Stephanie Campos Lecture—Small Village, Large Hell: Examining the Incarceration of Women in Lima, Peru through an Intersectional Framework

Using an intersectional framework, this presentation will explore how the Santa Monica prison in Lima, Peru reflects and reproduces hierarchies of race, class, gender, and citizenship. Life history interviews with incarcerated women demonstrates how structural inequalities influenced their entrance into the illicit drug market and subsequent imprisonment. In addition, prisoners competed for scarce resources and privileges. Those with access to advantageous and valued economic, racial, gender, and national positionalities benefited over prisoners. This work also argues that women’s labor is the linchpin between drug trafficking and prison and that the drug trade and the prison in Peru are two parts of a symbiotic whole. This research contributes to a critical questioning of the prison as an adequate response to economic and political insecurity and crisis, a situation not created by those most negatively affected by it.

Stephanie Campos has a PhD in Anthropology and Women’s Studies Certificate from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is currently a Behavioral Sciences Training Program postdoctoral fellow at New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing, sponsored by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). As part of this fellowship, she is writing articles on her most recent fieldwork exploring the drug use patterns and sexual risk behaviors of low-income minority women in New York City. As Assistant Project Director at National Development and Research Institutes (NDRI), Inc., she is presently conducting fieldwork on the underground synthetic drug market in New York City. She is a recipient of a pilot project award funded by the Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research (CDUHR). For this project, Dr. Campos will adapt an evidence-based intervention to reduce HIV/STI risk among substance using, heterosexually identified men and women who have multiple sex partners.