Chapter 7 presents a description of daily prison life in order to evaluate prison environments and rehabilitation programs. Based on inmates’ self-reports from surveys, we analyze the depth and impact of overcrowding, the supply of basic services (food and health), rehabilitation and training programs (schooling and work inside prisons), health services, social life, and criminal networks. We show that the supply of goods and services in most prisons is deficient and creates profit opportunities for criminal networks; that most rehabilitation programs fail; and that preparations for reentry are very poor, contributing to high rates of recidivism.

Chapter 4 studies illegal drugs, a significant driver of crime and a central issue in Latin American politics and society. One in five inmates is incarcerated for drug-related crimes, and at least one in three uses drugs regularly inside prisons. This chapter examines the patterns of drug crimes, the revenue made from selling or transporting drugs, and the income offenders made prior to being arrested, as well as the use of drugs inside prisons (who supplies the drugs, how much is spent on drugs, who controls drug trafficking inside the correction facilities, and how big the illegal prison market is). We show that law enforcement overwhelmingly targets “easy to catch” drug-traffickers, while barely making inroads on dismantling illegal drug industries, and facilitates the replacement social mechanism. Prison has become an extreme punishment that has had only limited success in reducing the supply of illegal drugs.

We conclude with several observations on corrections and criminal policy. The final chapter has three short sections. We begin with a summary of findings and discuss their implications: mass incarceration has not solved the crime problem and may actually exacerbate it. Lastly, we offer several policy guidelines that may provide a road map to address the prison crisis in the region.

Chapter 5 analyzes the increase in the imprisonment of women and examines the growing and important role of females in the illegal drug business. Women live in separate facilities and have specific issues that deserve special examination. We show that females were incarcerated for similar felonies to their male counterparts, as they tried to take advantage of income opportunities offered by illegal drugs and property crimes. This largely explains their rapidly growing imprisonment rate. In addition, this chapter studies their criminal trajectories and violence in prison, analyzing patterns of victimization of women within prisons.

Chapter 9 reexamines our main claims by studying the so-called division between prison and the outside world. Penal populism claims: “Lock-in the criminals and throw away the keys,” yet the harsh reality has proven that this separation is a fallacy. The vast majority of inmates re-enter society after a few years, and all inmates have links with the outside world, producing negative externalities from imprisonment. This chapter shows that the boundaries between prisons and the outside world are blurred, that prisons are an integral part of life for hundreds of thousands in Latin America and affect the millions of relatives and friends who live outside prisons. Thus, there are active networks and channels of communication and exchanges that defy the concept of prisons as isolation centers. The chapter looks at several topics such as the effect of prison on families and recidivism, and concludes that separating large numbers of young people from the outside world has not impacted crime levels on the streets.

Chapter 6 examines the particular role of justice institutions in the incarceration wave that has yielded such a dysfunctional and overpopulated system. Our analysis focuses on arrests done by police, criminal prosecution, and trials in order to assess the types of cases that end up in criminal convictions, the type of evidence used to convict, and the role played by defense lawyers. We examine the overreliance on flagrancy detention, police and prosecutor collusion with crime, and corruption. This chapter shows that by targeting the most visible crimes, prosecutors process the easy cases, and judges rarely require high standards of proof as evidence to convict.

Chapter 8 explores violence and the inner organization of gangs. The declining provision of basic needs and poor infrastructure have led to the emergence of illegal markets within corrections. The control of these markets by gangs and small groups has contributed to the growth of criminal organizations that have shaped life inside prisons. Using different data sources, we show that these groups fight for dominance of the drug trade and other coveted goods inside prisons, and that they may use extreme violence to maintain control. This chapter studies the conditions under which violence may occur and its extent, the growing role of gangs in Latin American prisons, as well as the conditions that give rise to criminal governance.

This chapter presents our core argument – the close association of prisons and crime – and shows that more imprisonment may have increased criminality. It presents several hypotheses for the prison growth and studies the nature of policies enacted in response to the rise in criminality and which led to the prison explosion. We use an in-depth analysis of three representative countries: Colombia, Mexico, and Chile. We maintain that high turnover and the increased severity of punishment for very serious crimes account for the prison explosion, impacting critical living conditions within correction facilities throughout Latin America. We argue that prison growth has endogenously produced more crime on the streets because high inmate turnover has created large new cohorts who reenter society and rapidly reengage in criminal acts. We test this hypothesis by modeling a regression analysis of incarceration rates for property crime in order to prove that imprisonment has a delayed-lagged effect on property crimes, providing substantial evidence for the criminogenic effect of prisons.

The fourth chapter deals with the complicated history of public land in Brazil. Weak federal control of public land before the 1960s allowed the illegal settlement of hundreds of families inside the Brazilian Iguaçu National Park. In the 1970s, however, Brazilian park officials had decided to evict all the 2,500 settlers. The shift was partly a reaction to the same international discourse that had influenced Argentine park authorities, as discussed in Chapter 3. However, in Brazil, the early 1970s eviction coincided with the harshest years of the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades. The generals were obsessed with suppressing political dissent and feared the settlers living inside the Iguaçu national park could fall prey to left-wing radicalism. The Iguaçu evictions anticipated the authoritarian agrarian reform and population resettlement programs later implemented further north in Amazonia, designed by the military to remedy peasant unrest.

This last chapter recreates the changes in the landscape inside the two parks and their surrounding area. To do so, it uses a trove of more than 800 aerial images from 1953 to 1980 (as well as government reports, newspaper articles, and legal cases) to reconstruct the landscape before, during, and after the settlement of tens of thousands of settlers at the borderland. The chapter documents the role of logging, as carried out by Brazilian colonization companies with indigenous labor, in permanently transforming the native subtropical Atlantic forest into cropland. It also cast light on road building as one of the factors allowing migration to the region. Inside the park, the chapter argues that what is now seen as pristine nature – the forested landscape of the parks – is the fruit of decades of often contradictory policies and practices.

This chapter recounts the founding of the Iguazú National Park in Argentina in 1934. It shows how the goal of securing and occupying Argentina’s border zone through the use of a national park overcame the conservationist belief that the park’s mission was limited to the protection of flora and fauna. After the settlement of the Argentine border disputes with Brazil and Chile in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the country witnessed a proliferation of plans for the development of its borderlands. The chapter describes how, with the failure of the initial border colonization plans, local politicians and businesspeople began proposing national parks as an alternative tool for the settlement of the borderlands. This chapter and the next (Chapter 2), ultimately demonstrate how geopolitics and the drive to occupy what was seen as an empty borderland led to the establishment of national parks at the Argentine-Brazilian border in the 1930s.