Abstract

The boundary that separates the world of law from the world of crime, good citizens from the enemies of peaceful coexistence, and, ultimately, good from evil, is not only made by the iron bars and bricks of prisons, the patrols of wardens, and the inspections and audits for those who transit from one side to the other. The two worlds are also separated by a wall, less visible but equally impassable, which is the wall of silence. In silence and secrecy, imprisonment has been administered in prisons ever since, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this form of penalty became the universal instrument by which, almost everywhere, infractions of the criminal law are punished. The words of the convicted are extinguished in the confines of prisons. For their distant echo to reach the outside world they need to be supported by blatant gestures: strikes, riots, acts of self-harm. At the beginning of the 1970s, a group of French intellectuals coordinated by Michel Foucault founded a group that assigned itself the task of giving back the word to the condemned, of letting emerge from their narrative what prison really is and what its effects are on the lives of individuals, both the one that takes place inside it and the one that follows, which is often but a parenthesis between one period of restriction and another. The operation of parrhesia that is accomplished by this activity is to unmask the classist matrix of criminal justice and its stigmatizing and ghettoizing vocation.