Prisons and Crime in Latin America

This 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.

1: Introduction; 2, The Prison Explosion in Latin America; 3. Explaining the Prison Growth; 4. Drugs and Prisons; 5. Women Imprisonment and Violence in Latin America; 6. Justice Institutions in Latin America; 7. Life in Prison; 8. Hobbes in Prison; 9. Prison and the Outside World: The Fallacy of Separation; 10. Conclusions; Corrections and Criminal Policy.

Marcelo Sergio Bergman is Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). He has conducted empirical research on crime for the last twenty years while working in the USA, Mexico, and Argentina. His book More Money More Crime (2018) won the 2019 most outstanding book award by the Comparative and International divisions of the American Society of Criminologists. He has directed many data collection projects and is the founding director of two research centers: PESED (CIDE-Mexico) and CELIV (Argentina).
Gustavo Javier Fondevila is Professor of Law at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE). He is one of Latin America's foremost criminologists and is a leading expert on prisons in the region. Fondevila has published numerous books and papers in prestigious international criminology journals.