Between Bureaucratic Inertias and Evaluations of Families: Adolescents Deprived of Their Liberty in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the discussions that intersect population government debates with processes of state reproduction of inequality. Analyzing judicial files of criminal cases followed towards adolescents in Buenos Aires in 2016, the paper focuses on the juvenile justice system's own conditions that reinforce the use of deprivation of liberty over the most vulnerable populations. The proposed analysis of the state practices includes both the interpretative and the material dimension of institutional practices, as well as the ways in which gender and age are processed; in addition, the paper reflects on the judicial file as an object that constructs realities. The article argues that what constitutes the causes in which the toughest measures such as the deprivation of liberty are imposed -even in a specialized penal system and in accordance with human rights-, is a complex interweaving between the moral evaluations of judicial agents on the trajectories of adolescents and their families, prior to and during transit through the system, how families negotiate these institutional interpretations, and the bureaucratic inertias that suffocate the guarantee of rights.