Enduring Lock-Up: Co-Governance and Exception in Nicaragua’s Hybrid Carceral System

While the Nicaraguan prison system officially functions as a progressive privilege system with a humanistic re-educational penal ideology advanced through its Penitentiary Law, overcrowding, violence, and a desperate lack of resources characterize its prisons. Interested in understanding how prison life is organized, this chapter seeks to grasp the experience of government and exception in the Nicaraguan prison system—experiences marked by violence and secrecy, and revelatory of the shared nature of power in Nicaragua’s hybrid carceral system. This sharing of power is particularly manifest in the emergence and maintenance of what I call co-governance arrangements. To be able to explain the intricate workings of these arrangements, I explore the rules that underpin them as these were recounted to me during my extensive ethnographic research with prisoners and former prisoners of three Nicaraguan prison facilities (2009–2016). In considering how co-governance arrangements emerge and are maintained between prisoners and authorities in Nicaraguan prisons, I first explore the formal system of prisoner consejos (councils) set up to assist the authorities in monitoring the prison population. Then I zoom in on the overcrowded cell space where, beyond and alongside the consejos, prisoners establish particular internal rules and hierarchies. Following on this, I consider how authorities (both prison guards and police officers fulfilling that role in police jails) engage in the extralegal use of force against prisoners. Though authority use of violence may seem volatile or marginal, I hold that it is part and parcel of Nicaragua’s hybrid carceral system, as it appears to be deployed not only to adjudicate disciplinary punishment to particular prisoners, but more systemically to maintain the power balance in favor of the authorities. Finally, I consider the implications of prison co-governance and public secrecy for the broader political economy of exception in Nicaragua, especially after the exteriorization of these arrangements following the 2018 anti-government protests.