Some of the most problematic prisons in the world are to be found in Latin America, typified by:

• • rampant overcrowding in dilapidated, unsanitary prisons;

• • endemic violence of prisoner on prisoner, prisoner on staff and staff on prisoner which regularly results in fatalities, often at a high level;

• • very low ratios of staff per prisoner, with personnel who are inexperienced and poorly trained resulting in non-existent or at best inconsistent supervision;

• • extensive corruption at institutional and individual levels;

• • an absence of appropriate political oversight and strategic direction.

Over the years I have had discussions in many countries with regional intergovernmental agencies, with government ministers and officials, with non-governmental organisations and civil society groups and with academics, and have pored over countless official reports about the dire situation in prisons in the region by bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2011) and the United Nations Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (ILANUD). I have also observed these realities at first hand in several countries in Central America and in South America, from Venezuela and Colombia in the north to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in the south as well as in Brazil, which has the third-highest prison population in the world after the United States and China. A special edition of the Prison Service Journal (Darke and Garces, 2017) presents a unique panorama of the daily reality of life inside several prisons across the region with a number of articles written by men who have experienced this at first hand. The editors comment that:

Rather than make this chapter a repetitive penal travelogue, I shall again focus on a small number of countries to provide examples of the generic situation in the region and will end with the positive story of how one country is feeling its way towards a different model of imprisonment.