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CJC Seminar - Máximo Sozzo, Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina)

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Location: Room S2.09 & Room S0.08

A buffet lunch will be served in Room S2.09 from 12.30pm. The seminar will start in Room S0.08 at 1pm.

Beyond the ‘neoliberal penalty thesis’? Political change and punitive turn in South America

Máximo Sozzo from Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina) has kindly agreed to present his work on postneoliberal penality in South America.

"As it is well known, in recent years certain South American contexts have experienced strong processes of political change. Some of these processes have given rise to governmental experiences that continue to this day: Venezuela since 1999, Uruguay since 2004, Bolivia since 2006 and Ecuador since 2007. Others were closed recently: Brazil between 2003 and 2016 and Argentina between 2003 and 2015. The governmental alliances and programs built in these countries during this processes had important differences.

Nevertheless, there is a common element: the rejection of neoliberalism. Around this rejection, a “postneoliberal” promise emerged as the basis of political identities on which legitimacy and popular support was constructed. The degree of practical translation of this postneoliberal promise has varied greatly and has led to intense political and scientific debates. In this paper, I address comparatively the relationship between these processes of political change and the penal field. I focus my analysis on three of these scenarios: Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador.

In all of them there was initially, a public rhetoric that deliberately sought to distance itself from the language of the "mano dura" that was present - with varying degrees of strength - in their recent past. The processes of political change generated in all these jurisdictions a moment of penal moderation. Various direct and indirect means constructed this penal outcome and I describe them in the paper.

However, in all these cases, contradictory tendencies, more or less marked, towards the growth of punitiveness followed these "virtuous" moments. For example, the incarceration rate in Venezuela grew 98% between 2008 and 2014. In the case of Venezuela this development can be considered a “postneoliberal punitive turn”, since it was completely constructed during this governmental experience, after a decade of stable and very moderate incarceration rates. In Ecuador and Argentina, there were punitive turns that preceded the emergence of these governmental experiences. This element install the difficult question about legacies and “path dependency”. I discuss both trajectories in detail in this paper.

All these countries have witnessed in the framework of these governmental experiences clear reductions in the levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty and a strong expansion of social policies, especially during the 2000s and up to the beginning of the 2010s. Since that time, some of these contexts have begun to present signs of economic crisis that became increasingly stronger but with dissimilar intensities. However, there were no absolute reversals of the economic and social achievements produced before.

In any case, it is difficult to think of these punitive developments as a consequence of “neoliberalism” as a homogenous political project of an increasingly transnational elite, as the “neoliberal penalty thesis” proposed. This paper sustains that the tendencies towards penal expansion, just as the precedent ones oriented towards penal moderation, were created through strategies and struggles carried out in the terrain of politics, broadly defined, inside and outside these governmental alliances, both by state (including penal) and non-state actors. It tries to present specifically these dynamics and processes advocating for a more substantively political approach to the penal field and changes"

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