The rise of the penal state in Latin America

Abstract

The recent work of Loïc Wacquant identified the emergence of the penal state as a core feature of the global expansion of neoliberalism and the neoliberal government urban marginality. Drawing on Wacquant’s theoretical and conceptual reflections, this article analyses the emergence of a Latin American form of penal statecraft. By taking an in-depth look at the increasing criminalization of urban marginality in contemporary Latin America as well as the related developments in the local prison system, the single most important institutional expression of the Latin American penal state, important commonalities and differences between the penal statecraft experiments throughout Latin America and the countries of the ‘developed world’ are highlighted.

Keywords:

• penal state
• prison
• neoliberalism
• urban marginality
• Latin America
• Loïc Wacquant

Notes

1. Although Wacquant’s (2009) approach seems to follow a political-economic perspective on imprisonment in the tradition of the classic work by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939), he criticizes this approach for its ‘congenital incapacity to recognize the specific efficacy and the materiality of symbolic power’ (p. xvii), and calls for escaping ‘from the narrowly materialist vision of the political economy of punishment to capture the reverberating roles of the criminal justice system as cultural engine and fount of social demarcations, public norms and moral emotions’ (p. xviii).

2. In addition to formal policing efforts, there is also an observable trend towards informal policing practices by private ‘rent-a-cops,’ death squads, justice makers (Huggins, 2000) and other ‘policing extensions’ (van Reenen, 2007). These informal activities target the ‘undesired’ segments of the urban population, like street children or homeless people, and frequently culminate in lethal violence. As Gay (2010) observed for the case of Brazil: ‘Death squads comprising off-duty and retired police officers are often hired by local merchants to clear the streets of “undesirables“ and are responsible for killing a large number of Brazilian youths each year’ (p. 209).

3. See for example Padilla Arroyo (2001); Salvatore and Aguirre (1996); Salvatore, Aguirre, and Joseph (2000).

4. On the gendered dimension of prison life during the military dictatorships in Latin American, see Treacy (1996).

5. It is in light of this ‘triple selectivity’ Wacquant (2010b) rejects the notion of mass imprisonment by arguing that: ‘Mass [emphasis in the original] incarceration suggests that confinement concerns large swaths of the citizenry (as with the mass media, mass culture, and mass unemployment), implying that the penal net has been flung far and wide across social and physical space. This is triply inaccurate’ (p. 78).

6. Women account for about 6% of the total inmate population in Latin American countries. However, the increase of the female inmate population has been higher and more pronounced in some countries that the growth of the male inmate population. In Chile, for instance, the number of female prisoners increased by 19% between 2006 and 2007, while the male population increased by 10% (Dammert & Zúñiga, 2008).