AbstractVenezuela has two types of prisons: a prison regime ruled by a hierarchical organisation of armed inmates and the securitised ‘New Regime’ system under the control of the Ministry of Penitentiary Services. This article uses a comparative approach to examine how legitimacy is constructed in these competing yet co-existing prison regime formations in Venezuela. Both the Venezuelan state and the prisons under ‘carceral self-rule’ legitimate their respective carceral orders through discourses of left-wing emancipation that correspond with different phases of the Bolivarian project. Yet contradictions emerge from these legitimising discourses and neither regime conforms to its respective discourse of participation or socialism. In the state-abandoned, violent and hierarchical prisons under carceral self-rule, prisoners are only partially empowered, while in the New Regime prison types predation at the hands of one's fellow inmates is replaced by the violence of the ‘humanising’ state.

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Utilizing the Feminist-Marxist lens of reproductive labor, I examine how the caring work and bodies of women who visit prisons are central to an analysis of the relationship of incarceration and social reproduction under capitalism. My research is based on participant observation and interviews with women prison visitors in 2014–2015 in Venezuela. I analyze how women bring food, clean laundry and otherwise approved items; they take long journeys, wait in lines for hours and pass through an invasive strip search so that they can visit their loved ones in prisons. This work is even more burdensome because the prisons operating under carceral self-rule—run by armed organizations of inmates through a de-facto privatization that centers not just survival but profit —fail to provide even the most basic necessities. I argue that the work of caring for a loved one in this context creates an additional burden on top of a job, housework, and community activism. This fourth shift requires that women’s labor be incorporated into a neoliberal carceral apparatus and also demonstrates that while the carceral zone is porous, the bodies of poor racialized women are used to enforce the prison border.

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