Implementing social policy through the criminal justice system: youth, prisons, and community-oriented policing in Nicaragua

Prison Riots in Nicaragua: Negotiating Co-Governance Amid Creative Violence and Public Secrecy

“…3 This discourse of "exception," however, is directly related to the way in which these institutions have historically figured in the Sandinista's "revolutionary" state-building project and is pivotal to the practices of the current Sandinista government (2007-date). Importantly, however, the ability of policing and prison institutions to project themselves as lawful while simultaneously engaging in extralegal governance strategies is key to understanding the cultivation of public secrecy so that these extralegal entanglements remain unquestioned (Guevara, 2014;Weegels, 2018aWeegels, , 2018bWeegels, , 2018c. Related to this is the fact that national human rights organizations have been banned from accessing prison since 2008, and journalists have suffered a similar fate.…”

“… 1. This state has been largely unveiled by way of their own exorbitant repression of anti-government protests that began taking place after April 18, 2018. I have argued elsewhere (2018b) that the authorities’ deployment of lethal force as well as its full institutional and para-institutional apparatus against the protesters has irreversibly undone over a decade’s worth of the government’s institutional and takeover reputation-building (an issue discussed at length in Collombon & Rodgers, 2018; Guevara, 2014; Walker & Wade, 2017; and relating to the police and prison system in Weegels, 2018a, 2018d). …”

“… 3. For more critical accounts of Nicaraguan policing strategies and policies, see Rocha (2005, 2007), Rodgers (2006, 2009, 2016), and Weegels (2018a, 2018d)—all researched and written before the hardhanded repression of anti-government protests in 2018, which largely debunked the Nicaraguan police’s “friendly” reputation. …”

Undoing the “Cemetery of the Living”: Performing Change, Embodying Resistance through Prison Theater in Nicaragua

“…2 In this essay, I explore the effects of prison as a moral institution through the dialogical relationship between its institutional performance and the political -moral realms in which it is embedded. The latter are articulated through the institutional emphasis on citizen security, which (re)produces particular social and prison -related stigma and as such can be understood as producing particular gendered and classed subjects of intervention (Levenson, 2013;Weegels, 2018aWeegels, , 2018b. In this way, particular "noncitizen" subjects are identified for exclusion from the community and deemed fit for imprisonment.…”

“…For a close consideration of the way in which the Nicaraguan government (2007 to present) uses the criminal justice system as a vital arena for implementing social policies directed at "wayward" youths, seeWeegels (2018b). It must be noted that from April 2018 onwards the violent repression of anti -government protests (leaving over 300 dead and 800 imprisoned, most of them young), has definitively altered the public perception of policing and imprisonment in Nicaragua, as well as the government's discourse around community policing and imprisonment, bringing its long well -hidden repressive and politicized face into the public eye (for a discussion of this topic seeWeegels, 2018c).3 The adjective "humanitarian" (humanitario) has been incorporated into the institutional slogan of the Nicaraguan National Penitentiary System.…”