Prison Overcrowding in Latin America: A Plea for Less Criminalization? Camila Ruiz Segovia - Brown Political Review
go to original March 19, 2016

With several of the highest homicide rates in the world, widespread kidnapping, robbery and extortion, as well as an increase in drug-trafficking, Latin American states admittedly have a lot to deal with in the criminal justice domain. As a result, many of them have emphasized arrests over prosecution as a short-term strategy to deal with the crisis of violence. However, such pro-incarceration policies have resulted in a tremendous influx of inmates to local and federal prisons, despite the fact that the number of prisons is far from sufficient to handle the amount of alleged criminals. As of 2012, the 19 penitentiaries of the Honduran state, originally designed to collectively hold 8,000 inmates, were packed with over 24,000 people. As of 2013, over 27,000 inmates in El Salvador overcrowded a system built initially for 8,000.

In hopes of remedying the dire consequences of prison overpopulation, it is crucial to try to look past the horrifying carnage of Topo Chico and similar incidents to ask the question of what Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico share besides the evident issues of prison overcrowding and rampant violence. One answer, which becomes evident upon closer inspection of the cases mentioned earlier, is broken judicial systems. The sluggish pace of judicial proceedings in Latin America makes a bad situation even worse as it leads to a significant percentage of inmates hopelessly waiting for a trial or a formal prosecution while in detention. Furthermore, detentions do not necessarily lead to trials or prosecutions — many inmates are withheld while in the process of receiving a formal sentence.

Another cause is, unsurprisingly, poor drug war policies. A large proportion of inmates are imprisoned due to offenses related to the criminalization of the production and trafficking of drugs. In 2012, 60 percent of inmates in Mexico was detained due to drug-related offenses, mostly possession or transportation of marihuana. By providing unequal access to economic opportunities and welfare, Latin American states have excluded large parts of their populations from the legal means to a productive and sustainable life. Unfortunately, because of this, engaging in this type of criminalized activity is an appealing option for the disenfranchised youth of these nations, since they attain a certain degree of economic stability, a sense of belonging and protection — all the elements that the state has failed to provide.

To make matters worse, in similar manner to the United States, mass incarceration due to policies that criminalize drug-related activities has the largest impact on marginalized communities in Latin American countries. In a recently conducted poll about prison’s populations in Mexico, the data revealed that only 20 percent of the inmates reported to have completed middle school, and that 90 percent of them began working before age 18. But in criminal systems plagued with corruption, an individual accused of a drug-related offense has much less chance of receiving a fair trial — or any trial at all — if he or she belongs to a marginalized community; this individual also lacks the economic means or political power to pay his or her way out of detention or prosecution, in effect contributing to the issue of overcrowded penal facilities.

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