Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Toward an Interpretive Social History of Prisons (From Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830-1940, P 1-43, 1996, Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds. - See NCJ-168123)

• NCJ Number: 168124
• Author(s): R D Salvatore; C Aguirre
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 43 pages
• Sale Source: University of Texas Press
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This essay offers an interpretive framework for understanding the connections between the successive waves of prison reform and major changes affecting Latin America during the period 1830 to 1940.

Abstract

The essay argues that the birth of the penitentiary in Latin America was a process that must be viewed against the backdrop of institutional changes, contested processes of nation and state formation, struggles over power and social discipline, and shifting discourses about society. The penitentiary was an imported device whose fate must be explored in the context of Latin America's hybrid modernity. Imitation of foreign models and the importation of liberal, positivist, scientific ideas served to strengthen or refashion traditional forms of domination and personal dependence. It was a process of modernization that did not replace the old social structures, forms of interaction, or racial and gender hierarchies but reinforced them. Prison reform in Latin America, unlike the European and North American experiences, became part of a process of state and nation formation in which a rhetoric about modernization and innovation was generally contradicted by the continual, and usually violent, exclusion of the majorities from the exercise of democratic rights and citizenship. Notes