Between state theatres and prisoner performances of change Nicaragua’s contested moral politics of incarceration

In Nicaragua, the national penitentiary law holds that the primordial goal of imprisonment is the ‘penal re-education’ of incarcerated people. Constituting the institutional vehicle for so-called ‘change of attitude’, this politico-moral framework however shapes not only how re-education is enacted, but also who is considered deserving of the benefits it has become infused with, spurring a continuous performative battle between prisoners and authorities. At the hand of long-term ethnographic research conducted with (formerly) incarcerated people, this article seeks to elucidate not only the ways in which multiple moral orders can coexist and vie with each other, but also how morality and legitimacy are co-constituted. It does so by expanding on Jarett Zigon’s tripartite conceptualization of ‘moral assemblages’ to consider the potentiality of institutional ethical breakdown, focusing on the ethical practices of incarcerated young men as they struggle for moral recognition within and against the institution. Having considered in depth the moral politics and performances of penal re-education, I turn to the re-emergence of political imprisonment to elicit how moral and political breakdowns may strengthen one another, planting the seeds for institutional change. Yet nearly 7 years after the mass protests and their lethal repression, Nicaraguan criminal justice institutions appear more politically and morally unmovable than ever. Though local moral assemblages have certainly proven malleable, this politico-moral work ‘from below’ appears severely limited by the disproportionate amount of power amassed ‘above’. That is, by a system of powerholders who have radicalized their values, investing in the maintenance of their political position at all costs. As a result, the Nicaraguan case points to both possibilities and severe limitations for moral and institutional change under autocratic rule.