This essay examines inmate “crucifixion protests” in Ecuador's largest prison during 2003–04. It shows how the preventively incarcerated—of whom there are thousands—managed to effectively denounce their extralegal confinement by embodying the violence of the Christian crucifixion story. This form of protest, I argue, simultaneously clarified and obscured the multiple layers of sovereign power that pressed down on urban crime suspects, who found themselves persecuted and forsaken both outside and within the space of the prison. Police enacting zero‐tolerance policies in urban neighborhoods are thus a key part of the penal state, as are the politically threatened family members of the indicted, the sensationalized local media, distrustful neighbors, prison guards, and incarcerated mafia. The essay shows how the politico‐theological performance of self‐crucifixion responded to these internested forms of sovereign violence, and were briefly effective. The inmates’ cross intervention hence provides a window into the way sovereignty works in the Ecuadorean penal state, drawing out how incarceration trends and new urban security measures interlink, and produce an array of victims.

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To keep drugs and weapons out and to generate security clearance, Ecuador’s prison administrations now demand the visual, digital, or physical strip searching of all adult citizens who establish contact with incarcerated subjects. The prison system may normalize such denuding and voyeuristic surveillance, but prison officers deny any sexual content in these procedures while satisfying their professional gatekeeping tasks—the maintenance of carceral boundaries effectively blurring any formal distinctions between voyeuristic desire and bureaucratic duty. The state’s securitization of the prison in an age of inmate-threat neutralization and administrative segregation expands the carceral boundary of denuding surveillance to include non-incarcerated subjects. Rampant “security sexualization” and its disavowal, I suggest, form a spectral aspect of prison governance currently on the rise across Ecuador and in a cross-hemispheric context.

Whatever one might argue about prisons in Latin America or the Caribbean today, cross-regional booms in prison construction signal an immediate, pressing need for new kinds of study and critical diagnostics-and a revisiting of the ethics of community. The Western Hemisphere beyond North America occupies a key role in any study of the last quarter century of globalized carceral accelerationism. Almost all countrywide prison populations have doubled or tripled in size since the mid-to-late 1990s: national numbers approached, and sometimes surpassed, 300

The People's Mic is a new genre of political speech. In Occupy Wall Street (OWS) general assemblies, this tactile media for public deliberation was integral to embodying new political community across American cities in a globally oriented movement of the squares. Whether or not OWS has exemplified direct democracy per se, the People's Mic has cultivated new forms of democratic charisma between previously disaggregated constituencies-a "leaderful charisma", with historical roots in pious American oratorical traditions ("hallowed speech") and more recent movements for intercultural solidarity building (global justice, horizontalist, feminist, etc.). In this article, I signal how the People's Mic atavistically conjured and resembled the American town hall meeting in a contemporary and heterogeneous US frontier assembly. Before its strategic incapacitation, the Occupy movement's widespread use of People's Mic served to undermine the authority of private-public monopolies and to place a check on mounting police repression of urban space.