Rethinking prevention as a reactive force to contain dangerous classes

Introduction

On the afternoon of 14 October 2019, hundreds of Chilean students organised acts of mass evasion of public transport, triggering a protest in several Santiago metro stations against a fare increase. Within days, the protests escalated and spread throughout Chile's major cities, challenging not only the rise in public transport fares but, above all, the principles of the political economy that govern the country. How has the Chilean state dealt with the consequences of the recent capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession? How has it attempted to maintain social order given the growing social discontent and deepening contradictions of the economic model first imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship and continued by the governments that have succeeded it? We explore these issues by reconceptualising the notion of crime prevention as a twofold political technology that works to contain the affliction of economic violence, while also working as a subtle form of counterinsurgency against civil disorder. The empirical core from which we inform this conceptualisation is based on ethnographic research amongst prisoners’ families and parastate organisations working with them in Santiago de Chile between 2017 and 2020.

We argue that the emergence of preventive action as a new rationality for the preservation of social order and the internal security of the state constitutes a reactive force to social processes that may threaten to disrupt the status quo of neoliberal capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the uprisings for social justice – of which the Chilean social revolt is a paradigmatic case – we see that preventive rationality reveals a structural nexus for the maintenance of inequalities. In Chile, this is clearly part of ‘processes of accumulation by dispossession’ (Glick Schiller, 2020; Harvey, 2018) managed by a regime of authoritarian neoliberalism, which concentrates wealth in economic conglomerates belonging to a handful of families strongly connected to global corporations (Robinson, 2008; Taylor, 2006).

During the last decade, the action of the Chilean state in controlling delinquency and, more broadly, in preventing civil disobedience has operated as a form of management of families impoverished and economically undermined by neoliberal policies. Prevention has worked in parallel as an instrument of policing households forced to live on the margins of the state. The ruling class mostly fears the propensity of these populations to undermine public security. Hence, the anxious reaction of the state to redouble programmes in marginalised populations, making them priority targets for preventive action against antisocial behaviours. Preventive rationality constitutes a challenging field for anthropological theory because it allows us to rethink the problem of hegemony in the context of the crises of capitalism.

Inspired by the work of Foucault, various scholars have explored how in contemporary societies the ‘principle of security’ (Gros, 2012) takes the form of defence, the purpose of which is not the reintegration of the lawbreaker or the elimination of danger, but the proper management of crime (e.g. Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001; Simon, 2007; Zedner, 2009). In the lecture manuscript of 24 January 1973, Foucault (2015: 61) outlined his argument in the following way: ‘the criminal “appears” as “enemy” of society. Society “appears” as injured, wounded by the crime. Punishment “appears” as protection, defense [sic] of society. Phenomenon which is opposed’. Five years later, the French philosopher drew from this insight the hypothesis of a historical shift from a ‘disciplinary society’ to a ‘security society’ based on risk management (Foucault, 2009). This theoretical insight pushes us to formulate the problem of crime prevention as a matter that does not exhaust itself in a univocal reading in terms of social control. How, then, can we account for less overtly coercive and more subtle forms of hegemony that are put into action through prevention?

The concept of illegalisms, forged by Foucault (1993, 2015), serves as a theoretical input into our approach to the role of prevention in the development of new techniques for managing households in low-income neighbourhoods affected by the penal system. The hypothesis raised by the concept of illegalisms is that the law itself is a struggle, a dispute over the very question of defining the line of illegality (Harcourt, 2018) – the boundary that determines the deviant behaviour of those unwilling to follow the rules and the established moral order. To think merely in terms of illegality would be blind to the power struggles that operate through illegalism by determining who are the inescapable subjects of crime prevention. Foucault used the term illegalism as a tool to shift the focus of his study on crime and punishment to the analysis of the penal system, and with it, remove the idea of a direct connection between offense and sanction. Through this shift, he placed punishment – and, by extension, crime prevention – in a broader field of practice conceived as a ‘new political economy of illegalisms’ (Feldman, 2019).

Containment of imaginary danger before damage occurs has become a core principle of preventive rationality in security policies (Masco, 2014; Ochs, 2011). Framed by this rationality, we conceptualise prevention as a micropolitics aimed at containing the struggles that may arise from class and gender contradictions. Its tactics aim to shape the habits, desires and values of impoverished populations that, for state security institutions, would be likely to endanger social peace. Chamayou (2018: 261) attributes to this micropolitics, which he connotes as neoliberal, an anthropological radicalism that ‘seeks to produce effects on consciousness and action’. In this case, prevention translates into concrete micropolitical actions aimed at encouraging self-discipline, proper management of household budgets and patriarchal gender roles. To put it in terms of governmentality, delinquency prevention converges on the kind of government technologies that aim to shape how one conducts oneself and behaves towards others. But this concerns only the purpose of prevention, that is, its project or rationality. Hence the importance of expanding the scope of analysis to the results and uses of prevention, thus deepening its conceptualisation through the strategic meanings it adopts within historically changing power relations. Thus, for example, in the present moment of political and economic crisis aggravated by the pandemic, prevention as a productive force of subjectification has been for many an unsuccessful project. Its promise of redemption of social suffering through entrepreneurship has remained largely unfulfilled. Instead of forging resilient and functional subjects, preventive action has become a more modest reactive force, focused on containing the decline of neoliberal hegemony.

Governing through prevention

The intervention with prisoners’ families as a programmatic strategy for crime prevention finds one of its roots in the Regional Plan of Action on Violence and Health promoted by the Pan American Health Organization in 1994 (PAHO, 1994). This plan urged governments to establish anti-violence policies, especially in low-income urban areas. From a perspective that conceptualised violence as an individual behaviour that spreads like a contagious disease related to poverty and marginalisation, this plan pioneered in Chile and Latin America the belief in criminal risk factors (Rigakos and Law, 2009). The individualisation of risk has become a hegemonic model in Chile by forcing social science professionals – whose jobs depend on precarious state-funded intervention programmes – to read the social problems of deprived populations as a set of isolated behavioural traits by focusing on social deviance, domestic violence, alcohol and drug use and weak parental control. Such an approach to social disobedience – especially its relation to truancy, addiction, vagrancy, family disintegration, petty crime and civil disorder or ‘vandalism,’ as the authorities call it – has been widely incorporated into Chilean government policies in recent decades. In the same vein, experts from the influential think tank Paz Ciudadana have argued that ‘adolescents returning from prison to the community need to be incorporated into activities that favour their adaptation to the rules and a less conflictive coexistence with the justice system and law enforcement agencies’ (Valdebenito, 2011: 15). Hence, the task of this think tank – backed by the leading corporate and political groups of the Chilean establishment – has been to frame security policy and its treatment in terms of risk factors, such as ‘anti-social behaviour and inappropriate parenting practices’ (e.g. indiscipline, law-breaking, child abuse and domestic violence) (Morales et al., 2017: 9, 29–33).

Prevention programmes in Chile, such as those carried out by the Public Security Plan, have taken a similar approach to delinquency by placing parental incarceration as a key predictor of offending behaviour amongst adolescents living in low-income suburbs. For instance, the Horizontes programme ¹ – created in 2008 and implemented by the ‘Chile Security and Opportunities’ section of the Ministry of Social Development and Family – targets the families of inmates through female heads of household to reduce what the programme terms the ‘risk factors of becoming involved in delinquency’. The programme's practitioners (mostly female social workers) recruit the adults who play the role of caregivers – usually wives, mothers, or sisters of prisoners – to combat ‘antisocial or criminal activities before they manifest’ (Monreal et al., 2011: 6). Its three main areas of intervention are improving parenting skills, empowering female heads of household and providing entrepreneurship training along with financial assistance for microenterprises. The joint focus in these areas on female heads of household is in practice regarded as the best way to prevent delinquency.

This rationality of prevention takes root in the interplay of freedom and security – an interface that, as Foucault traced in his 1978–1979 lectures, is at the very heart of neoliberal governmentality. Thus, crime prevention relies on the interplay of security/freedom as a mode of managing risk and ensuring that individuals, families and society, have the least exposure to hazards (Foucault, 2008, cf. the 24 January 1979 lecture). The greatest danger that crime prevention seeks to contain is that of the ‘internal war’ against the poor who violate private property and the social order.

Crime prevention works based on an estimate of probabilities, which is ‘pretty much the essential characteristic of the mechanism of security’ (Foucault, 2009: 20). Prevention, instead of disciplining individuals through the punitive action of the state, is deployed within the logic of security government. Foucault devotes a good part of his inaugural lecture Security, Territory, Population to explaining this difference in logic with a criminological example: while a theft is treated by the logic of the criminal system as an act that should be punished, thus following a classic ‘binary division between the permitted and the prohibited’, security logic places the phenomenon of theft in a series of probable events that ‘establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded’ (Foucault, 2009: 6).

Security rationality is future-oriented (Valverde, 2008), quintessentially preventive and acts on individuals through risk management and incentive mechanisms. Prevention has become one of the primary forms that securitisation processes take to normalise prisoners’ families. This is done through parastate bodies that are charged with transmitting the value of autonomy and self-discipline to subjects who will be less of a burden on the rest of society despite the persistent poverty they endure (Lemke, 2001). For example, the Horizontes program identifies ‘the capacities, needs and resources of each family’ and tries to extract them from a ‘way of life’ that is reluctant to conform to the social order. To this end, emphasis is placed on co-responsibility, that is – in the words of a senior ministerial official – that the state fulfils its obligation to look after the welfare of the people and, they become an active part in the process of improving their living conditions’ (Silva, 2009: 8). Preventive rationality that takes shape through programmes like Horizontes targets populations living on the ‘margins of legality’. But it is not only a matter of making the dispossessed responsible for their marginalisation. This rationality aims to operate as a technology of government intended to make subjects confront themselves as ‘projects’ that they need to manage consciously. ² In other words, as individuals at risk of engaging in offending behaviour, the subjects of prevention must learn to develop competencies and alliances within a society made intelligible by market rationality.

Governing through prevention entails developing empowerment, resilience and responsibility in groups identified by the state as being at risk of engaging in illicit activities. These qualities operate through a neoliberal and gendered rationality that seeks to permeate different aspects of the lives of female heads of households with incarcerated family members. But how do these qualities work? On the one hand, preventive practices try to influence the desires and projects of these women, by teaching them how to take advantage of their freedom through entrepreneurship. On the other hand, using values, such as self-sacrifice and care for the family – attributes that ideologically construct the figure of the ideal mother of the low-income family – preventive action encourages women to be more resilient and to manage their emotions. In reality, while some of the women welcome prevention initiatives with hope and enthusiasm, others feel exhausted, overwhelmed and frustrated by the consequences of having a close relative or partner in prison.

But although the practitioners of preventive programs try to educate prisoner-related women by keeping control of the situations in which they intervene, anxieties and afflictions arise from time to time, mobilising ambivalent affects and emotions (see the last section of this paper). The state's preventive action seeks to normalise these critical situations, which are conceptualised as involving wrong individual choices and a deficit in human capital that requires a strengthening of the entrepreneurial capacities of female heads of household. Thus, prevention, as a neoliberal project, seeks to contain the violent effects of the policing of poor families, for whom the costs and risks of life have been transferred from the state and private companies to individuals, and in which ‘the social has been opened out to a process of capitalisation’ (Adkins, 2018: 473).

Prevention as a neoliberal project

The advent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973–1989) was a generational disaster and social tragedy for most Chileans. Political persecution by the military regime caused more than 3000 people to be murdered and disappeared, and around 40,000 were tortured and violated.

The memory of state terror and the enforcement of a neoliberal project restructured the relationship between the state and society, causing profound transformations in the country's living conditions. On the one hand, through programmes and policies, the Chilean state promoted institutions such as small and medium-sized enterprises, seeking to install the disciplinary power of the market upon social actors. On the other hand, the state fostered the transformation of institutions that hindered the advancement of the disciplinary power of the market, such as cooperatives and trade unions. As Taylor states, ‘Far from mere technical changes to the economic organisation of society, these institutional transformations incur profound alterations in the relations between social classes with manifold implications for the distribution of resources, power and insecurities within society’ (Taylor, 2006: 8).

After the dictatorship, with the advent of the governments of the ‘Concertación por la democracia’ – a centre-left coalition of parties that overthrew Pinochet – the neoliberal project imposed by the dictatorship was redefined in an attempt to ‘mediate the contradictions of neoliberalism without undermining the institutional context established by the neoliberal restructuring’ carried out by Pinochet (Taylor, 2006: 8). Faced with the wounds left by the repression of the military regime, the Concertación governments created a complex political strategy to mitigate social inequalities.

Under the promises of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘development with equity’, the Concertación governments sought to contain social discontent. To this end, the ruling class translated some of the concerns of the working class into social programmes that focused on the poorest sectors of the country. However, these programmes did not transform the structural inequalities in Chilean society, but rather intensified the dynamics of accumulation by dispossession that Pinochet's neoliberal project sought to consolidate.

A paradigmatic case of the contradictions inherent to the neoliberal project led by the Concertación governments is the implementation of crime prevention programmes, which have focused on combating petty crime and civil disorder. Since the 1990s, security plans have been developed in line with the global trend towards community participation. As Dammert (2006: 171) states, in this period the ‘growth of reported crimes, as well as the apparent inability of the police to respond to them or to create a strategy built around crime prevention, showed the need to consolidate and in some cases establish mechanisms for community participation at the local level’. The problem with these programmes is that they were applied in a differential manner according to population and neighbourhood of residence, strengthening the logic of socio-spatial segregation and criminalisation in the poorest urban districts (De Mattos, 1999; Guerrero, 2007).

As part of this process, prisoners’ families have become a key target of state prevention aimed at a population judged as prone to illicit behaviour. Prison-neighbourhood circuits are of particular interest for state policy, as they concentrate ‘populations seen as dangerous’ due to decades of their association with illicit lifestyles, transgression, and revolt. This preventive rationality has created new strategies to reduce ‘risk factors for crime’ (Welsh, 2011), a crucial category for the identification of prevention subjects and the planning of programs oriented to combating petty crime.

Scholars from around the world have paid considerable attention to the expansion of preventive measures (Carvalho, 2017; Crawford, 2009; Janus, 2006; Mayson, 2015; Sajó, 2006) and the production of security laws, policies and interrelated practices that, taken together, ‘are motivated by the same impetus to minimise risks and forestall harms’ (Zedner and Ashworth, 2019: 430). This phenomenon shows the intricate relationship between the installation of the security imperative and the maintenance of a capitalist order, favoured by the emergence of a risk factors market.

The global market for social risk management can be traced back to the quantification of financial risk factors during the 1970s. However, it was not until the early 2000s, under the leadership of World Bank economists Holzmann and Jorgensen (2001), that the discourses of state institutions incorporated the idea of social risk management as a strategy to address global poverty. The main goal of social risk management is to turn the poor into economically active individuals, capable of coping with socio-economic and emotional crises (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2001). In Chile, this goal was pursued through policies that encouraged access to consumption through indebtedness. For banks and retailers offering consumer credit, indebtedness constitutes a business that profits through the interest charged. Due to the precariousness of employment and the proliferation of inequalities, thousands of Chileans are forced to take on debt to pay for basic subsistence services such as food, housing and health (Han, 2012).

By encouraging the ‘will to empower’, groups considered at risk of delinquency, such as prisoners’ families, prevention pervades ordinary survival practices through the promotion of individual entrepreneurship. Since the 2000s, the promotion of entrepreneurship has become one of the main development strategies in Chile (Atienza et al., 2016). In 2017, Chile became the country with the highest percentage of new entrepreneurship in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2018). Entrepreneurship places the market as the aim of the state's preventive action and the main way for prisoners’ families to get out of the prison-neighbourhood circuit.

Based on discourses of empowerment, entrepreneurship and resilience, preventive rationality seeks to incorporate prisoners’ families into productive and sustainable living within the free market. For prevention programmes, the reproduction of the household is separated from socialised forms of provision. Economic survival constitutes a private responsibility achieved through market integration and family support networks. Since the imprisonment of a family member entails the loss of income – often provided by men – preventive practices urge female heads of households to sustain their families both financially and morally.

The micropolitics of prevention have strategically focused on women heads of households affected by the imprisonment of their relatives. For these women, participating in state prevention programs involves opening the intimacy of their homes and exposing their social worlds to prevention practitioners in the hope that it could make their families’ survival less difficult. Crime prevention offers them the possibility of struggling for a destigmatised future validated by the market through entrepreneurship and resilience (Freeman, 2014; Lainez, 2019).

While discourses of empowerment and resilience may generate consensus amongst prisoners’ families, preventive rationality embodies several contradictions. Far from empowering women heads of households and integrating their initiatives into local business networks, it legitimises social inequalities and gender domination. Prevention pathologises families and makes women responsible for the consequences of their family members’ imprisonment. These contradictions generate frustration and exhaustion amongst both women heads of households and practitioners of prevention programmes, many of whom take on the role of psychosocial counsellors as an outlet for the social discontent that prevention attempts to placate.

Policing prisoners’ families

Michel Foucault's hypothesis about the prevalence of security in contemporary societies goes hand in hand with the advance of prevention as a central technique for managing domestic and street violence (e.g. O’Neill, 2015). But how to characterise the relationships between the family and the social and political order? Donzelot (1979) hints at this by analysing the transition from a government of families to a government through families. Deleuze (1979), in the foreword of Donzelot's work, calls this movement that constitutes the policing of modern families the ‘rise of the social’. Here, Deleuze understands the ‘social’ as a condition given by the emergence of the family as a substratum and target of policy. In this sense, Donzelot argues that the modern family is not so much an institution as a mechanism of government that works through the variations between individual interests and family interests. In prisoners’ households, the preventive rationality of anti-crime policy unilaterally claims the protection of the family's minors and women. Donzelot’s (1979: 94) genealogy shows that the government through the family relies on ‘the privileged alliance of the doctor and the educator with the wife’ for developing household savings and education, paving the way for the preventive action of the state. It is a mechanism that allows the social body to manage the delinquency propensity of marginalised groups through the private pursuit of well-being without involving political rights and social justice issues.

Prisoners’ families epitomise, in the eyes of the state, the imminent risk of social deviance. This vision has been translated into policies and programs in several countries worldwide (e.g. Codd, 2013; Lanskey et al., 2019; Smeeding et al., 2011). Conceived by the Chilean state as a population that must be prevented from the disruptive influence of their local environment, families of prisoners have become a specific target of policies that operate as political technologies. To mitigate the propensity of these families to engage in illicit activities, a crime prevention program has been implemented since 2008 through parastate organisations working at the local municipal level. The stated mission of this program is to prevent domestic violence, substance abuse, school truancy and, more broadly, ‘anti-social’ behaviour that may threaten the state's internal security.

In practice, the Horizontes programme addresses crime prevention as an issue that primarily affects low-income urban families. The programme applies a grid of delinquency risk factors to prisoners’ families based on guidelines from international agencies (Gray, 2009; Hannah-Moffat, 2019; O’Malley, 2004). This risk framing establishes protective factors for offending behaviour that focus primarily on individual aspects, such as lifestyle, attitudes, behaviour and emotional warmth (Gray, 2009; Kennedy et al., 2019; Mulder et al., 2010). Crime prevention thus constitutes a circular process, whereby it defines and evaluates illicit practices while at the same time establishing who are the ‘risky people’ likely to undermine the social order (Lemke, 2019; Rigakos and Law, 2009). This preventive rationality is rooted in the internal enemy doctrine, implemented in the context of the Cold War by the Pinochet dictatorship, and adapted to the democratic system under the umbrella of citizen security (Candina, 2005; Dammert, 2006). The post-dictatorship governments, after dismantling the armed groups that fought against the Pinochet regime, refocused security on petty delinquency (Calderón, 2015). Thus, the internal enemy doctrine was redefined to encompass a wide range of actions, such as the representation of ordinary criminals in the press, policies based on discourses of fear and suspicion and the criminalisation of social protest (Pincheira, 2014; Ruiz-Tagle et al., 2021).

The differential management of illegalisms and crime prevention in low-income populations converge in the formation of dangerous classes (Caldeira, 2000). Approaching illegalisms as a matter of political economy entails focusing the analysis on the mechanisms by which they are differentially managed. White-collar crimes, for example, are widely tolerated by contemporary penal systems (Angeletti, 2019), while popular illegalisms, such as petty shoplifting, small-scale cannabis dealing and even the mere tolerance of such trafficking by those who occupy the same domestic space – as Han (2017: 179) remarks – are penalised, their effectuators criminalised and their families placed under the policing eye of prevention programmes. These programmes often include institutionalised practices of differentiation, categorisation and behaviour management to counter the ‘domestic ethos of the illicit’ and reduce the costs of imprisonment (García, 2014; Johnson and Raphael, 2012). Through these mechanisms, preventive action aims to normalise unequal gender and social relations, deactivating domestic solidarities that might contravene legality.

The use of crime prevention involves subtle but pervasive forms of coercion that operate through a grammar of self-care. By fostering conservative family values that go hand in hand with promoting a model making the individual responsible for his or her future, crime prevention intervenes in social spaces where the dismantling of the social welfare state has undermined both the respect for law and the legitimacy of security institutions. It is within such social configurations that this paper conceptualises crime prevention as a technology aimed at instilling – especially in women caregivers – the will to improve the economic and emotional life of the family.

Crime prevention has thus become an extended, yet subtle, form of controlling delinquency through the promotion of self-care, proper management of affects and micro-entrepreneurship amongst low-income families. More specifically, the implementation of anti-crime programmes in prisoners’ families shows how the enactment of prevention brings together, on the one hand, the illusion of overcoming social marginality through micro-entrepreneurship initiatives, and on the other, the concern for preserving conservative family values, especially those centred on women, such as marital fidelity and maternal devotion.

Cooper (2017) observes that neoliberal policies of privatisation and deregulation in the United States have gone hand in hand with socially conservative efforts to treat dependency and care as exclusively family matters. Since the mid-1970s, the expansion of neoliberalism in Latin America led to the collapse of the welfare state and the import-substitution economic model (Kurtz and Brooks, 2008). In Chile, the early neoliberal counter-revolution, which ended the government and life of socialist President Allende through the Pinochet coup of 1973, was coupled with conservative family values promoted by the political right that supported the military regime (Mora, 2006; Power, 2002). The violence with which the Pinochet regime dismantled the welfare state, liberalised the economy, and privatised state enterprises as well as the health, pension and education systems, was accompanied by a discourse of social reconstruction. The creation of a new Constitution at the height of the dictatorship freed up the constitutional moorings for a profound neoliberal restructuring of the state, which focused on the family as an alternative to the social welfare state (Fischer, 2009). Neoliberals and social conservatives in different national settings, despite their differences, have agreed that private economic obligations of families should be encouraged as an alternative to Keynesian redistributive programmes (Schild, 2015).

In post-dictatorship Chile, the Independent Democratic Union (now the largest right-wing party in the country) has played a key role in Chile's contemporary political history. It has operated as a hinge between the deepening of neoliberalism and the defence of a social conservatism focused on a patriarchal heterosexual family model. Its doctrinal principles highlight the existence of ‘an objective moral order inscribed in human nature, constituted by the family, the basic nucleus of society which must be respected and strengthened’, and to value a model of woman as ‘bearer of life, nucleus of the family and main agent of transmission of moral values and traditions’ (UDI, 2020). It is within the influence of these ideas that, in the last decade, a securitarian rationality aimed at marginalised populations has encouraged the preservation of conservative family structures and gender roles. This is a rationality that operates mostly through preventive programmes –such as Horizontes – and that focuses on women heads of household as agents of crime prevention within their families and neighbourhoods. The genealogy of these interventions provides insights into how neoliberalism and conservatism have found common ground on questions of family responsibility in a way that, as Cooper (2017) notes in examining American poor laws, has reinforced traditional family values.

Crime prevention in marginalised urban populations cultivates a gendered family model, in which women must be as responsible for the care of their young children at home as they are for their husbands, siblings, or adult children behind bars. Indeed, neoliberals and neoconservatives have used family responsibility as an emblematic cause in the undermining of the welfare state in Chile and beyond (Arenas de Mesa and Montecinos, 1999; Cooper, 2017). In this process, the responsibilisation of women heads of household became a pillar for preventive containment of petty crime and urban disorder.

Normalising a neoliberal concept of freedom

Crime prevention practitioners strive to normalise a neoliberal concept of freedom amongst the prisoners’ families. By normalising we mean establishing ordinary actions that seek to make the neoliberal concept of freedom seemingly attuned to real life. Normalising here refers to the mechanism by which hegemony attempts to inscribe in everyday practice the dominant ideology that serves the social reproduction of the current capitalist system (Narotzky, 2016). By associating prevention with an internal process for achieving freedom, practitioners try to inculcate in the prisoners’ families the idea that one's self is a set of skills that can be improved or ruined. With this objective in mind, practitioners focus their efforts on shaping resilience and empowerment as crucial qualities to be developed especially by women heads of families in conflict with the law. On the one hand, practitioners hope that women caregivers and their children learn to live as ‘resilient subjects’ in constant adaptation to the precariousness of their social and affective worlds. On the other hand, they expect that these women learn how to support their families financially through the development of micro-entrepreneurship.

Horizontes practitioners generally work in pairs. While the tutor works with the inmates’ children, the counsellor deals with the adults in charge of the children. The work of both practitioners lasts for 2 years, time during which the program aims to order, prevent and repair the social dysfunction by targeting the caregiver–child dyad. In the practitioners’ activities with families, they address aspects of the caregivers’ life stories. In such situations, experiences of abuse and domestic violence often arise. It is a specialised intervention in a group considered in danger of becoming a source of antisocial subjects. Practitioners consider a significant number of the people with whom they work to belong to circuits of illegality. Some NGO workers even describe them as ‘criminal families.’

Along with the tutor and the counsellor, the ‘network manager’ (usually a social worker) aims to educate the prisoners’ families on how to take advantage of public and private institutional networks. Through these networks, the prisoners’ families can apply for packages of subsidies, bonuses, pensions and allocations from government programs that seek to alleviate the economic needs of low-income households. These networks may also include municipalities that offer job training, banks that provide low-interest loans, government offices that finance entrepreneurial projects, amongst other resources that should be capitalised on by prisoner families. The main task of this prevention technician is to teach women heads of household to identify and use networks as resources, which can either mitigate their vulnerabilities or lead them to a micro-entrepreneurial venture.

The embodied role of the ‘network manager’ can be illustrated by Claudia, a 26-year-old woman whose work we followed for 1 year at the NGO where she works. Claudia is a part of the El Pastor Foundation, a Catholic organisation that participates in the Horizontes Program. Since her youth, Claudia felt very close to the foundation. She studied at a Salesian school and, when she was in college, participated in foundation activities as a volunteer. ‘I even did my internship here working on the implementation of the program’, she stated (Personal communication, 2018).

After identifying the potential networks of each family, ³ Claudia prepares a technical report, called ‘family diagnosis’. This report takes the form of a clinical instrument that in turn produces a domain of reality – in other words, a regimented and institutionalised version of the truth – on which NGO practitioners intervene. Through a ‘clinical gaze’ (Foucault, 2003), network managers such as Claudia produce diagnoses to determine the needs as well as the opportunities that networks offer the inmates’ families. After completing the diagnostic stage, practitioners focus on empowering the women heads of the families to use their skills and networks. Members of affected families are encouraged to manage themselves as entrepreneurs in partnership with NGOs, state services, microfinance institutions, potential clients and employers.

Crime prevention defines social vulnerability as a form of family pathology that must be healed through empowerment and self-governing technologies. The roles assumed by women practitioners, as well as their daily work with the families of prisoners, show how crime prevention operates as a form of therapeutic governance (Shoshana, 2019). This type of governance focuses on the self as the primary object of social control and on psychological accounts rather than on the structural aspects of social inequality.

Taking responsibility for one's own future

Faced with unsuccessful self-management, prevention workers play an external rectifying role (Rose, 1996). Prisoners’ wives, mothers and children can try to choose well, to avoid risk, but the potential for failure is always there, haunting their prevention projects. Under this model, when failures happen, the ‘responsible self’ should turn to a family counsellor or a child/youth tutor (the program's expert roles) to learn how to choose more effectively. The intervention focuses on ‘accompanying’ female heads of households in their self-reflective work so that they can take responsibility for their failures (Gershon, 2011). In this way, NGO practitioners play a critical role in implementing regulatory technologies when subjects deviate. They put into practice cartographies of psychosocial risks and techniques aimed at correcting the behaviours of individuals identified by the state as prone to breaking the law and changing them into people that others can trust and negotiate with.

Social intervention manuals provide clues to specifically understand the knowledge taught by NGO practitioners when talking to families about ‘protective factors.’ Based on these factors, they highlight the internal qualities of the people addressed by the programme. Thus, esteem, self-care, optimism, sense of humour, self-confidence, empathy and positive communication appears as key affective components in the ‘self’ of this preventive rationality (e.g. Mideplan, 2015: 52–53). The injunction for individuals to take responsibility for their futures urges that they learn to ‘commercialise’ themselves, an injunction which acquires the force of an ethical imperative (Gledhill, 2005).

While during their meetings and conversations, women practitioners and women heads of households affected by the imprisonment of one of their family members share experiences in relation to domestic work and family life, the practitioners make a radical differentiation between their values, habits and desires. They claim that the lack of entrepreneurship and empowerment that ‘threatens’ the families of prisoners is related to longstanding ways of life that are rooted in the low-income neighbourhoods in which they live. From the perspective of most prisoner-related women, although crime prevention initiatives are not rejected outright, they lack real weight because they are not convincing viable solutions to the difficulties encountered in their everyday lives. For many of these women, practitioners may exercise forms of ‘covert policing’ (Loftus, 2019) to which they often respond by displaying subtle resistance in the form of family secrets (Barnwell, 2019).

Prevention workers hope that women heads of prisoners’ families (the ‘caregivers’ in the programme's vocabulary) and their young children learn to live as ‘resilient subjects’, in constant adaptation to the precariousness of their social and affective worlds. To paraphrase the works of Cruikshank (1999) and Murray (2007), the ‘subject of prevention’ must acquire the will to empower and the will to improve. It works through knowledge packages shaped by government programs that claim to know what prisoners’ families need, what is best for them and how they should live. That is not an easy task since family counsellors encounter resistance, which they understand in terms of the ‘beneficiaries’ ignorance, cultural dependency, or mere passivity. A worker explains: ‘In some families, not all, they don't understand what one means by empowerment; I don't know if people see it the same way we do. In some cases, families think that what we do is just another welfare measure. They like our visits because we talk to them, we help them in this and that, but that is not empowering people’ (Family Counsellor, 2018, personal communication). The subjects targeted by this preventive rationality must have the ‘will’ to engage reflexively in the management of their resources and skills. This subtle refusal of empowerment takes the affective form of unwilling participation. This form of sceptical bonding with the subject of prevention constitutes a major pitfall. It erodes a core component of this project: the willingness to internalise the model of the autonomous individual, for whom class, gender and ethnic determinations are irrelevant.

Disciplining women through affects

Upon reaching the office of El Pastor Foundation, we greeted Valentina and Coni from afar. It seemed that they were having a team meeting. We waited outside, but the door was open. The image of Valentina sitting in the meeting room and Coni giving her a shoulder massage, as best she could, caught our attention. When they saw us, they invited us into the hall to show them the lamp we had brought. There is not much in the organisational budget for decoration; ‘in the spreadsheets, you aren't able to justify an armchair’, Coni explains. Despite the lack of resources, they decorated the room to be very cosy. ‘Yesterday we had an “emergency” all day, we’re dead tired [raja]. Today we’re not going to any houses. Now we’re behind the scenes. […] Yesterday's emergency kept us busy all day.’ In the language of the NGO workers, ‘emergency’ refers to situations and people who embody a crisis. Marta had a severe fight with her husband. El Pastor workers invest much of their effort in women caregivers like Marta, who have the responsibility of caring for the children of incarcerated parents.

The dispute with her partner upset the caregiver, which, in the words of the practitioners, led her to ‘self-punishment’. Valentina and Coni form a working duo, in which Valentina plays the role of child and youth tutor and Coni the role of family counsellor. On the day in question, they were going to carry out an ordinary visit to a family but ended up having to do it in the San Benito Hospital, where there is a long wait for public health care. Valentina tried to control Marta's husband, Juan, who just over 2 months ago had returned home after serving a 3-year sentence. He was aggressive with his wife and with hospital staff. Everything fell on Valentina. She was listening to him, trying to calm him down. Meanwhile, on the other front, Coni filled out the clinical paperwork and took care of Marta.

Yesterday was a long day for Coni. She dragged the ‘emergency’ to the subway and the bus. Her husband went to pick her up at the bus stop, and in the car, she cried. ‘You can't cry there you know, you have to hold it in, because if you break down, then, you’re not helping’. She told her partner what happened during the ‘emergency’, then took a shower and went to bed. Today, she said, ‘I thanked him for his support [apañe], for listening to me talk about unpleasant things from my job. Maybe he wanted to have early dinner with me, but I couldn't’.

Yesterday was also a long day for Valentina. When she got home, she tried to take a break. ‘I came to see my daughter’, she says, ‘we checked her homework, we had dinner, and then I put her to bed. Only after that could I start telling my boyfriend what happened, smoke a cigarette, and drink a beer. I didn't cry, but today, you see me, I hurt everywhere: my back hurts, I’m all tense’.

These kinds of ‘emergencies’ not only shake the emotions of Coni and Valentina, but also disrupt the daily reality of the caregiver. For the family, these interruptions are – in the words of the NGO workers – like a ‘honeymoon’, because they give them a temporary lapse that installs a new way of relating. However, for Coni and Valentina, the sudden ‘emergencies’ that they have to manage affect their work and put to test their professional vocation. The caregiver's partner, while he thanked them for being there, for supporting them (at home, neighbourhood, school, hospital and through their cell phones), commented in passing, ‘they must pay you a lot [caleta] for this type of job’. But Valentina, without hesitation, replied to him, ‘Not really, how much do they pay in construction? Four hundred lucas [400 thousand Chilean pesos]’. She says, ‘exactly; we get paid a hundred lucas more to do all this work’.

By addressing affects in motion rather than affects in theory, this event provided us with clues to understanding how affects pervade the worlds of prisoner-related women and NGO workers. The ‘emergencies’ that arose put us in a position to see how affects move and are moved by entangled government discourses, labour suffering, domestic violence and gender and class solidarity (Ahmed, 2014; Fortier, 2010). Women heads of household, who often play the role of caregivers within the families of prisoners, have become central targets of the state's preventive action. The ongoing tension between control and overflow shapes their relational worlds. In the meetings that take place between the practitioners and the prisoner-related women, the former invites the latter to open up their family intimacies to them. The practitioners give the rules of language and even a repertoire of words – taken from psychosocial manuals – to enable prisoner-related women to articulate an appropriate discourse of their emotions, desires and frustrations. These instances create a strange relationship between the women and parastatal agents since the latter assumes the role of emotional coach aimed at fostering the need for self-control and the moral duty of self-improvement. In preventive discourse, self-confidence and resilience function as dispositions that are supposed to mitigate the effects of imprisonment through emotional containment. But, as we have seen, affects often get out of control, overwhelming the lives of the women on both sides of the discourse.

In interactions between practitioners and prisoner-related women, affective dispositions are normalised but not politicised. In all cases that we know, they are assumed as intrinsic hardships that must be endured (aperrar) – a particular form of endurance that leads to assuming by oneself the costs and ravages of a precarious life, like that of an abused street dog (literally, aperra) that learns to survive by eating waste and taking advantage of the temporary affection of passers-by.

Resilience, autonomy and self-esteem promoted by prevention practitioners draw on the aperrar affective core. NGO workers and prisoner-related women experience the affective overload – that the attitude of aperrar raises – as a mark of character and a question of integrity, especially concerning their families and jobs. This specific form of endurance affects women and workers of NGOs in different ways. When NGO practitioners refer to their own living conditions, they stop using the language of social therapists (dominated by the psychosocial repertoire of resilience and empowerment). Instead, they widely use the notion aperrar (endure) to characterise their attitudes towards the precariousness of their working conditions, which do not guarantee employment for more than 2 years – the program implementation period.

The crime prevention regime recasts the distinctive ethos of endurance by disciplining women to take responsibility for managing their precariousness and that of their families. By this means, despair and injuries are dissociated from structural causes and minimised by the need to endure adversity. The remodelling of women's endurance (aperramiento) veils the afflictions that the prevention regime entails (McGee, 2005). In this vein, Scharff (2016: 221) argues that the injuries remain hidden because they puncture the image of the autonomous, neoliberal self and instead evoke the spectre of weakness and failure. Implementing prevention in populations treated by government initiatives as crime-prone instrumentalises women's capacity to cope with hardship and ideologically frames their afflictions as mere individual contingencies. Thus, by relying on the female head of household (whose paradigmatic figure is the female breadwinner in families affected by the penal system), crime prevention attempts to contain the damaging effects of economic and gender-based violence.

Conclusion

In the last decade, petty crime prevention has become a predominant technology of classifying, policing and managing low-income populations deemed by the Chilean state as prone to delinquency (Aedo, 2020; Han, 2017). In conceptualising this phenomenon, we took Foucault's notion of illegalism – as distinct from illegality – and extended it to dispossessed groups affected by dramatic levels of economic inequality and structural violence. We grounded the differential management of illegalisms in a political economy that overlooks the illegalisms of wealthy economic groups while criminalising the illegalisms of the poor. By approaching prevention in this way, we redefine it as a way of governing that strategically targets female household heads, preserving the social disparities produced by a state-protected form of neoliberal capitalism (Moulian, 2002). The state's preventive action is inextricably connected to the policing of social order. Indeed, as we have observed, the anti-crime policy is intertwined with the fear of social unrest (Rosas, 2013). It has brought to the fore the exceptional place of preventive rationality as a mechanism for containing both the disobedience of low-income populations disproportionately punished for minor offences and the threat of popular subversion.

Preventive rationality has a depoliticising logic that relies on an international industry of risk experts. The Chilean state enforces prevention through government programmes seeking to establish a hegemonic way of thinking about social deviance amongst dispossessed populations, often criminalised as prone to ‘illegal’ practices. It does it through a language based on models of individual ‘risk factors’, borrowed from the international security services market (Leander, 2011; Liss and Sharman, 2015). The managerial rationality of risk has become so pervasive that it affects the way transnational experts think, act and justify their actions (Aedo, 2016; Guilhot, 2005; Mosse, 2011). However, at the local level, precarious NGO practitioners struggle to perform their work ‘professionally’ – as experts – striving to ‘read’ society in terms of risks and protective factors. But they also often feel overwhelmed, both by the inability of their resources to really address the social problems they encounter, and by suffering first-hand, as working poor, the contradictions of a regime that oppresses them.

The technicality of the risk factor language endows preventive initiatives with an aspect of neutrality which, however, does not mean that they are apolitical. On the contrary, crime prevention is a political concept whose effects are inseparable from the maintenance of class and gender inequalities. Preventive rationality thus constitutes a response to masking the contradictions engendered by a form of neoliberalism, shielded by constitutional restrictions resulting from Pinochet's capitalist revolution (Clark, 2018; Olavarría, 2003). Preventive action points to a circular process by which risk managerial thinking, through neoliberal governance techniques, classifies low-income populations and assesses their members according to their propensity to offend. Hence, we have attempted to show that prevention cannot be understood separately from its aim to contain the struggles arising from class and gender inequalities.

Preventive practices produce patterns of behaviour (centred on self-control and self-government) and forms of attachment both within families and between families and prevention practitioners. Based on this evidence, we have contended that preventive rationality has become a key security mechanism, which is especially salient in authoritarian neoliberal regimes for articulating the joint domination of the middle and working classes. Preventive action implements measures of control, surveillance and management of social groups that are seen – by the Chilean state – as a threat to the rule of law due to their unwillingness to respect legal order. But beyond the groups treated as criminal risks, prevention is embedded in a general security strategy as a form of pacification to dampen conflict before it breaks out and to govern unruly and marginalised populations. Its ultimate aim, in the Chilean case, is the preservation of the privileges of a handful of oligopolistic local family groups, strongly interconnected with transnational conglomerates, which exert substantial influence over the public agenda (Gaudichaud, 2015).

Preventive rationality is interconnected with the criminal policy of post-Pinochet Chile and with the global rise of resilience as a technique of the self to develop autonomous subjects. It aims to manage marginalised populations, offering them a project of self-discipline through empowerment, responsibility and the promotion of a gendered family model. As evidenced from the case of prisoners’ families, gender is at the heart of the implementation of the preventive rationality, which challenges gender equality. The neoliberal policies and social conservatism that catalyse preventive rationality sharpen class and gender inequalities through a double movement: on the one hand pushing prisoner-related women into the precarious labour market of micro-entrepreneurship and, on the other, by reactivating conservative family values that make them responsible for the care of children and the moral integrity of their households. The centrality acquired by preventive action in the management of marginalised populations and those fearing dispossession, although strongly marked by Chile's history, expresses at the same time, a broader process concerning the rise of the preventive state (Zedner and Ashworth, 2019). We see this rise of preventive rationality as an ultimate reaction to the radical uncertainty that characterises the times in which we live. To clarify this phenomenon, we have redefined prevention as a reactive force of neoliberal capitalism aimed at containing the contradictions that are fissuring its hegemony.

Preventive action encourages affective dispositions to endure economic hardship, gender injustices and social disparities both amongst female heads of households and the female practitioners who work with them. Such a relational process that connects women in different positions vis-à-vis the state, has revealed that prevention not only works as a mechanism for governing populations at risk of delinquency, but also engages the practitioners in charge of its implementation, obliging them to endure the structural violence that afflicts them as well as their clients. This effect of preventive action reveals the class contradictions that underlie it, preserving the status quo of a regime that channels wealth to those at the top and impoverishes everyone else. The Chilean capitalist elite constitutes one of the greatest legacies of the Pinochet dictatorship (Clark, 2018); it is also one of the greatest obstacles to the deepening of democracy and social justice in the nation.

In a time when ‘vast populations live with no sense of a secure future’ (Butler, 2016: 201), prevention seeks to engender a sense of security in individuals by attempting to transform ‘inconvenient affects’ (Nouvet, 2014) into suitable affective dispositions through the technical vocabulary of resilience and responsibility. But certainly, something is happening in Chile and elsewhere beyond the seamless subjectification sought by preventive rationality. ‘Chile woke up!’ shouted hundreds of thousands of Chileans in the streets across the country on Friday, 18 October 2019. In a matter of days, what had begun as a small protest by students jumping the underground turnstiles in rejection of the fare increase had revealed severe cracks in the Chilean model of development. This until recently had been portrayed by President Piñera as ‘a true oasis’ in the midst of a ‘troubled’ Latin America (Baeza, 2019). Today, although preventive rationality follows the inertia of the anti-crime policy of neoliberal governance, its failure to contain social unrest and the struggle to create other forms of political life has become more evident than ever before. The economic violence endured in the intimacy of family life, at great cost to women, gave way to the collective expression of discontent, opening a space for recognition of the shared experience – across the working and middle classes – of the violation of their social rights. By connecting the conceptualisation of petty crime prevention to the ongoing contradictions of the society in which we live, we have sought to sharpen attention to the ways in which the neoliberal hegemony in crisis attempts to contain its decline.