Prácticas educativas, gubernamentalidad y legitimación del orden carcelario en las prisiones contemporáneas.

This work proposes to research the meanings constructed by prison authorities about the socio-educational practices implemented by institutions, organizations, and heterogeneous actors in contexts of punitive confinement, and their relationship with the construction of the prison order. Institutionalized and formalized spaces such as primary and secondary education, experiences organized by university actors, and "non-formal" educational practices, compose the contemporary educational-prison framework. The central hypothesis is that the definitions of prison managers, introducing differentiations, hierarchies and evaluations, manage to enroll educational practices as substantial devices for the construction and legitimization of the prison order. Legitimation process that gain a weak character, given by three interrelated dimensions: degrees of institutionalization, statehood and criticality that the authorities recognize in the educational actors involved. Starting from an interpretative paradigm, this paper will focus its empirical references on observations and in-depth interviews with directors of three prisons, two for men (one medium security and the other maximum security) and one for women, but it falls within the partial results of a research project carried out during the period 2018-2022, in five prisons in the south of the province of Santa Fe (Argentina). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]