Latin American prisons throughout history: From a region without penitentiaries to a mass imprisonment area

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present, in a general way, more than two centuries of Latin America’s prisons history. This enormous regional generalization has a high cost in the loss of national particularities. However, it is important to approach it in this general way, in order to be able to appreciate lines of development in the long term. In the first section we will detail the preval‐ ence of the colonial legal culture in the period prior to the regional integration into the global market. In the second section, we will analyse the construction of the first radial penitentiaries in various capital cities and the places of incarceration used in more regional areas. The processes of establishing criminal codes as a tool for change in penitentiary discourses and practices are also presented. In terms of architecture, the shift from the radial architectural design to the parallel one during the first years of the 20th century and the creation of the first centralised penitentiary administrations are briefly presented. In the third section the penitentiary politics of the military dictatorships with their widespread use of political imprisonments and State terrorism are addressed. Even after the establishment of democratic governments in many Latin American States, the ascent of a neo-punitivism which led Latin America to develop the greatest growth in incarceration rate in the world in the 21st century is also examined. Over the decades and through the various above-mentioned changes, each element and aspect has been consistently worsened by circumstances that historically characterised Latin American prisons: overpopulation, lack of distinction between convicted and accused individuals, violence, large numbers of imprisoned people without a firm sentence, poor sanitation and diet, lack of gender politics and human rights violation. It is important to point out that, unlike the Anglo-Saxon sphere, in Latin America, the terms ‘prison’ and ‘penitentiary’ are used as synonyms.