ABSTRACT
Some of Latin America’s prison systems mass incarceration provoked a serious structural crisis in the criminal justice system due to practices of state illegality and emergent forms of prisoner self-governance. The state committed violence against prisoners, permitted violence between prisoners, or ceded the carceral space to the inmates. The chapter analyzes this phenomenon of “prisoner capture.” State authorities held tens of thousands in extended and unjustifiable pre-trial detention and often denied convicted prisoners their legal rights through a form of lawfare that detains and punishes very selectively. This officially sanctioned kidnapping created such overcrowding and underinvestment that national, constitutional, and international norms on detention were systematically violated. This in turn encouraged a different kind of “prisoner capture” where inmate organizations took over the day-to-day governance of prison life, producing a parallel normative and pseudo-legal world where inmates adjudicated on, and disciplined detainees in the absence of state officials. The chapter considers what current Latin American prisons and prison studies can add to the field of regional socio-legal studies. It then examines the reasons for prisoner capture, the consequences of inmates’ control of the carceral space, and the implications for the dominant socio-legal literature on prisons and imprisonment.
