The quadruple burden: Reproductive labor & prison visitation in Venezuela

Introduction

Every weekend women load up shopping bags full of food, clean laundry and otherwise approved items. They carry these heavy bags on long journeys via public transit, sometimes children in tow, wait in lines for hours and pass through an invasive strip search so that they can visit their loved ones in prison. This work is more burdensome in Venezuela where the prisons operating under carceral self-rule— run by armed organizations of inmates through a de-facto privatization—fail to provide even the most basic necessities. In this article, I will examine the caring work encompassed in prison visits and how reproductive labor is incorporated into the neoliberal carceral apparatus. I ask how the women conducting prisons experience their labor as mediated by the state and what the limits are of this quadruple burden, especially in the face of ongoing crises in Venezuela.

In 2017, the total prison population in Venezuela was 57,096 (178 per 100,000 people). Despite this number being an all-time high for Venezuela— the prison population hovered around 20,000 people between 1999–2009 before dramatically increasing—the country still has a lower rate of imprisonment than Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. Demonstrating a slight decrease in rates of incarceration, 46,775 people were interned in the 41 prisons that make up the centralized penal system within the country in 2018 and 94% of which were men (Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones, 2018). Nearly two-thirds of people in prison have yet to go to trial; only 36% of the prison population is serving a sentence. While no current data exists on the social or racial makeup of the prison population, interviews and participant observation provide evidence that a racialized underclass is disproportionately incarcerated in Venezuela and thus that the women who provide care tend to be poor or working class.

During the neoliberal era in the late 1980s, the Venezuelan government abandoned the prison system. With growing rates of incarceration and chronic overcrowding, groups of incarcerated people solidified long-existing hierarchies as a means of providing social order among the penal population. Military-issued weapons were trafficked into the prison by state functionaries and most prison staff were exiled from the interior, leaving prisoners to manage the day-to-day life. This carceral world (el mundo) is governed by a strict code of conduct, particular linguistic styles, and a hierarchical internal governance structure that orders the penal population, resolves disputes, centralizes the distribution of goods (largely through a highly regulated market economy) and extracts surplus from the prison population through an obligatory weekly tax (la causa) (Antillano et al., 2016; Crespo and Bolaños, 2009). The surplus revenue is spent on costs associated with running the prison, it is invested in infrastructure and what remains is concentrated with the prison leadership (Carro), it is transformed into profit. By the early 2000’s until roughly 2015, the majority of prisoners in Venezuela were incarcerated in a facility under carceral self-rule, relegating correctional officers and National Guards members to conduct counts, guard the perimeter, and maintain external prison-related business.

The precarity of prison life and the extraction of surplus value by a small elite have engendered this particular social order. Just as capitalism functions for the endless accumulation by a minority, the de-facto privatized prisons reproduce this economic logic (Antillano et al., 2016). It is not only survival that organizes prison life in Venezuela, but it is also the accumulation of capital. To this end, incarcerated men depend on the financial contribution and commodities that visitors bring into prison, but they also rely on the unpaid caring work of their visitors. The prisons under carceral self-rule tend to have regular, longer and looser visiting policies that allow for frequent direct contact between incarcerated people and their family members, which exacerbates the care-taking expectations and financial burdens placed upon their disproportionately female visitors.

Often theorized as “housework,” this form of work includes social reproduction such as birthing, nursing, child rearing, cooking, cleaning and unwaged sexual, logistical, and emotional labor. Feminist-Marxist scholars have demonstrated how unwaged reproductive labor is central to the oppression of women under capitalism (Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Federici, 2014; Fortunati and Fleming, 1995) and this idea has been popularized through the concept of the double burden or the second shift (Hochschild and Machung, 2003). Contemporary activist scholars have extended the analysis beyond women’s paid jobs and unpaid housework to include a third-shift, the community organizing, service and activism that has increasingly been a necessity with the rise of Structural Adjustment Programs and the decline of state support that mark the neoliberal period (Chant, 2004; Fernandes, 2007; Folbre, 2002; Gilmore, 2007). More recently, the fallout from the closure of schools and childcare centers around as the Covid-19 Pandemic have thrust the gendered gaps in social reproduction to the forefront.

Women pick up the slack where the state fails to provide basic necessities in Latin American prisons (Fontes and O’Neill, 2019; Garces et al., 2013). But, how can we locate women’s labor not only in relation to the incarcerated men they care for but also to their own experiences within the capitalist production process that orders society and the prison itself? Poor racialized women who, in addition to providing an income; caring for children and tending to a home; organizing and advocating; also conduct prison visits which are not only “an emotional minefield fraught with practical difficulties” (Dixey and Woodall, 2012) but also incorporate women’s labor into the extractive neoliberal carceral apparatus and use women’s bodies to reassert a carceral frontier. I examine this dynamic, what I call the quadruple burden, through a qualitative empirical analysis of women’s experiences as prison visitors and the types of labor that they provide to their incarcerated loved ones.

Methods

My research is based on observations during visiting days in three male prisons under carceral self-rule ¹ and on interviews with family members of people incarcerated within those facilities. ² My unsanctioned visits between October 2014–April 2015 were a part of my dissertation research on carceral regimes in Venezuela. Access to the prison made a long term-sited ethnography impossible but as “the carceral boundary expands” (Garces, 2014), my fieldwork took place in the expansive zones around and connected to prison. I conducted participant observations in the lines stretching around the prisons, at the nearby shops catering to prison visitors, in the administrative section of the prison where items were examined and strip searches conducted, inside the interiors of prisons, and on public transit connecting the prisons to the nearby cities in which they were located, particularly around Caracas.

Entering the prison as common visitor, without permission to evade the lines or searches created an opportunity to connect with women and to experience some of the most turbulent aspects of crossing onto the other side. This is an experience that few ethnographers have written about in their accounts of accessing prisons. My positionality as a foreign white woman shaped all aspects of my fieldwork. As a woman, I was able to gain access to the feminized spaces at the prison boundary and to build rapport. While many women seemed to be comfortable talking to me about their lives and experiences as visitors through informal conversations and ad-hoc focus groups in the porous space around the prison, very few women wanted to or had the bandwidth to participate in a formal interview. As a white foreigner, toting a US Passport, my presence also aroused both suspicion and interest. Some women were nervous to talk to me, especially before they were cleared to enter the prison but others perceived me as having greater access to an international audience that might condemn the human rights abuses in prisons and so they eagerly shared their stories.

Although I approached dozens of women about being interviewed, in the end, I conducted eight semi-structured recorded interviews with family members of incarcerated people. Five of the interviews were with women that I met while waiting in line outside of El Rodeo prison. All of these interviews were conducted following prison visits and they took place either around the corner from the prison or on public transit returning to Caracas. For this group, all of the women were between the ages of 18–40, they had partners or brothers in prison (sometimes both), they all visited the prison regularly and were from the “barrios populares” in Caracas or Barlovento. Interviews generally lasted from 20–40 minutes; timing was constrained by access to public transit which was less frequent on Sunday evenings following visits.

When discussing my research on the Caracas metro with a friend, a woman handed me a small piece of paper that had her name and phone number on it; the paper said “I have a brother in prison. Call me.” I followed up and conducted two in depth interviews with her over a six-month period in which her brother was transferred to three different prisons in Venezuela. I also interviewed her mother (who I count among the interviewees analyzed in this article) and father. These interviews were longer, more unstructured, included a life history component and were inspired by Oral History methods and practices. Their experiences revealed differences in visiting a state-run prison, where the procedures were more formal and access was far more restricted, compared to those under carceral self-rule. Because of these differences, this article focuses on prisons under carceral self-rule whereas a comparative analysis of the divergent prison regimes in Venezuela is addressed elsewhere in the literature (Fischer-Hoffman, 2020). Additionally, I conducted an hour-long interview with a longtime friend whose son had been in and out of prison in Caracas.

I analyzed all of the interviews through a combination of inductive and deductive coding. First, I used deductive methods to see what themes of labor associated with prison visits would emerge. I grouped these into the following categories: 1)preparing packages for loved ones (clean laundry, buying food, drinks and hygiene products and preparing home cooked food); 2) travel to the prison (navigating public transit, long lines, carrying heavy bags); 3) waiting in line to enter the prison (standing out in the hot sun, hauling bags sometimes for hours—and all the more challenging with children in tow); 4) undergoing the search of goods and bodies (navigating the inconsistent rules and regulations and mistreatment); 5) providing care on the inside (chores, cooking, cleaning, emotional & sexual labor) ; 6) following the legal status and location of loved ones etc.; 7) increasing hours of paid work to contribute financially; and, 8) maintaining connection throughout. With these categories forming the structure of my argument, I conducted an inductive narrative analysis to bring the individual experiences supported by my fieldwork observations to highlight the most critical points of my theoretical arguments. I changed all of the names out of respect for privacy.

My work engages with the growing scholarly ethnographic research on Latin American prisons (Antillano et al., 2016; Biondi, 2016; Carter, 2017; Darke and Garces, 2017; Weegles, 2017) and particularly those studying gender, social reproduction and prison visitation(Ferreccio, 2018; Godoi, 2016; Pereyra Iraola, 2018) Building off of the assertion that “women’s essential role in shaping prison life [is] as visitors” (Fontes and O’Neill, 2019: 90) and that the unpaid work of women “contributes to the sustaining of regimes of incarceration” (Pereyra Iraola, 2018: 232) the following article makes important empirical contributions by examining prison visitation through the experiences of women visitors within prisons under carceral self-rule as well as essential theoretical contributions that examine the relationship between carcerality and the gendered politics of reproductive labor under capitalism.

To situate prison visitation within the context of reproductive labor, I will review two different scholarly literatures. First, I examine the scholarly work on the formulation of unwaged housework as central to the oppression of women under capitalism and locate this debate within a Venezuelan context. Then, I review the literature on prison visitation, evaluating differences in the United States and Latin American contexts. Following which, I present my findings on the nature of the prison visit and the multi-faceted forms of social reproduction it entails. In the subsequent section, I analyze my findings through a lens of feminist political economy and present the quadruple burden as a concept to explain how prison visitation adds a particular form of state-mediated labor to women’s already underpaid jobs and undervalued family and community commitments. In conclusion, I show how reproductive labor is intertwined with penal control, and that while the fluid carceral boundary extends into the lives and private spheres of poor racialized women their bodies are also used to mark its borders.

Theorizing unremunerated caring work and prison visitation in hybrid post-neoliberal Venezuela

The interest in creating better theoretical tools to understand and analyze housework emerged from the contradiction between the perception that housework is not “productive” and the lived experiences of the many women who, upon doing housework, know that they are working. The dichotomy between productive and reproductive (or even non-productive) labor is central to Marxist thought. Marx saw reproduction of the labor force as necessary to capitalism, but he conceptualized ‘productive labor’ as something that contributes surplus value to the capitalist class and creates goods that have an exchange value. Fortunati and Fleming (1995) argued that reproductive labor does produce value for capitalism and is, in fact a central part of capitalist relations. She states “posited as a natural force of social labor” and “appearing as a personal service;” “reproduction is the creation of value but appears otherwise” (Fortunati and Fleming, 1995: 8). For these scholars, the theoretical task at hand was to analyze housework in relation to capital and not solely in relation to the wage-earner (Benston, 1969; Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Federici, 1980; Malos, 1980: 11). While social reproduction takes place in all societies, Rock (2018) explains how it is organized under capitalism,

Capital is structurally primed to try to avoid paying the replacement costs of the inputs that it utilizes in the process of production, including immaterial production … .[which] means not paying the full replacement costs of the work of social reproduction. That difference between what capital gets out of that work, even indirectly, and what is paid for it, is a nice little windfall, a freebie, that makes capitalist production more profitable.

Dalla Costa and James presented wages for housework as a strategy in which the “role of the working class housewife and her relation to capital” would represent the position of all women (1975: 48). With their leadership, in 1972 the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWHC) emerged (they have since changed their name to the Global Women’s Strike). The thinkers and activists of the IWHC were successful in building an international network, influencing theoretical debates and changing the discourse around unremunerated housework, but the achievement of Article 88 in Venezuela’s constitution may be the most significant concrete win within this framework.

The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution was the first in the world (followed by Bolivia and Ecuador) to acknowledge housework as producing social and economic value; furthermore Article 88 also entitles housewives to social security. Llavaneras Blanco (2017) traces how the recognition of housework became a norm in Venezuela by focusing on how the Venezuelan women’s movement (in dialogue with transnational feminist networks, including IWHC), “femocrats” within government and an epistemic community (composed largely of researchers who developed mechanisms to measure the productive contribution of domestic work) advanced the demand for the recognition of housework.

The demand for measuring, remunerating, and acknowledging housework in Venezuela also resulted from the particular conditions of volatility and class formations created by being an oil-dependent nation. The economic boom of the 1970’s advanced numerous legal reforms that disproportionately benefited upper-class women but with the subsequent fall in oil prices, the debt crisis and the imposition of neoliberal Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPS), housework was converted into an everyday political matter. In the face of increased poverty, unemployment, and cuts in social services, even economists and policy-makers acknowledged the importance and value of unpaid housework in times of deep economic recession (Dalla Costa, 1995).

Nora Castañeda, a long time socialist militant who participated in the United Nations’ International Women’s Conferences in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995) and who championed Article 88 from her position as the president of the Women’s Development Bank, raised some theoretical concerns about the framework of ‘wages for housework,’ because she noted, the wage has not freed workers under capitalism (so why would it liberate housewives?). Despite some nuanced disagreements with the European Marxist-feminists, until her death in 2015, she recognized the direct need for material relief for many poor women as well as the potential that recognizing housework had for “revolutionizing the concept of work itself” (Castaneda, 2006: 68; Ciccariello-Maher, 2013: 136–139). In 2006, the social program Mission Mothers of the Barrio (MMB) partially implemented Article 88 by providing minimal compensation to a small number of poor women in acknowledgement for the work that they did in the homes. This program was the focus of my Master’s thesis (Fischer-Hoffman, 2008) but by the time that I conducted my fieldwork on prisons in 2014, MMB was barely functioning.

Scholarship on prison visitation in the United States is not readily applicable to the Venezuelan case for some basic structural differences. Unlike the designated visiting rooms in the highly securitized and surveilled prisons in the Northeastern United States (Casey-Acevedo and Bakken, 2002), or a formalized ‘welcome center’ for visitors to get information on visitation policies in New York (Christian, 2005), or the restricted ‘non-contact’ visits in Arizona (Tasca et al., 2016), the process of prison visits in Latin America tends to be more informal and permissive. In the case of Venezuela, after entering the prison, visitors have access to most of the facility and there are no government representatives monitoring visits. Although armed inmates patrol the prison, this “relative freedom” is described as “a visible acknowledgement that the interior of each facility belongs to the inmates, not the authorities” (Birkbeck, 2011: 314).

This is illustrated best by the pernocta—an overnight prison visit—that was instituted in Venezuela in 2004 and while the common practice was said to be abolished by 2013 it was still operating within facilities where I conducted my fieldwork years later. Over the decade that this policy was in effect many visitors entered the prison on Saturday and left the following afternoon. Participating in this visit, unlike conjugal visits in the United States, did not require special permissions, paperwork, or a marriage license; waiting in line with State-issued identification was sufficient. Despite differences in the structure of prison visitation and penal regimes, reviewing the literature provides relevant parallels for describing the incredible financial and emotional hardship that women face while visiting prisons in the United States as well as in Latin America. Studies in the field of carceral geography explore space, distance and lack of transportation as an impediment to regular prison visits (Gilmore, 2007; Moran, 2013b), a theme echoed by ethnographic studies of women visiting prisons in Argentina(Ferreccio, 2018; Pereyra Iraola, 2017) Highlighting the collateral consequences of incarceration on families of prisoners, Christian notes how the extreme demands of visiting deter families from maintaining bonds and that for those who do, the “prison experience becomes an integral part of life” (2005: 33). Comfort’s ethnographic work in California exposes how

women whose loved ones and close acquaintances are caught in the revolving door of ‘corrections’ experience restricted rights, diminished resources, social marginalization, and other consequences of penal confinement, even though they are legally innocent and reside outside of the prison’s boundaries (2003: 79).

Relating prison visitation to their ethnographic work in a Guatemalan prison, Fontes and O’Neill emphasize women’s roles within commodity and service markets, particularly small-scale drug and cell phone trafficking as well as the emotional labor that comes with these mostly paid jobs. They note that “female visitors triage an extreme lack of state resources by feeding, clothing, and caring for prisoners” and they focus on how this work is ‘affective labor’ (2019: 86). ‘Affective labor’, as Hardt (1999) describes, has been most commonly applied through empirical studies of female wage-earners in the service sector, noting the ways in which workers have to put their own feelings aside to tend to those of their customers. But ‘affective labor’ fetishes the relations between visitors and their incarcerated recipients of care without analyzing unpaid care work in relation to capital; I argue that the lens of reproductive labor is better situated to analyze the experiences of women within the broader prison economy.

The focus on social reproduction, gender and incarceration remains undertheorized. In the United States Angela Davis and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore (2007) provide essential insights into the convergence of race, gender and capitalist relations with a growing ‘global prison economy’(Davis, 2003). Empirical studies in the United States, the world’s largest jailer, demonstrate a correlation between decreased social spending and a rise in mass incarceration in which prisons no longer function as institutions of social reform but as warehouses of an unemployable racialized underclass (Wacquant, 2009). While this model of neoliberal penality does seem to be consistent with some cases in Latin America(Carter, 2017; Müller, 2012) Godoi (2016) raises critical questions about the wholesale application of this US model onto Latin America.

Under former President Hugo Chavez, petro-funded social programs were extended to Venezuela’s poor and amidst increased government investment, poverty went down sharply between 2003–2008 (Wilpert, 2006). In that same period, only one new prison was constructed in Venezuela and the incarcerated population grew slowly relative to its neighbors. But prison rates began to rise sharply following the 2008 global financial crisis and by the time the newly created Ministry of Penitentiary Services (MSP) was tasked with “revolutionizing prisons” in 2011 economic stagnation undermined more resource-intensive ambitions for prison reform in the country. The MSP advanced prison reforms that while infused with socialist discourse more accurately embody the liberal prison reforms of the past combined with a modernizing mission oriented towards highly securitized prisons in the US. The coexistence of neoliberal rationalities alongside liberal and anti-neoliberal logics are what define hybrid post-neoliberal Venezuela (Fernandes, 2010). In the case of prisons, especially those under carceral self-rule in which a surplus is extracted from those imprisoned, neoliberal logics prevail and continue to be a useful lens for analysis.

Despite differences, many parallels remain between the labor required of prison visitors; the experiences of waiting in lines, difficulty with transport, the burden of providing for loved ones are seen in both the US and Latin American contexts. While women consistently endure hardships to conduct prison visits, feminist ethnographers emphasize that visitors are not mere victims and examine “how the care provided by women to those incarcerated actively contested the deemed disposability of inmates” but nonetheless warn against romanticizing prison visits arguing that they need to be analyzed “both as oppression and resistance at the same time” (Pereyra-Iraola and Gunawardana, 2019: 556), something I aim to do in this article.

Although there are some universal experiences in prison visitation, my findings reflect a particular context. Venezuelan prisons under carceral self-rule tend to have regular visiting days with less restrictions on bringing outside items which generates more expectation on visitors to come often and bring supplies. But the defining features, and central to my argument, are the requirements to pay rent and the related privatization and commodification of goods and services all of which are organized not just around survival but profit.

Findings: Reproductive labor and prison visitation

The quadruple burden and its limits

The regular visiting days in Venezuelan prisons under carceral self-rule create more opportunities for family contact but also increase expectations on visitors to come frequently. While some women saw prison visitation and its associated labor as a maternal or feminine duty, many complained about the toll that it took on them. The expectation to provide sustenance and to show up for prison visits places considerable pressure on women who had their own obligations and responsibilities in the outside world. One woman said that she had not planned on visiting but that her husband begged for her to come: “It's hard to have a social life,” she explained, “it's not like they have a pool in there!” Some prisons in Venezuela do actually have swimming pools, bars and dance floors, these are all intended to incentivize visitors to spend their precious weekends locked inside. Another visitor said, “I don’t come when I have my period, and sometimes I don’t come because I have the right to take my children out and I also need time to take care of the house.” Since women are prohibited to visit during their periods, they frequently used that as a reason to avoid visits. These narratives demonstrate the sense of obligation that women felt but also how they were conflicted about visiting.

The concept of women’s double burden, or second shift is well established in feminist and social scientific scholarship and demonstrates that in addition to the paid work that women do, they also do a disproportionate amount of the household chores (Hochschild and Machung, 2003). This schema is magnified for women whose husbands go to prison. Anabel counted on her husband’s income, but she became the sole income earner for her family and was responsible for all of the labor associated with child-rearing and household management. She described this predicament as “very difficult.”

Because women visitors are the main interlocutors between the prison and the outside world—and they witness the inhumane conditions in the prisons—they have also played an active role in organizing for better conditions in prisons. This has taken the form of organized protests, they have joined in consensual kidnappings in coordination with the prison population, created grassroots prison education and re-entry services, provided testimony for NGOs and advocated for their loved ones through legal proceedings (BBC, 2012; Clarembaux, 2016; OVP, 2018).

Women have been the grassroots leaders in the social programs and political participation in Venezuela embodying the “triple burden of housework, wage work, and activism” (Fernandes, 2007). Folbre (2002) describes this form of caring work, as “the invisible heart;” a necessary supplement to “the invisible hand” of the market, noting that volunteer work done by women is the basis of many civic and community institutions. In her examination of the growing prison complex in California and the grassroots organizing of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, Gilmore speaks directly to the triple burden that women caring for their loved ones in prison confront, women “who work to support their families and to free their loved ones encounter one another as laborers with similar triple workdays–jobs, home, justice” (Gilmore, 2007: 237).

While few of the women that I interviewed are involved in sustained political organizing work that expressly fights for justice in the criminal punishment system, many spend some of their time involved in social programs or community councils and nearly every single woman that I spoke with dedicates some time to advocating for their loved ones in prison. This often involves going to courthouses, calling lawyers and in the case that a loved one is transferred to a new facility, it can take a lot of energy to simply locate them. So, in addition to the work that women do for money, the second shift which involves child-rearing and housework, this triple burden of unpaid work involves working for justice or organizing the broader community. This third shift work can be public and recognized, but it is still undervalued and rarely paid.

While the relatively liberal visiting policies create an opportunity for connection, physical contact and continued relations; the deprivation inside of the prisons places a serious burden on women visitors who assume responsibility for the care of a loved one. Many women feel stuck between their obligations to provide food, clothes, sex, care, and the connection with their children, and their responsibilities to provide incomes and do reproductive labor and caring work for their families on the outside. Surrendering one’s body to the state on a regular basis requires profound psychological labor that is distinct from the standard forms of reproductive work assumed to take place in the privacy of one’s home. Having one’s reproductive labor so highly regulated and mediated that one must submit to a cavity search by state functionaries is a distinct burden for women who visit their loved ones in self-governed Venezuelan prisons. The quadruple burden implies that women’s labor is not only absolutely necessary for the everyday functioning of the prison, but it is also co-opted into the capitalist relations which maximize profit by taking advantage of unpaid inputs into the prison economy. This fourth shift also requires that the bodies of women are policed, surveilled and violated as a means of asserting power but also establishing a prison boundary in an increasingly porous carceral zone. This quadruple burden has become magnified as the economic crisis deepens in Venezuela.

While the austerity measures of the 1980s and 1990’s placed a spotlight on the importance of housework in sustaining Venezuelan families, the new era of economic crisis has again placed the labor of survival center-stage. Run-away inflation, shortages, capital flight, and decreased standards of living create even greater hardships for Venezuelans, making the caring work that women provide even more essential. While the state and the Carros rely on the uncompensated and underappreciated work of women to make up for shortfalls in the basic care within the prisons, women will not be able to subsidize these shortfalls indefinitely. The volatility of the oil economy in Venezuela has launched the country from booms to rapid declines and when the “invisible hand” fails to meet the needs of the majority, it is often the “invisible heart” that is called upon to care for families and communities, inside and outside of prison. Just as Structural Adjustment Programs placed more pressure on women, creating concern that “the disproportionate burdens that have fallen on women have stretched their personal reserves to capacity and there is no further ‘slack’ to be taken up” (Chant, 2004: 212–214), women cannot be expected to be the bandage by assuming a fourth burden within the context of serious obstacles to well-being. The failures of both the state and the market fall disproportionately on the bodies of women; but, the current crisis in Venezuela could mark the breaking point for how much the labor of poor women can be exploited to subsidize the state and fuel the for-profit prison regimes.

Conclusions

The work of caring for a loved one in prison magnifies the forms of reproductive labor that women do, placing a quadruple burden on top of the job, housework, and community activism. Women are not solely making up for the lack of funding provided by the state, their bodies and labor are being captured by modes of production organized around profit. While carceral self-rule is in decline, and the deepening economic crisis is fueling widespread emigration from Venezuela, the reproductive labor provided by visitors will continue to be called upon but there are limits.

For some women, the stigmatization, disappointment, humiliation, and mistreatment are too much to maintain prison visits; for others, obligations at work, in the home, and in the community make it impossible to make the long journeys. And for many, women reject the overwhelming labor required to carry heavy bags of food, clothes and supplies, wait in long lines and endure the searches. Women resist in a variety of ways; they do paradoxically resist the disposability of their loved ones through the dynamics of care but they also resist the obligation to go to prison (sometimes by subversively claiming to be menstruating). This act may withhold needed resources from those imprisoned but is also withholds further investment in the extractive prison economy in which women are expected to endlessly infuse value. It remains a question what impact Covid-19 will have on these dynamics, as visits to prison have become more restrictive in many countries, including Venezuela.

Venezuelan prisons under self-rule operate within a mode of production that reinforces neoliberal capitalism, and women’s labor within this system not only provides much needed goods and services to the incarcerated but also subsidizes the surplus extraction within the prisons. It is not simply the deficit of care provided by the lack of state funding that produces this fourth shift for women, it is the capitalist production process both inside and outside of the prison, organized around accumulation, that exacerbates this burden. The research also demonstrates the expansion of the carceral and the porosity between prison and the daily lives of racialized poor women and communities and yet the ways in which women’s bodies are used to enforce the border between inside and out.

The unpaid caring labor in Venezuelan prisons under carceral self-rule, illuminates a fourth shift for poor women who conduct prison visits. In addition to providing an income; caring for children and tending to a home; organizing and advocating; women with loved ones in prisons experience the expansion of penal control as women’s bodies and labor are incorporated into the neoliberal carceral apparatus. For women to unburden themselves from the most severe aspects of this fourth shift, other mechanisms will need to be developed to make up for shortfalls in prison administration. This will require not only more funding for basic provisions for those who are interned, but also the removal of the profit motive that organizes the penal masses in Venezuela’s self-ruled prisons.