Joseph Eugene Hiller

JOSEPH HILLER, then a graduate student at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Love-Politics and the Prison-Society Nexus: Care, Confinement, and Carceral Transformation in Colombia.” Supervised by Dr. Orin Starn. Prisons are not closed off from the world: they are porous. This research interrogates how people who cross prison boundaries — as visitors, advocates, reformers, and ex-prisoners — navigate the vortex of Colombian prison worlds. In Colombia, prisons are sites of abjection and abandonment but also of tenacious care, refusal, and creation. Colombia’s prison system is entangled within legacies of violence both domestic and international, including the U.S.-backed “wars” on drugs and terror, Colombia’s internal conflict, and the underfunding of social safety nets. Yet Colombia is also a hemispheric leader in progressive prison policy, especially regarding innovative rights to intimacy, gender expression, and human rights advocacy. Within this fraught context of constraint and possibility, communities and individuals who care for incarcerated people perform exhausting labors to sustain relationships with loved ones behind bars. Coordinated through nonprofit, academic, and social movement organizations, these labors, which this research theorizes as expressions of “love-politics,” are not only fundamental to the survival of the incarcerated, they reveal how gender, sex, and desire structure prison worlds. Reckoning with these relationships at the “prison-society nexus” offers key insight into what penal technologies achieve, what they fail to solve, and how they might be transformed.