Postneoliberalism and Penality in South America: By Way of Introduction

Abstract

In the last two decades, there has been an extraordinary growth in incarceration rates in South America, with some variations across national contexts but generally in line with the same trend. Twenty years ago, incarceration rates were relatively low in most countries in the region; despite that knowledge, it has proved difficult to reconstruct the official data for that period. In 1992, with the exclusion of the small countries with less than one million inhabitants in the Northern region of South America such as Guyana, French Guyana and Surinam, only three countries had 100 prisoners or more per 100,000 inhabitants: Uruguay (100), Venezuela (133) and Chile (154) (see Figure 1). Several other national contexts reflected ‘Scandinavian’ rates, such as Argentina (62), Peru (69), Ecuador (75) and Brazil (74).

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Published: 2017-03-01
Pages:133 to 145
Section:Dossier: Postneoliberalism and Penality in South America
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How to Cite
Sozzo, M. (2017) “Postneoliberalism and Penality in South America: By Way of Introduction”, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6(1), pp. 133-145. doi: 10.5204/ijcjsd.v6i1.391.

Author Biography

Máximo Sozzo is Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina). He is Director of the MA in Criminology, Director of the Program for University Education inside Prisons and Director of the Social Involvement Program "Crime and Society" at the same university. He has been adjunct and associate professor of sociology and criminology at various Argentinean universities during the last ten years. As a visiting professor he has taught graduate courses in criminology at several universities in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador and Spain. He has been visiting research fellow at the universities of Bologna, Toronto, Barcelona and FLACSO Ecuador. He has been consultant on issues related to crime and punishment for different national and local governments and international organizations. His research over the last fifteen years has related to different themes in the field of criminology: police violence and accountability, police reform, crime prevention discourses and practices, history of psychiatry and criminal justice, cultural travels of discourses and practices on crime control, history of criminology and metamorphosis of prison and crime control in late modernity. He has published on these themes four books and many book chapters and essays in academic journals.