Chapter 4: Debasing and Sustaining Penal Encounters

The way relationships are organised and regulated in prisons makes all the difference. This chapter unpacks the range of different relationships that constitute prison life in Myanmar with focus on the instrumentality of relationships and the debasing and sustaining dependencies that are generated. We document the ways everyday prison governance is mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated through encounters with others, and illustrate the importance of conceiving of prisons as fundamentally relational institutions. We demonstrate the inevitable and unavoidable interdependence of prisoners caught up in profoundly challenging relations of violence and subjection. This involves looking explicitly at forms of entangled relationships, and how these are lived and experienced. In a concluding discussion, we examine the resonance between the debasing, sociality-threatening carceral landscapes that frame penal encounters in Myanmar and the notion of social death.