Criminal Law The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) https://crim.jotwell.com Decolonizing Criminology and Its Relevance to Understand the Birth of the Prison in Latin America. Author : Elena Larrauri Date : December 2, 2021 Libardo Jos6 Ariza and Fernando Le6n Tamayo Arboleda, El cuerpo de los condenados. Carcely violencia en America Latina (The Body of the Convicted. Prisons and Violence in Latin America), 73 Revista de Estudios Sociales 83 (2020). In criminology we are used to reading brief and 'filtered versions' of the history of the prison. Despite recent works that provide useful summaries (Rubin, 2019),1 our main knowledge about the emergence of the prison still comes foremost from the liberal or 'Whig' histories or from revisionist accounts (represented by Rothman, Foucault, and in a distant third place on the podium Spierenburg, Rusche and Kirkheimer, Ignatieff, and Melossi and Pavarini). The liberal version asserts that the emergence of the prison was the product of the 'Enlightenment' in the eighteenth century, and that this new form of punishment was a progressive triumph of humanitarian ideals which opposed corporal punishments and public executions. The revisionist version questions this benevolent explanation and, in the most influential Foucauldian version, declares that prison is also a cruel but 'hidden' punishment addressed to the soul (instead of the body), with the goal of disciplining and creating 'docile bodies', and destined not to punish less but better. Both the liberal and the revisionist versions have also been subject to criticism. Ariza and Tamayo's paper El cuerpo de los condenados. Carcely Violencia en America Latina (The Body of the Convicted. Prisons and Violence in Latin America) provides a good example why both accounts need to be reconsidered. As so often happens in criminology, and in general in the social sciences, our accounts derive mainly from the countries that produce them, the US, and the UK. In the social sciences, this generally means that even in Spain we explain the history of prison comparing 'the system of Auburn and Philadelphia'. This is logical, to a certain extent, because the main scholarship has been developed there. However, this sometimes misleads us because the chronology of the birth of the prison, its principal ideas and influences, and also finally the main actors might obviously be more diverse in different countries. In her fascinating paper Mary Gibson (2011) summarizes the birth of the prison in three other continents to explain that not all countries followed the sources or tempos of the birth of the penitentiary. There are countries where the emergence of the prison 'was introduced by a colonial government (Vietnam, Africa), by indigenous rulers under imperialist pressure from Western powers (China, Japan), or by postcolonial leaders (Peru).' 2 This literature produced from the margins allows us to capture new elements surrounding the origin of the prison institution, like racism, European imperialism, the brutal pre-modern conditions of the prison, and the substitution of less violent punishments existing in these societies before the prison, composing a more complete picture of the birth of the prison. The paper by Ariza and Tamayo therefore helps with 'decolonizing the birth of the prison'. Following the lead of other South American historians like Aguirre ( 2009 ),a we can learn how in Latin America the prison did not play such a central role in the 1800s because of the existence of other form of punishments, such as conscription into the army or the big proprietaries, that served to maintain and reproduce the existing social order. Since the prison was not central, and the state was weak and poor, the conditions of this new institution were brutish (but also paradoxically less 'disciplinarian', allowing at least some prisoners a greater degree of autonomy), far from that proclaimed by the reformers and proponents of 'the well-ordered prison.' 4 The inhumane conditions of existence inside Latin American prisons are what form the main thesis of Ariza and Tamayo's paper. They question if the shift in punishment 'from the body to the soul' and the demise of corporal punishments that is represented by the emergence of the prison really took place in Latin America. Their paper on 1/2