From prison to border: description and analysis of criminal networks established from belonging to the PCC

The project lays out a series of proposals: to elaborate a representation of criminal networks established from participating in the PCC, identify some of its nodes, and grasp the mechanisms through which this network builds, expands, and asserts itself; to describe the flow of resources among its actors, outlining how its members acquire and subsequently operationalize social capital; to verify if and to what extent there exists a particularity in belonging to the PCC that may explain the range, density, regularity, stability and complexity of the network that grows around and from its associates. The analysis will emphasize the empirical manifestations that emerge, on the one hand, by way of the economic flows within the criminal dynamics, especially drug trafficking, in which the nation’s border becomes a crucial strategic anchorage point; and on the other hand, through the production and reproduction of prison networks, where the connectors of these links take on a fiercely ideological dimension. The border and the prison are therefore two concentration points for the networks that we hope to describe and analyze, and similarly, two loci in which the resources enabling the connections between these nodes are, respectively, economic and ideological. We present two hypotheses: 1. The central role of the prison and incarceration policies in fashioning the primary fabric of the hereby analyzed networks, as well as their contemporary development; 2. The forming of a self-referential and autopoietic system, in accordance with Niklas Luhmann (1998), from a specific process of individualization and autonomization of the network established from prisons by PCC members.