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Introduction

Visual Criminology (MacClanahan, 2021)

Visual construction of punishment

Visual construction of the carceral state

Legal Pluralism

INPE’s social network

Female prisoner’s artistic products

What images do we seek to analyse? what is included-excluded in the frames? Who produces it and circulates it? What affects emerge?

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Some data about the Peruvian political context

Political crisis and historical exclusion

Democratic state never fully consolidated

Constant presidential turnover

Normalisation of coercion and states of emergency

Informal and illegal economies and inequality gaps

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Organized crime in Peru

Organised crime, public insecurity, and urban violence constitute the main concerns for the Peruvian population.

The homicide rate is of 10.7 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025 (INEI, 2025).
Extortion has become one of the most visible forms of urban violence - In January 2026 alone, 502 extortion complaints were registered in Lima.
56.6% report a constant perception of insecurity.

In this context, a generalised climate of fear emerges, functioning as a political resource that reinforces a broader culture of control and punitiveness, and as an immediate affective response to the perceived erosion of everyday security.

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The discourse of “War Against Crime”

“The evil that afflicts us at this moment is public insecurity. The main enemy is outside, in the streets, in the criminal gangs, the criminal organisations. They are, today, our enemies. And as enemies, we must declare war on crime. To do so, we have our National Police, we have our Armed Forces, and we must have the commitment of the other institutions of the State, of the Judiciary, of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and all the institutions of the State in order not only to declare war on crime but to win that war once and for all.” (José Jerí, October 2025)

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The Peruvian National Penitentiary Institute

103 717 people deprived of their liberty

37% on remand

68 prisons nationwide - 13 female prisons, mainly “mixed” prisons.

Overcrowding rate exceeding 140%,

Daily budget of less than 2 euros per prisoner for food and under 0.40 euros for health

As the nation-state, INPE’s presidents constantly change. In July 2025 entered Ivan Paredes Yataco, who installed a punitive turn in the administration of the prisons.

Prisons as sites of co-governance and porous institutions: active participation of prisoners in the mantainance of order, security and labor inside prisons, and continuous flows of goods, care, information, and labor that circulate across their walls.

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The Anexo Chorrillos Prison

The second largest exclusive women's facility in Peru, located in Lima.
Maximum-security prison - 675 women as of December 2025 (capacity for 288).

It holds women with lengthy sentences for offences such as Drug Trafficking, Extortion, Kidnapping, among others.

Working in prisons since 2006, and since 2023, I have being working in this specific prison.

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Research Question

How do state-produced visual representations surrounding the “war against organized crime” shape understandings of imprisoned subjects and legitimate intensified forms of confinement, and how do artistic practices developed by imprisoned women contest and reconfigure these visual-legal constructions of security and punishment?

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Methodology

Type of Images	Characteristics
Visual data published on social network of the National Penitentiary Institute (INPE).	Period: José Jerí (October 2025 – February 2026). Social Network: INPE’S Instagram (17,100 followers) with joint publications of Presidency of Peru (276, 000 followers) and Justice Ministry (267, 000 followers)
Visual data produced over two years of a research-action-creation process with women currently imprisoned in a maximum-security prison in Lima, Peru.	Two workshops: 2024: 10 participants during 12 group sessions. 2025: 30 participants during 12 group sessions. Visualy reflect about femininity, imprisonment and freedom

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🚨 Early this morning, President José Jerí Oré and INPE Director Iván Paredes Yataco led a simultaneous operation from Ancón I prison. At the same time, interventions were carried out in Lurigancho, Trujillo and Challapalca to strike at organised crime operating from within prisons.

✅ More than 200 agents from INPE's Special Operations Group were in charge of the simultaneous operation. As a result of the intervention in the prison facilities, the following were found: mobile phones, phone equipment accessories, devices used by inmates to carry out extortion. Stabbing weapons and drugs were also found.

🔴 At the request of the President of the Republic, INPE will continue carrying out security operations in prisons across the country, to curb crimes such as extortion and contract killings that originate within prisons.

🎙️ "Both the Government and INPE are redoubling efforts in the fight against organised crime. We will continue to combat crime with firmness and transparency, delivering concrete results to the population, because the security of this country is non-negotiable," stated Iván Paredes Yataco.

IG Post 11 October 2025

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Type of Visualities	Posts	N°	Percentage
Punitive Operative Visualities	Operations in male prisons	79	79%
	Operations in female prisons	4
	Implementation of security measures	26
	Border surveillance and visitor control	29
	Security announcements (managerial achievements, control of scapes, riots, extortions, etc.)	40
Visualities on Resocialisation	Resocialisation initiatives (signing of agreements, producto sales)	14	11%
	Activities in male prisons	6
	Activities in female prisons	4
Institutional Visualities	Administrative announcements	9	10%
	Labour conditions announcements	10
	Events	3
Total		224	100%

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Visualities of Operations in Male Prisons

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Visualities of Implementation of Security Measures

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Visualities of Operations in Female Prisons

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Visualities of Border Surveillance and Visitor Control

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Visualities of Imprisonment

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Visualities of Imprisonment

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Visualities of Imprisonment

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Visualities of Imprisonment

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Visualities of femininities and desires

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Visualities of femininities and desires

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Visualities of femininities and desires

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	Institutional Visualities	Female Prisoners’ Visualities
Aesthetics	Dark and “neutral” colors, closed spaces - Frameworks that intensify control	Vibrant coloring, texture and visual composition demonstrate the complex experience of imprisonment
Power relations Staff´-Prisoners	Authorities and large number of uniformed agents with equipment - Homogeneous mass of young men facing down, arms holding their head and looking to the ground	Surveilled but alert and agentic. Power is recognised, named, and contested
Imprisoned subject - positionality	Objects of intervention: immobilsed, subjected and controlled	Active and multidimensional
Affective register	Urgency, confrontation to danger to repress, control and create fear	Complex and contradictory: guilt to overcoming, from anxiety and overwhelming to peace, from loss to strength.
Other figures/elements	"Prohibited" items are displayed with surprise, outrage and suspicion. Justification of the intervention and the evidence of "winning" the war against organised crime	Elements that concretely and symbolically exceed prison walls, conceived as distant but desired.
Framing	The camera as an institutional accomplice: close framing that naturalises institutional authority and power	Collages as a covert counter-visuality of imprisonment: dynamic, layered, ambigouos, contradictory and open-ended
Visual-legal production	The imprisoned subject is constructed as a threat. The images legitimate the state of emergency, justify the restriction of rights and the intensification of confinement.	The imprisoned subject is a multidimensional self. The collages demonstrate the pains of imprisonment while making visible the affects and agencies that the punitive legal regimes renders invisible.

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Final reflections

Macro-legal visualities

Imaginary of “total institution”

Controlled, homogeneous mass

Fear, distrust

Accomplice of punitive legal order

Micro-legal visualities

Porous institution

Multidimensional and active

Contradictory and layered

Covert-counter visuality

Legitimisation of securization measures

Recognition of selfhood