Latin American Prisons

This chapter is co-authored by criminologists from the United Kingdom and Brazil. The first named author is one of just a handful of Northern researchers to have familiarised themselves with Latin American prisons literature and conducted fieldwork in Latin American prisons. The second named author similarly joins a relatively small club of Latin American prison researchers to have published in English. The authors have previously collaborated in publishing two articles on Brazilian prisons (Darke 2014a; Darke and Karam 2012). Here we broaden our object of analysis and explore what we perceive to be the key features of prisons and prison life in Latin America as a whole. Alongside our more general aim to provide an overview of prisons and prison life, in this chapter we draw particular attention to two paradigms of globalised crime control that quite clearly have particular resonance in Latin America: those of criminal justice militarisation and, quite the opposite of rehabilitation, securitisation of the prison environment. In the first half of the chapter we chart the extraordinary rise in Latin American prison populations over the past two decades, as well as deteriorating prison conditions, and question the extent to which the region's prison systems continue to adhere to international human rights norms (if they had ever adhered to these norms). We turn our attention to the daily lives of prison inmates and staff in the second half of the chapter. Here our focus shifts onto the self-governing nature of Latin American prisons.