Imprisoning Politics

This brief introduction lays out the key questions addressed in the special section that follows. It situates “Imprisoning Politics” in the context of ongoing debates about carceral states and their alternatives and about the distinction between liberal and nonliberal political regimes. The introduction asks how practices of imprisonment cut across and so complicate this distinction. For the contributors to the special section, imprisonment is, in Barbara Harlow's words, “an always already immediate political fact.” The introduction considers the repoliticization of the prison today, as inmates are moved from the United States to El Salvador and as fantasies about their relocation to other countries publicly circulate. What, if anything, do these prisoners’ movements, real and fantasized, tell us about the workings of political imprisonment in the present?