The recent revolts, escapes and killings in Latin American prisons seem all too familiar in a region with an incarceration rate twice that of the European Union and some of the highest homicide rates in the world. But an article in the New York Times describing the wholesale takeover of prison systems by criminal groups has brought broader attention to a regional crisis in which prisons “have become crucial recruitment centers for Latin America’s largest and most violent cartels and gangs.”
The article, citing IDB research, reveals that Latin America’s prison population climbed by 76% from 2010 to 2020 and reflects concerns that we, along with research colleagues, have expressed in the past about policies that lead to excessively high rates of imprisonment and to the violence and disruption that can accompany it. These include the widespread use of pretrial detention, the languishing for months or years of detainees awaiting trial, and harsh sentences for people with low-level drug offenses, a phenomenon that exposes non-violent people to hardened criminals.
We have also emphasized the far-too-limited opportunities for inmates to acquire education, work and achieve rehabilitation. Together with extremely poor living conditions in prison facilities, these shortcomings create fertile ground for organized crime groups to flourish.
The question is what can be done and how alternative approaches can be communicated.
What Can Be Done?
The IDB’s commitment to improve prison management is aimed at supporting efforts that support the main purpose of the prison system: the rehabilitation and social reintegration of individuals. Currently, 13 of the 31 operations of the IDB Group’s citizen security and justice portfolio focus on using evidence to strengthen prison systems’ institutional capacities.
These efforts seek to prevent and reduce crime and violence within prisons and reduce recidivism for overall greater citizen security. It is all part of a strategy that encompasses a human rights approach in line with international standards to guarantee the integrity of all inmates. It includes initiatives to respond to sanitary and humanitarian crises; develop results-based information systems aimed at strengthening prison management and create innovative prison infrastructure that is sustainable, secure and promotes rehabilitation. It also involves the promotion of alternatives to detention; the professionalization of prison officials; the adoption of new technologies for better prison management; and the definition of results-based budget management of prisons.
Distorted Information
Another crucial focus is the role of information in shaping public demand for greater punishment, especially when politicians, journalists and social media sites hype crime stories and misrepresent statistics. In the United States, for example, where 2019 crime rates were roughly half what they had been 20 years prior, Gallup polls consistently showed that a majority of people believed that there was more crime each year than the year before. This may have deterred efforts to reduce the prison population.
In an experiment done in Panama, we exposed people to a message about higher crime over the 2000-2013 time period, accompanied by a picture of a crime scene. Those people were willing to dedicate 30% more resources to punishment than another group that got a message about falling crime rates over the more recent period of 2009-2013, accompanied by a peaceful image of a mother and child—a group that was willing to spend more on preventative measures.
Information, in other words, can be manipulated and drive harsh sentencing. It can lead people to ignore measures with great potential for crime reduction, like larger investments in childhood education, parenting programs, vocational training, rehabilitation and anti-poverty initiatives. These and other measures, compiled by the IDB’s Evidence Platform, help governments design and implement citizen security policies.
A lack of faith in institutions is also a problem in Latin America where on average less than half the population trusts their national police and, in many countries, less than one-third, according to the 2021 Latinobarómetro opinion survey. This lack of trust, as described in an IDB monograph, affects citizen’s willingness to fund the police, the type of security policies they demand, and their willingness to cooperate with law enforcement. It not only hampers the police’s ability to contend with lawlessness. It can by extension also lead to great impunity, and, consequently, demands for harsher sentencing and more incarceration, even if those measures are costly and fail to curb delinquency long-term.
Information To Improve the Prison Situation
As of 2021, around 1.4 million people were held in Latin American penal institutions. Overcrowding and poor living conditions are common, and organized crime organizations, using prisons as a recruiting ground, have become more powerful. This precarious and unsustainable state of affairs is more likely to turn non-violent criminals into violent ones and increase the incidence of recidivism than serve the interests of rehabilitation and greater security. In the face of disinformation from social media, politicians and other sources of inaccuracy, better information on crime and prisoners can only help the cause of law enforcement, sentencing and penal reform for the benefit of society as a whole.
