Brief History
For the sake of expediency, the history of prisons in Latin America can be divided into four phases, each with its own set of implications.
1. Nationalist Phase: Modernization and the Nation
The first, the nationalist phase, took place in the mid 19th century, as nation states began to win their independence from the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal. Brazil’s Casa de Correção, its plans pictured here, was the region’s first penitentiary, constructed in 1834. Their promoters in this era thought the rationality of the system would be a counterpoint to the varied and openly barbarous systems of colonial punishment that preceded it (while retaining or even extending the kernel of those systems of racialized class management and even many of their methods of punishment), and hopefully prove a lie the perception in Europe and the United States of these countries as backwards and wild. This era of prison construction and rhetoric of crime and punishment in the cultural sphere was informed by ideas about centralization, nation building, and the unification of the land and people.
2. Biological narratives of delinquiency: Crime, migrants and the modern Latin American city
The second phase began at the end of the 19th century and stretched until almost the middle of the 20th (Cuba not building its first panopticon, Gran Presidio, until 1939). Characterized much more by the burgeoning sciences of criminology, positivism, and eugenics, it was in large part a reaction to the rapid expansion of urban centers, some of them doubling or tripling in size over less than 10 years, and upper class anxieties about crime, immigration, and race. Rather than ostensibly interest themselves in the reformation of the individual subject at the center of the institution, this phase was dominated by discourses of an infectious and biologically determined criminal and criminal groups, to be contained lest they contaminate the social body, and classified, to be better studied. In the official discourse and cultural production of both phases, there is a language of ‘purity’ and ‘civilization’ that extends an old colonial racialized discourse and rhetorical scheme -in each case appropriated to the demands of the current ruling classes and placed within a contemporaneous scientific and narrative frame-, and a visual aesthetic of social and physiognomic harmony, at times violently enforced.
3. Dictatorships
The third phase of prison development began in the late 1970s, when right wing dictatorships in many parts of the region began imprisoning political adversaries. New prisons were constructed, as well as a legal backbone for the prosecution of those threatening to political structures. Concomitantly, numbers of 'common' prisoners were also rising, again as a method for the management of the racialized poor. This created prison environments, especially in Brazil, where these groups came into prolonged contact with each other and where each influenced the others' structure and political analysis (for more on this, see the histories of the organized crime groups Primeiro Comando da Capital in Brazil in Biondi 2016, or Sendero Luminoso in Peru).
4. Modern Mass Incarceration in Latin America
Its fourth and current phase of development, is something much closer to 'mass incarceration' as the term is used. Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s and borrowing much from the U.S. War on Drugs, in this phase drug crimes are punished much more harshly. This borrowing is both rhetorical, in terms of how drugs and crime are talked about, and material, as in the case of Colombia, to whom, through a large military and diplomatic package known as Plan Colombia, the U.S. government provided military training and funding in an effort to combat drug production and left wing paramilitary groups. this phase is characterized by the exponential increase in number of prisoners and an even greater reliance in the legal and cultural sphere on carceral solutions to crime, social inequality, migration, and ‘civic unrest.’ As Hathazy and Muller argue, this period of a ‘rebirth of the Latin American prison’ expands its “embeddedness within wider social and economic contexts” and integrates them more fully into “globally circulating penal ideas and institutional models” (113). Latin American prisons in the contemporary are warehouses for the “useless and unsubmissive to the dictatorship of market deregulation,” Loïc Wacquant argues, and a method for the management of the racialized precarity those deregulations produce, according to Rita Segato (see Chapter 7, Color of the Prison in Latin America). In practice, this latter era extends the eugenic philosophies of the second -of certain classes and groups being ‘unreformable’ and a social and biologic:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lanacionpy/PJRRN4FI6FAIRHXC4SVL43O2WY.jpg)
al danger- but now applies it to a far greater number of people (essentially all of the poor) and with even greater frequency, while retaining the rhetoric of reform that informed the first, even as it rings increasingly hollow. It also maps those categories onto 21st century transnational dynamics of race, crime, migration, and epidemiological risk.
Latin America now has one of the greatest rates of increase of prison populations globally, surpassing even the United States (in rate of increase, not in raw numbers or, in large part, in percentage of total population incarcerated. El Salvador is the exception, having recently become the country with the highest percentage of people incarcerated after the imposition of a State of Exception by the president and mass arrests and detention). Pictured below is the newly constructed Terrorist Confinement Center, slated to hold over 40,000 prisoners. It will be the largest prison in the world.
Centro de confinamiento del terrorismo, San Vicente Province, El Salvador. 2023. Photo: AFP
Texts
The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America by ISBN: 9780292777064Publication Date: 1996-01-01Opening a new area in Latin American studies, The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America showcases the most recent historical outlooks on prison reform and criminology in the Latin American context. The essays in this collection shed new light on the discourse and practice of prison reform, the interpretive shifts induced by the spread of criminological science, and the links between them and competing discourses about class, race, nation, and gender. The book shows how the seemingly clear redemptive purpose of the penitentiary project was eventually contradicted by conflicting views about imprisonment, the pervasiveness of traditional forms of repression and control, and resistance from the lower classes. The essays are unified by their attempt to view the penitentiary (as well as the variety of representations conveyed by the different reform movements favoring its adoption) as an interpretive moment, revealing of the ideology, class fractures, and contradictory nature of modernity in Latin America. As such, the book should be of interest not only to scholars concerned with criminal justice history, but also to a wide range of readers interested in modernization, social identities, and the discursive articulation of social conflict. The collection also offers an up-to-date sampling of new historical approaches to the study of criminal justice history, illuminates crucial aspects of the Latin American modernization process, and contrasts the Latin American cases with the better known European and North American experiences with prison reform.
Authoritarian Police in Democracy by ISBN: 9781108907330Publication Date: 2020-10-30In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.
Afterlives of Confinement by ISBN: 0822978067Publication Date: 2012-10-28During the age of dictatorships, Latin American prisons became a symbol for the vanquishing of political opponents, many of whom were never seen again. In the postdictatorship era of the 1990s, a number of these prisons were repurposed into shopping malls, museums, and memorials. Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the "opening" of prisons and detention centers to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in post-dictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, Draper examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures. The afterlife of prisons became an important tool in the "forgetting" of past politics, while also serving as a reminder to citizens of the liberties they now enjoyed. In Draper's analysis, these symbols led the populace to believe they had attained freedom, although they had only witnessed the veneer of democracy--in the ability to vote and consume. In selected literary works by Roberto Bolaño, Eleuterio Fernández Huidoboro, and Diamela Eltit and films by Alejandro Agresti and Marco Bechis, Draper finds further evidence of the emptiness and melancholy of underachieved goals in the afterlife of dictatorships. The social changes that did not occur, the inability to effectively mourn the losses of a now-hidden past, the homogenizing effects of market economies, and a yearning for the promises of true freedom are thematic currents underlying much of these texts. Draper's study of the manipulation of culture and consumerism under the guise of democracy will have powerful implications not only for Latin Americanists but also for those studying neoliberal transformations globally.
Cultures of Confinement by ISBN: 1501721267Publication Date: 2018-07-05Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.
Execução penal e dignidade da mulher no cárcere : uma visão por trás das grades by ISBN: 9788594591555Publication Date: 2019Constatou-se ao longo dos últimos anos um elevado incremento da população carcerária feminina, que, historicamente, permaneceu invisibilizada em um sistema penitenciário concebido por e para homens. Considerando o perfil predominante de mulheres encarceradas no país, bem como o fato de ocorrências relacionadas ao crime de tráfico de drogas consubstanciarem o principal fator de aprisionamento feminino, buscou-se apresentar o funcionamento dos mecanismos da seletividade penal com base nos valores socioeconômicos dominantes desde o surgimento dos presídios femininos no país, para a compreensão, em uma perspectiva interseccional, dos sistemas de subordinação tradicionalmente incidentes sobre a mulher encarcerada. Mobilizando esse referencial teórico, pretendeu-se, então, investigar, tomando por base as condições de vida carcerária e os códigos internos de conduta vigentes na prisão, em que medida a pena efetivamente cumprida pelas internas (pena real) afigurar-se-ia mais gravosa que a pena fixada na sentença (pena ficta), como forma de fornecer substrato aos operadores do direito para repensar a questão carcerária feminina. Para tanto, fora realizada pesquisa empírica no Presídio Nelson Hungria, na Penitenciária Talavera Bruce e na Unidade Materno Infantil, situados na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, adotando-se o método etnográfico e entrevistas qualitativas semiestruturadas, a fim de se perquirir, em campo, por meio da narrativa das internas, o impacto do funcionamento do sistema prisional sobre seus corpos.
Historia de la cuestión criminal en América Latina by ISBN: 9789873864674Publication Date: 2007The book “Historia de la Cuestión Criminal en América Latina”, edited by Lila Caimari and Máximo Sozzo, was published in 2017,
starting on ten articles, propose to review central points related to police, justice, crime and punishment in America Latina during XIX
century to middle XX century.
Policing Life and Death by ISBN: 0520971671Publication Date: 2019-04-16In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago's incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.
Prisons and Crime in Latin America by ISBN: 9781108768238Publication Date: 2021-02-19This groundbreaking work examines Latin America's prison crisis and the failure of mass incarceration policies. As crime rates rose over the past few decades, policy makers adopted incarceration as the primary response to public outcry. Yet, as the number of inmates increased, crime rates only continued to grow. Presenting new cross-national data based on extensive surveys of inmates throughout the region, this book explains the transformation of prisons from instruments of incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation to drivers of violence and criminality. Bergman and Fondevila highlight the impacts of internal drug markets and the dramatic increase in the number of imprisoned women. Furthermore, they show how prisons are not isolated from society - they are sites of active criminal networks, with many inmates maintaining fluid criminal connections with the outside world. Rather than reducing crime, prisons have become an integral part of the crime problem in Latin America.
Prisões : o rosto mais sombrio da justiça criminal by ISBN: 9786556050911Publication Date: 2020A presente obra se centra no estudo das prisões no contexto latino-americano, de modo particular em nosso país. A partir dos múltiplos rostos da violência e da perspectiva que nos corresponde ter da política criminal e da segurança pública (indissociável esta da questão prisional), o autor se debruça sobre o papel da polícia na contemporaneidade (sua atuação preventiva e repressiva), bem como sobre o encarceramento massivo e seus efeitos perversos.
Buscando mostrar o cárcere em sua inteireza, mergulha em seu interior, numa viagem virtual que expõe suas deficiências, suas mazelas, com ênfase na superlotação e suas repercussões negativas sobre bens e serviços, como saúde, trabalho, assistência educacional, lazer e alimentação. O autogoverno e o cogoverno são também objeto da análise neste texto, atento à atuação das facções, à expansão das drogas e à sexualidade atrás das grades.
Na abordagem sobre a fraude da prisão como agência terapêutica, tem-se uma oportunidade de revisitar os conceitos de ressocialização e reinserção social. Noutro plano, são apresentados diversos casos emblemáticos de medidas provisórias (fixadas pela Corte Interamericana de Direitos) e as reflexões que emergem acerca do estado de coisas inconstitucional.
O autor discorre sobre a aplicação da justiça restaurativa intramuros e o modelo APAC de prisão virtuosa, com seus baixos índices de reincidência. Destaque para os documentos internacionais de proteção dos direitos humanos, a audiência de custódia, as alternativas penais (entre elas a vigilância eletrônica a distância) e, por último, a defensoria pública e sua importância no universo carcerário. Considerações finais e recomendações, a partir de perguntas formuladas nas páginas iniciais, dão um significado maior à obra.
Violence Work by ISBN: 9781478002024Publication Date: 2018-08-02In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as "violence work," showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence. She traces this dynamic by examining the formation, demise, and aftermath of the U.S. State Department's Office of Public Safety (OPS), which between 1962 and 1974 specialized in training police forces internationally. Officially a civilian agency, the OPS grew and operated in military and counterinsurgency realms in ways that transgressed the borders that are meant to contain the police within civilian, public, and local spheres. Tracing the career paths of OPS agents after their agency closed, Seigel shows how police practices writ large are rooted in violence--especially against people of color, the poor, and working people--and how understanding police as a civilian, public, and local institution legitimizes state violence while preserving the myth of state benevolence.
Perspectivas multidisciplinarias sobre las cárceles : una aproximación desde Colombia y América Latina by ISBN: 9789588936512Publication Date: 2018Muchos años después del advenimiento de las democracias en nuestros países de América Latina y el Caribe, y ya sin gobiernos militares, continúan habiendo masacres, violaciones masivas de derechos humanos en el corazón mismo de los sistemas de justicia penal, cuya función es, paradójicamente, hacer justicia. La situación de la justicia penal, y particularmente la de las cárceles, con pocas excepciones, es grave en la actualidad en casi el mundo entero, pero notablemente peor en los países de medianos y bajos ingresos como es el caso de todos los de América Latina y de la mayoría de los países del Caribe. Este libro describe y propone acciones para corregir la situación en nuestra región.
Cárcel, derecho y sociedad : aproximaciones al mundo penitenciario en Colombia by ISBN: 9789587981063Publication Date: 2021"Cárcel, derecho y sociedad" es un avance relevante en la discusión sobre las condiciones, los problemas, los efectos y las alternativas del sistema penitenciario actual en Colombia, e invita a una reflexión más amplia sobre el lugar de la prisión en la sociedad. Los artículos reunidos aquí analizan diferentes aspectos necesarios para comprender el mundo penitenciario del país, su relación con la sociedad y los efectos del arreglo penitenciario y carcelario contemporáneo sobre las personas privadas de la libertad. Son no solo una ventana al aparato carcelario, sino también un recordatorio de que las actuales formas de organización social están soportadas en el sufrimiento de cientos de miles de personas. Así, los análisis de los autores tienen como objetivo contribuir tanto a la deliberación académica, como a una acción política que desemboque en la eliminación definitiva de mecanismos deshumanizadores de castigo. En la primera sección se abordan cuestiones relacionadas con el diseño legal e institucional del mundo penitenciario y las relaciones y los efectos sociales que se producen por dicho diseño. En la segunda sección se analiza el gobierno de la cárcel, por medio del estudio de las formas jurídicas que sirven a la defensa de los derechos de quienes están privados de la libertad, los espacios existentes para la justicia restaurativa y la reducción de la cárcel, y los mecanismos de reintegración de los internos a la sociedad. En la tercera sección se presenta un análisis sobre la situación de las poblaciones diferenciadas privadas de la libertad, con énfasis en la situación de las mujeres presas y su relación con el exterior. Finalmente, en la cuarta sección se estudia el derecho a la salud en las cárceles colombianas, las posibilidades de mejoramiento del sistema de salud penitenciario y las estrategias para garantizar los derechos humanos en los penales.
Punishment in Paradise by ISBN: 9780822375890Publication Date: 2015-04-20Throughout the nineteenth century the idyllic island of Fernando de Noronha, which lies two hundred miles off Brazil's northeastern coast, was home to Brazil's largest forced labor penal colony. In Punishment in Paradise Peter M. Beattie uses Noronha as a case study to understand nineteenth-century Brazil's varied social and cultural values, especially in relation to justice, class, color, civil condition, human rights and labor. As Brazil's slave population declined after 1850, the use of colonial-era disciplinary practices at Noronha--such as flogging and forced labor--stoked anxieties about human rights and Brazil's international image. Beattie contends that the treatment of slaves, convicts, and other social categories subject to coercive labor extraction were interconnected and that reforms that benefitted one of these categories made them harder to deny to others. In detailing Noronha's history and the end of slavery as part of an international expansion of human rights, Beattie places Brazil firmly in the purview of Atlantic history.
The Security Archipelago by ISBN: 0822353849Publication Date: 2013-07-12In The Security Archipelago, Paul Amar provides an alternative historical and theoretical framing of the refashioning of free-market states and the rise of humanitarian security regimes in the Global South by examining the pivotal, trendsetting cases of Brazil and Egypt. Addressing gaps in the study of neoliberalism and biopolitics, Amar describes how coercive security operations and cultural rescue campaigns confronting waves of resistance have appropriated progressive, antimarket discourses around morality, sexuality, and labor. The products of these struggles--including powerful new police practices, religious politics, sexuality identifications, and gender normativities--have traveled across an archipelago, a metaphorical island chain of what the global security industry calls "hot spots." Homing in on Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, Amar reveals the innovative resistances and unexpected alliances that have coalesced in new polities emerging from the Arab Spring and South America's Pink Tide. These have generated a shared modern governance model that he terms the "human-security state."
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds by ISBN: 0822334577Publication Date: 2005-01-27The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds is the first major historical study of the creation and development of the prison system in Peru. Carlos Aguirre examines the evolution of prisons for male criminals in Lima from the conception--in the early 1850s--of the initial plans to build penitentiaries through the early-twentieth-century prison reforms undertaken as part of President Augusto Leguia's attempts to modernize and expand the Peruvian state. Aguirre reconstructs the social, cultural, and doctrinal influences that determined how lawbreakers were treated, how programs of prison reform fared, and how inmates experienced incarceration. He argues that the Peruvian prisons were primarily used not to combat crime or to rehabilitate allegedly deviant individuals, but rather to help reproduce and maintain an essentially unjust social order. In this sense, he finds that the prison system embodied the contradictory and exclusionary nature of modernization in Peru. Drawing on a large collection of prison and administrative records archived at Peru's Ministry of Justice, Aguirre offers a detailed account of the daily lives of men incarcerated in Lima's jails. In showing the extent to which the prisoners actively sought to influence prison life, he reveals the dynamic between prisoners and guards as a process of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance. He describes how police and the Peruvian state defined criminality and how their efforts to base a prison system on the latest scientific theories--imported from Europe and the United States--foundered on the shoals of financial constraints, administrative incompetence, corruption, and widespread public indifference. Locating his findings within the political and social mores of Lima society, Aguirre reflects on the connections between punishment, modernization, and authoritarian traditions in Peru.
Beyond Papillon by ISBN: 1280550783Publication Date: 2006-01-01For French criminologists and colonialists of the mid-nineteenth century, the penal colonies of Guiana and New Caledonia seemed to satisfy two needs, namely, to incarcerate a growing number of criminals and to supply manpower for these developing colonies. But were these two goals not contradictory? Was the primary purpose of the penal colonies to punish or to colonize? In the prisons, inmates found means of subversion, guards resisted militaristic discipline, and camp commanders fought physicians for authority. Back in the metropole, journalistic exposes catered to the public s fascination with the penal colonies horror and exoticism."
