once released from prison, becomes an entrepreneur outside and creates her own shoe shop. Thus, ex-prisoners would have legal and economic activity, augmenting their production in prison under just conditions. She defines this process as ‘the real resocialization’.

In this context, prisoners become co-financiers and co-producers of formal labour activities. At the same time, the formal labour workshops become platforms for semi-autonomous, collaborative actions that teach the prisoners skills that are valued in the marketplace. Moreover, prisoners create emotional relationships of solidarity that aid them to collectively face imprisonment. In sum, the informal-customary dimension of resocialization has subjective and material transformations on the prisoners. It enables them to construct spaces of collective care, reflexivity and skills-building, responsibilities that are allegedly associated with the formal-institutional dimension.

Final reflections

The concept of resocialization links to the Eurocentric-patriarchal colonial project and establishes a specific gendered way of how we should live in society. It assumes that there are rules and ways of being and doing, and that those who do not follow them are ‘maladapted’. This idea of resocialization assumes that there is such a thing as normality, freedom, justice and good manners. People who break the rules of citizenship are misfits who need to be ‘cured’. Resocialization and its possibilities are linked to discipline. Psychology and therapeutic processes have a significant role in the concept of resocialization: instead of being used as an emotionally secure space to reflect about oneself, therapies convert into a space where women must enact a defined way of thought and learn how to adapt to social and institutional norms.

Although the modern-colonial-patriarchal system intends to impose resocialization, it has not entirely succeeded. Instead, there are two intermingled dimensions of the concept of resocialization: the formal-institutional and the informal-customary. The latter recreates the concept of resocialization and also subverts it. Indeed, prisoners adhere to traditionally gendered mandates and prison expectations, but also, in their experiences, there is searching for emancipating of patriarchal mandates. In the path to self-discovery, female prisoners seek to create a learning path about themselves, linked to intra-personal capacities. In the governance of common goods, women fulfil an apprenticeship in managing their life in common. In the entrepreneurship path, they search for economic autonomy and an independent entrance to the public sphere. In so doing, the women fortify themselves to face imprisonment and create emotional and material well-being within precarious conditions. This form of agency produces an ambiguous, ambivalent, inconsistent situation: in prison, someone may lose their freedom but find their liberation through their daily struggles and semi-autonomous performances.

It is essential to mention that all these processes are linked in one way or another to motherhood and religion. Although I have not explored this connection in depth here, all the resocialization processes intersect with religion and the motivation to become ‘good’ mothers. While these are modern-colonial-patriarchal mandates, this article also recognizes how the women's informal practices create a more complex view of their experiences and break the dichotomous conception of discipline-resistance to acknowledge the ambiguities and inconsistencies.

Finally, the recognition of the informal-customary dimension has a political intention. I consider it is an opportunity to enforce abolitionist theory from a Global South perspective. Although a radical abolition of prisons is a utopian idea, it is possible to propose a progressive transformation of imprisonment that seeks to amplify well-being and recognize prisoners’ participation, initiatives and everyday praxis. From a decolonial feminist perspective, structural transformations start on the focus of people and communities’ knowledge of their role in power relations—in other words, on the colonized subjects’ capacity to strategically transform, incorporate and use to their benefit discourses and practices of resistance (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012). Therefore, I intend to inspire what prisoners and ex-prisoners are doing inside the prison to fortify their well-being. The aim is to recognize and learn from their initiatives, resistances and negotiations, which provide a unique perspective on understanding local phenomena in the Global South and inform the analysis and transformations of imprisonment globally.