fe Bikhe_op He Post bewctiony be fot faviica, Rn Ricade Salatae y lulos Aguiue (eds) foster > Vir vbsi Tecan ress, 4916 & : 1. The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Toward an Interpretive Social History of Prisons Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre In Europe and North America, moern penitentiaries and reformatoties added important dimensions to the project of modernity. The new prisons, in addition to their explicit goals of hurmanizing the treatment of inmates and providing more rational means of reformation, presented the possibility of changes in attitudes, sensibilities, and perceptions that were deemed necessary for the construction of modern market econo- mies, republican governments, and stableand harmonic social relations. ‘These changes extended far beyond the confines of the prison, where new technologies of punishment tried to instill capitalist work habits, honesty, and thrift among inmates, projecting onto the social and political body new policies, principles, and authorities, Whether we consider the prison as part of 2 gradual civilizing process, as the central element of a grid defining a carceral, disciplinary society, or as a self- improving institution that mimicked the goals of the industrial bour- geoisie, the effects of the prison on European and North American societies have been recognized as pervasive and long-lasting. In Latin America, little is known about the process that gave bisth t6 the penitentiary.! Available evidence {the compilation of fragmentary studies) suggests that this was a protracted process encompassing more than a century {1830-1940} and uneven in its evolution and nature. Clearly, the nature of the penitentiary project embodied in the Casa de Corregdo of Rio de Janeiro in the 1850s was quite different from that incorporated into the Penitenciaria Nacional of Buenos Aires in the 1910s, Hence, any attempt to understand the emergence of the peniten- tiary in Latin America must pay attention to questions of periodization and regional diversity. The reasons why some countries adopted the penitentiary project earlier than others arenot always clear, constituting in fact one of the questions we attempt to explore in this essay. ‘The purpose of the penitentiary project, as it was conceived by different countrics in the region between 1830 and 1940, seems to differ2 Ricardo D. Satvatore and Carlos Aguirre from the European and North American experience, adding difficulty to the task of understanding the experiences of prison reform in Latin America. In additiongo their functions as loci of social control, peniten- tiaries in the region served various other purposes, New prisons acted as, catalysts of a clinical, “scientific” view of social problems, provided the experimental grounds for the consolidation of the new sciences of crime andpunishment criminology and penology}, and pioneered professional interventions that reshaped the relations between the state and the lower classes. In the political terrain, the effect of the penitentiary was also signifi- cantly different. Rather than contributing to imagining a democratic polity (as in Europe and North America), the various efforts at prison reform in Latin America were predicated upon nondemocratic concep- tions of the political order. Instead of 2 foundation for a new political order or the imaginary (imagincire) that sustained that order, the penitentiary in Latin America served as either a symbol of modernity or as an instrument of social differentiation and control. Regarding the connection between the new disciplinary power and the construction of the social, the penitentiary project gave birth toa diversity of discourses about the lower classes immigrant workers, blacks, indigenous peoples, mothers, and infants) that tried to interpret the challenges facing the emerging export economies of the region. ‘In part, this was the effect of quite different transformations affecting Latin American societies during this period: the consolidation of cen- tralist nation-states, the rapid integration of their economies to the world market, the sudden changes in the composition of the working classes associated with mass immigration, regional displacements of population, and important changes in the social relations of production. To this extent, the discursive formation that supported the different movements toward prison reform can be considered as attempts to interpret Latin America's ambivalent economic, political, and social modernity. This essay is an attempt toadilress these issues in rather exploratory way. Given the scant attention these issues have received in Latin American scholarship (nothing compared to the richness and sophistica- tion of the debates on criminal justice history in Europe and North America}, this essay has very modest goals. It should be read as an initial effort at ordering information, contrasting the Latin American experi- ence with that of other regions (where prisons and penitentiaries were actually invented), and proposing a number of hypotheses about the - institutions of confinement, the recurrent efforts for their reform and \demnization, and their connections with the broader Latin American -serjeties, ‘The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America 3 First, we describe the development in North America and Europe of new technologies of punishment and locate in this context the uneven and ambivalent “adoption” of the penitentiary in Latin America. We then discuss the problem ofthe different timingof these “adoptions” and the shifting ideological and sociopolitical environments from which they emerged. Next, we examine the discursive formations that pro- duced the enunciations that supported and conditioned the march of prison reform, differentiating a period of liberal constitutionalism (1830— 1860) from a later period marked by the influence of positivist criminol- ogy (1880-1910). In this second period, we argue, discourses on prison reform served to construct and interpret different problems and projects related to building the nation-state, the integration of national econo- mies to the world market, and the “social question.” Apptoaching the History of the Penitentiary The history of the penitentiary can be narrated in at least three alterna- tive or complementary ways. First, it can be regarded as a se:~.> of institutional innovations which coalesced in the formation of as; ized kind of knowledge {“ penology”). In this sense, the emergence - 1 diffusion of che house of correction, the cellular prison, the penal colony, the method of “congregated” work, the Irish system of classification, and the reformatory could be seen as stages in a “progressive” path toward more sophisticated and effective prisons. Thus, the penitentiary appears as a combination of techniques of control applied onto the prisoner’s soul and body and as a set of blueprints generally developed abroad ready. to be transferred, adopted, and improved. Second, the history of the penitentiary can be described as a genealogy of discourses and practices about crime and criminals that engendered—along with new disciplinary techniques—certain forms of authority, iden:.". :nd rationality characteristic of “modernity.” In this second appre penitentiary is located at the intersection of moder ways of. -.:g, classifying, isolating, and understanding the poor, the working class, the colonial subject, or the subordinate. Seen both as the manufacturing site of individuation, regimentation, and self-containment and as a clinic or laboratory for the understandingand treatment of “social problems,” the penitentiary acts upon (that is, actualizes) a discursive formation con- taining enunciations about the "criminal class” and about the national, racial, or gender character of delinquency 3 Third, this history can be seen as an account of the new technologies of discipline-—its promises and its failures—as experienced by the prisoners themselves. In adc -.0n tothesystems ofrules, the architecture, the administration, the less-ns, and the sermons within the penitentiary, the historian committed to4 Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre this type of history must examine the secret communication and barter among prisoners and between them and their guards, their protest against rules and their enforcers, as well as their sufferings, frustrations, and silences. Frown this perspective, prisoners’ experiences serve to illustrate the development of social classes, gender divisions, and racial tensions in society at large.* Each alternative narrative strategy promises a different periodization and poses its own difficulties. We concentrate on the first two ap- proaches and their interrelationship. The former, the “progressive” history of “innovations,” provides us with a context and reference in which to locate the history of Latin America’s adoption of new methods of punishment in relation to wider international practices. This was the perception of the Latin American "specialists" who traveled to Europe and the United States in search of the best available technology of Punishment. Isolated from the historical context in which they emerged and from the sufferings they inflicted, these “innovations” appeared as additions to the stock of accumulated knowledge about the reformation ofprisoners, as “improvements,” and as “modernizations.” The reform. ers’ attempt to bring their countries up to the standards of the more industrialized nations necessarily replicated and naturalized the "pro- gressive” history of penal institutions as conceived by European and North American experts. Our intention is not to measure the modernity or backwardness of Latin America in relation to Europe and the United States but rather to examine the question of why certain regimes and groups within the elite, at given conjunctures, found it necessary to modernize the methods of incarceration and the treatment of prisoners. This implies an examina- tion of the rhetoric of reformers, the multiple forms through which they argued for the “innovations,” the different references and authorities they invoked to assert their claims, and the ways in which the peniten- tiary was connected to imagined political and social communities. It is inthis connection that we pursue the second approach: the genealogy of discourses about crime, punishment, and prison reform and the emer- gence of criminology. We are concerned with the local appropriation and uses of internationally circulated discourses about crime, punishment, and confinement. Aware of the similarities in the rhetoric and intent with which European, North American, and Latin American clites looked at, discredited, and criminalized their respective “lowerclasses,”” ‘we want to understand the connections between “national” perceptions of prison reform and the set of contentious processes that characterized the region's history in the period under study (1830-1940) class forma- tion, nation building, labor gendering, and racial/ethnic conflict. In our view, the discursive articulation of international technologies ‘The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America 5 of punishment to fit the needs of national or local debates about revolution, political reform, the “social question” posed by immigrants, or the nature of colonial peasantry was part of a process of interpreting and appropriating modernity. The Latin American experts who visited the prisons of Europe and the United States looking for innovations replicated in their reports the idiom of modemity in which the commu- nity of penologists cloaked the new methods. Determined to spread more humane and effective methods of rehabilitation, these experts, in their communications with government officials and the public in general, presented certain methods of imprisonment as the most mod- em, scientific, and efficient. The relation between discourses of reform and the diffusion of the penitentiary model presents us with additional questions, forneitherthe “original” model nor its replicas in Latin America had the diffusion that penologists and prison administrators expected. Consequently, the discourse of reform included also a pessimistic strand: a set of proposi- tions aimed at explaining the failure of reform which connected natu- rally with “explanations” concerning the “character” of the lower classes, the habits of ruling groups, or the nature of the political system. By exploring these “explanations” we can understand better the inter. pretive and symbolic benefits derived from a project—the penitentiary, the reformatory—that failed to fulfill its promises of humanizing pun- ishment and disciplining prisone Another intriguing dimension concems the construction of a new form of power/knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century a growing poo] of prison managers and experts came to claim monopoly to a new kind of knowledge: a set of propositions about the efficacy of methods of confinement, isolation, religious instruction, agricultural work, and so forth disseminated through specialized journals as well as through national and international congresses. While Latin American reformers had the possibility of selecting among competing, practical methods of prison administration, penology, the new science of punish- ‘ment, guided their choice in acertain direction. Similarly, visions of the “criminal class” were shaped by the new science, criminology, heavily influenced in the late nineteenth century by positivism. Thus, the search forand the adoption of modern technologies of punishmentin the region were closely associated with new attitudes of elites and govern- ments toward science. New Technologies of Punishment In Europe and the United States, the period between American indepen- dence and the Franco-Prussian War prodiiced momentous transforma-