The prison is the institution of Bentham’s panopticon where you can see without being seen. Prisoners under surveillance are subjects to a criminal law that has sentenced them and governs them. It is because they are criminals that criminal law is applied and surveillance is used, and this is what establishes their condition as prisoners. Delinquency is no longer seen in terms of a statement but of the enunciation: prisoners are criminals, as the categorization speaks up for themselves. The methodology of enunciation becomes an ethnomethodology as a form of specific investigation in contexts of deviance, and gives account of the interplay of biopolitics of disabled bodies and their active micro-stories collected during the psychologist research in the CDT in Parma and in the detention facility. In applying Murphys’ theory of liminality and the social deviance of “social stigma” by Goffman, two different models of detention will be compared to see how these individuals have incorporated and activated the rhetorics of narratives about “disability”, “impairment”, “handicap” and the family similarities related to them. How can their micro-stories be exemplary of the forms of life of disability in detention? How has the institution performed their being and acting? A medical anthropology in detention proves more necessary than ever as a tool to seize, alongside structural violence and its incorporation, the forms of life it encompasses.
