Security is a top public policy issue in Latin America. In response, political leaders increasingly offer a tough-on-crime response. Their policies define more acts as crime, put more police on the streets, and, ultimately, place more people in prison. Indeed, Latin America’s inmate population almost quadrupled from 1992 to 2017 from 408,000 to 1,519,000 (p. 1). Although not yet at levels seen in the United States, the trend is alarming and has led to a growing number of studies on prison conditions and punitivism in the region. In Prisons and Crime in Latin America, Marcelo Bergman and Gustavo Fondevila offer quantitative evidence that not only questions the effectiveness of prisons in reducing crime but also reveals how they facilitate increases in crime. Their book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of prisons in crime and offers original statistics that will be valuable to scholars and policy makers alike.

The book is grounded in an impressive quantitative study of the region. As the authors note, correctional institutions in Latin America are “typically opaque” and “neither gather detailed information nor publicize their data” (pp. 22–23). As a result, qualitative or ethnographic studies of prisons are more common. Bergman and Fondevila have compiled administrative data, which are often difficult to access, on 18 countries from governments, public agencies, and international organizations. But more importantly, the findings of the book rest on an original survey of sentenced and pretrial inmates in eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. In each country nearly 1,000 inmates were interviewed and asked 300 questions about themselves, their alleged crime, life before prison and in prison, their families, and their current and past experiences with the criminal justice system. Thus, the data presented in this book will be valuable to scholars and practitioners seeking quantitative evidence of what mass incarceration looks like in specific countries and across the region and will help identify issues worth exploring in more depth.

For the purposes of the authors, the detailed statistics enable them to present a nuanced argument of when and why prisons create crime. The vast majority of people in prison are there for low-level theft and drug-related crimes. When they are put in jail, a new recruit quickly replaces them, expanding the numbers of people involved in crime. Because sentences are short and debts are incurred while in jail, most inmates return to these profit-driven crimes after they are released. Thus, the types of crimes committed, high turnover, and high rates of recidivism are factors contributing to rising crime rates.

Prison conditions also matter. Many studies have examined the poor prison conditions in Latin America. Bergman and Fondevila’s survey contributes to this research by providing cross-country comparative measurements of the poor conditions as described by prisoners themselves. More importantly, their study moves beyond exposing human rights abuses to linking them to rising crime. Among other issues, they provide data on overcrowding, poor provision of basic needs, insufficient rehabilitative programs, and limited reentry supports. This state neglect, the survey shows, leads inmates to turn to their families and gangs for support. Both these alternatives contribute to more crime.

Families are an understudied area of the crime puzzle, and this book should encourage more work in the area. The authors find that families of the incarcerated, who are often poor to begin with, become indebted while supporting the relative (often the breadwinner) in prison. Once released, the family frequently pressures the former inmate to become involved in crime again to pay off these debts. Moreover, children suffer emotionally from the imprisonment of a parent (78% of inmates have children) and often leave school (p. 78). Prisons become familiar to children who visit their parents there, and crime becomes a more likely path.

Gangs also provide an alternative governance structure in prison. Given the paucity of resources in prison, a substantial illegal market emerges that controls the distribution of all the goods one could want, from fresh drinking water to drugs. The data show that this market is enabled by family members who supply goods from the outside and by corrupt security guards who profit from turning a blind eye to contraband or assist in this market. It also facilitates the recruitment of petty thieves and small-scale drug dealers into gangs and organized crime networks. The procurement of cell phones and the corruption of security guards help those in prison organize crime outside the prison. Scholars interested in growing organized crime in the region will appreciate these insights into the role of prisons in its expansion.

Socioeconomic issues are threaded throughout the book. In chapter 2, the authors provide a profile of the inmate population. One-third left home before they turned 15. Many had low-paying jobs in the informal market prior to entry; few had completed elementary school. Inmates often came from households with substance abuse, violence, and family members who had been imprisoned. Chapter 6 shows how the criminal justice system favors the arrest and conviction of people from this socioeconomic bracket: police arrest those caught red-handed; prosecutors, public defenders, and judges accept confessions as sufficient evidence for convictions; and people from lower socioeconomic groups lack the money to pay bribes or do not have connections who can set them free.

The shocking result of what the authors call an ‘“arrest and convict’ machine” is that nearly 1 in 55 Latin Americans, or about 2.8 million people, have been in prison in the last decade (p. 183). Thus, many millions of families are emotionally and financially affected, and mass incarceration is deepening socioeconomic inequalities and increasing crime. The conclusion of the book recommends more effective preventive programs and criminal justice reforms, but more explicit attention should be given to socioeconomic solutions. For example, the data suggest that attention to the educational and health care system could be as important to reducing crime as reforms to the criminal justice system. This is certainly an area in which more research is needed, and I hope that the data offered in the book will encourage such work.

Moreover, the conclusion optimistically offers an array of reforms, which emerge from the findings, that could help reduce the use of prisons and their role in producing crime. However, research on punitive populism has shown that political leaders’ crime policy choices are motivated less by evidence than by perceptions of punitive public opinion, emotion, profit, career incentives, and political strategy. Thus, for political scientists interested in the rise of punitive populism, this book adds new urgency to the need to understand how it can be reduced.

Overall, Prisons and Crime in Latin America offers a valuable quantitative overview of the incarceration crisis in the region and presents a convincing argument of its role in exacerbating, not reducing, crime. The book will be of interest to those studying punitivism, crime and security policy, and prisons in political science, criminology, sociology, and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to policy makers and practitioners concerned with reducing crime and with criminal justice reform.