Abstract
During the first intifada uprising (1987–1993), thousands of Palestinians were arrested annually, and mass incarceration affected as many as 100,000 families. Relying on several recent ethnographies, and other published research including some of my own, this article describes the contests over Palestinian prison ontology as organized by (a) the jailers, (b) the prisoners, (c) the families of prisoners, and (d) a service agency in the emerging Palestinian Authority. What becomes evident is that mass incarceration involves ontological struggles over the framing of justice, agency, and gender. The conclusion asks how these ontological struggles may be part of other modern prisons.
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Notes
The incarceration rate in the Occupied Territories during the first intifada was estimated at about 750 per 100,000 (Human Rights Watch 1991: 732), compared to the incarceration rate in the US, which was only in the low 300s per 100,000 at the time.
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Bornstein, A. Palestinian prison ontologies. Dialect Anthropol 34, 459–472 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9197-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9197-3