Abstract
In the last decade, Bolivia, as with most countries in the region, has seen an unprecedented increase of its prison population. This is often explained as the consequence of a punitive populism sweeping Latin America. Our article investigates what triggered this punitive turn in Bolivia by identifying some of the factors that impact crime policy and growing prison populations since the election of president Evo Morales in 2006. We argue that a complex array of local and international factors and shifts in crime policy to harden approaches to domestic violence led to steep increases in remand populations. Combined with other inefficiencies in the criminal justice system, this led to sustained increases in the prison population throughout most of this period. This study is based on new and previously unstudied statistical data produced by the Bolivian institutions in charge of implementing crime policy.
Highlights
After a decade of increasing economic inequality and crime rates in the 1990s, most Latin American countries have hardened crime policy during the 2000s
We find that one of the cornerstones of Bolivian crime policy, which accounted traditionally for more than half of Bolivians prison population9 and still makes up for about one fifth of all incarcerated persons,10 can be understood as a product of external demands
We find that the Plurinational State of Bolivia dedicated considerable effort towards shaping its crime policy through enacting new criminal laws
Summary
After a decade of increasing economic inequality and crime rates in the 1990s, most Latin American countries have hardened crime policy during the 2000s. After the election of Morales, the new government adopted administrative measures based on increasing the number of civil servants—mostly police officers and prosecutors—and the adoption of a new preventive paradigm in the anti‐drug policy (Stippel and Serrano Moreno 2016, 2018). In this context, our article aims to answer to the following questions: How much did national and international interests shape Bolivian crime policy? The most important factor from our point of view is not the politicization of the Bolivian crime policy but its endemic inefficient institutions that lack professional public management and general interest in accountability of public servants
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