This is a welcome volume that brings a variety of approaches to understudied penitentiary and criminological institutions, theories, and practices in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Costa Rica. These authors examine why penitentiaries fascinated state builders, who expended prodigious resources to construct these monuments of industrial discipline amid agro-export economies. For reformers, despite the precarious enforcement of discipline within prisons and their limited capacity, penitentiaries were touchstones of civilization that distinguished fledgling central states from colonial and caudillo predecessors and strengthened their often tenuous legitimacy. As coercive labor forms gave way to market-oriented labor relations, the penitentiary seemed a “scientific” and humanitarian alternative to enforce social discipline while recycling a nation’s refractory elements.
This collection’s strength lies in its emphasis on the differing interpretations of European and North American criminological and penitentiary models. Local conditions shaped the way state builders selected and used these ideas. Enlightenment ideals on the perfectibility of individuals and institutions clashed with more venerable conceptions of natural, social, gender, and racial hierarchies that were “scientifically” reinforced in the late 1800s by criminological theories and social Darwinism. As Carlos Aguirre shows, this clash undermined the implementation of everyday penitentiary discipline in Lima. Similarly, María Soledad Zárate Campos offers an intriguing analysis of gender and discipline in Chile’s Correctional House for women. But other essays largely overlook the potential for a gendered analysis of masculinity in an institution dominated, inhabited, and dedicated to reforming mostly wayward “men” into ideal citizens.
After learning much about Latin America’s penitentiary projects, I desired to know more about the links between the limited capacity of modern penitentiaries and more traditional jails and penal colonies. Robert Buffington and Steven Palmer come closest to offering a broader vision of this relationship in their analysis of Mexico and Costa Rica. Also, one senses the need for a more rigorous consideration of the timing and depth of penitentiary reforms in relation to other disciplining institutions: schools, orphanages, poorhouses, asylums, police, military service, etc. Penitentiary reforms were linked to a web of institutions and the allocation of resources indicates much about state builders’ concerns and the potential they perceived in their populace. Ricardo Salvatore’s comparison of criminological theory and practice in Argentina and Brazil is the most revealing in teasing out these issues in relation to race and labor markets. Still, interesting questions remain, such as whether the Argentine state’s emphasis on public education or the lack of a standing military in Costa Rica facilitated and encouraged the development of penitentiaries. Clearly such a comparison is a monumental task beyond the grasp of any one collection of essays. The merit of this well-researched collection is that it paves the way for just such an ambitious scholarly agenda through its multidimensional approach to criminology and penitentiary subjects.
