Unionization of incarcerated workers and collective censorship in Argentina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to describe the history of the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Privados de la Libertad (SUTPLA), a unique experience of unionisation of incarcerated workers in federal prisons in Argentina. It examines its moments of emergence, consolidation and decline, drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the Federal Men’s Prison in the city of Buenos Aires, including observations, focus groups and interviews with prisoners, prison officials and external actors linked to this experience. First, the article explains how this initiative was possible, describing the practices of the incarcerated workers, but also of the external actors linked to the University of Buenos Aires’ programme of university education in prisons and the trade union movement, in the context of a favourable political climate linked to post-neoliberal governments. Second, it describes the consolidation of the SUTPLA, paying particular attention to its forms of collective organisation, struggle and resistance, how they were structured by the language of (prison and labour) law and its main effects. It then focuses on the decline of this experience and the conditions that help to understand it, both inside and outside federal prisons. In order to make sense of the style of collective organisation, struggle and resistance that SUTPLA incarnated, the article turns to the idea of ‘censorship’, originally introduced by Thomas Mathiesen, but mutating its original connection to an atomistic landscape. In this way, the use of the language of (labour and prison) law is highlighted as a defining feature that distinguishes it from other traditional forms of collective resistance and struggle by prisoners in Argentina and, more generally, in Latin America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".