ten - The universal and the particular in Latin American penal state formation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
Summary
It took me some time to understand what the book was about. The pages were divided into columns that contained dates and names and descriptions. When he sensed that I was having difficulty, the corporal explained that this list was a list of the cells currently for sale that I could choose from. Still not believing that any of this was real, I asked the major how much a cell cost, using one of my few Spanish expressions:
“¿Cuánto cuesta?”
“Cinco mil,” he responded. I thought that I knew the numbers, but I must have misheard. Five thousand was too much. I asked the translator to repeat the amount in English. He confirmed that it was five thousand.
“Dollars or bolivianos?”
“Dollars, my amigo,” he said. “Cell prices in San Pedro are always in American Dollars.” (quoted in Young and McFadden, 2004, p 54)
This is taken from the autobiographic account of Thomas McFadden, a British national who spent nearly five years in the San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia, for drug smuggling. With the help of another inmate, McFadden was able to set up a contract to purchase a prison cell from a Bolivian prisoner and to take over the cell for US$1,200, an amount that also included the former owner's television, refrigerator and some of the furniture he had brought into the prison (Young and McFadden, 2004, pp 107-8).
In a paradigmatic way, this episode illustrates one of many aspects of the reality of the contemporary Latin American prison system that is difficult to imagine for outside observers and analysts, but which an increasing number of people throughout the region are confronted with in their daily lives – most of all those belonging to the marginalised segments of Latin America's urban population. In fact, throughout the last two decades or so, the formation of what Loïc Wacquant described in great detail for the US and the countries of Western Europe as the emergence of a ‘neoliberal Leviathan’ in the guise of a ‘penal state’, that resorts to ‘punitive containment as a government technique for managing deepening urban marginality’ (Wacquant, 2010a, p 204; emphasis in original), can also be identified for Latin America (Müller, 2012).
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- Criminalisation and Advanced MarginalityCritically Exploring the Work of Loïc Wacquant, pp. 195 - 216Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2012