The Backpacker’s Guide to the Prison: (In)Formalizing Prison Boundaries in Latin America

Ordinarily the vast majority of visitors to prisons across the world consist of prisoners’ friends and family, legal advisers and social workers. However, during the 1990s and 2000s prisons in Latin America admitted a large number of backpacker prison tourists under the guise of visiting fellow Westerners imprisoned for drug trafficking. This chapter examines this novel form of penal tourism in Garcia Moreno Prison in Quito, Ecuador. Unlike most penal tourist sites, such as the historic prisons of Alcatraz and Robbin Island, Garcia Moreno1 was a working prison. Tourism was not facilitated officially, but was an informal, uncommodified practice established and continued by inmates. In this chapter, we take this unique example of backpacker prison visiting, which disrupts conventional notions of penal tourism that typically take place in closed, disused former prison spaces, offering new insights into penal tourist experiences.