Life plots and punitive machinery:

lives entangled in the meshes of criminal justice

Abstract

This article deals with the journeys of men and women who have been imprisoned and whose lives are affected by control devices in the intricacies of expansive urban informality. Lives entangled in the networks of criminal justice, these paths allow us to understand the operational methods of managing popular illegalism. And they also illuminate aspects that have been insufficiently researched or not studied in researches about the societal effects of mass incarceration. It is a punitive machinery that, between fines, precautionary measures, warrants, subpoenas, ongoing processes, is entangled and composed with the plots of life in paths affected by disconcerts, fears, uncertainties, also fueled by the illegibility of decisions, laws, the regulations that circulate between the indecipherable judicial labyrinths, the courts, the police stations and “the dispersed body of the police”, all of this constellations in what Veena Das defines as “textures of ordinary”. The cases presented here allow us to unravel (i) the webs of life woven into the “mesh of punitive power”; (ii) the meanings of what we define as “punitive machinery”; (ii) the “precarious freedoms” embedded in the management of illegalities typical of the universe of urban informality; (iii) the importance of the socio-technical support networks that are formed around some of these (and other) cases.