The prison, the city and the neoliberal government of urban security: three structural couplings

Abstract

In this theoretical research I hypothesize that contemporary penal and urban changes are increasingly connected through the structural couplings of (i) different power technologies, (ii) social systems and (iii) social structures, reorienting criminal justice systems modes of operation in different global cities towards the punitive turn, and specially the enforcement of selective mass incarceration policies.In particular, it tries to think (i) the articulation of sovereign and disciplinary power technologies under the hegemony of neoliberal governmentality, with emphasis on the adoption of exception legal measures and strategies of individual responsibilization; (ii) the de-differentiation trends produced by neoliberalism and the recomposition of economical, political and legal boundaries, and its effects on criminal justice systems that seem to be increasingly colonized either towards politicization through penal populism or towards economization through crime control industry; (iii) in the Brazilian case, the way a historical continuum of criminal justice system colonization finds today a somewhat counterintuitive legitimation in the emergency of the neoliberal government of urban security which connects determinate crime control strategies in specific urban spaces. (AU)