The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935

Abstract

In the last decade, historians have shown increasing interest in prisons as the subject of critical inquiry. This scholarship has sought to understand the greater dimensions of social control, the difficulties in wholly translating Western institutional models to Latin American societies, and the ways in which the criminal-justice and penitentiary systems have reflected states’ exclusionary practices based on class, ethnicity, race, and gender. More broadly then, much of this new research has looked at power and the way it has functioned in the postcolonial world. Carlos Aguirre’s work here is no exception. However, what is exceptional is the innovative perspective that Aguirre takes in examining the world within four of Peru’s prisons: the Lima penitentiary El Panóptico, the penal colony El Frontón, the Carcél de Guadelupe, and the Carcél Central de Varones. He seeks to uphold a subaltern view, one from inside the prison walls, that reveals a tenuous and often improvised relationship between both “common” and political prisoners, prison officials, wardens, criminologists, and doctors, as well as the families, cronies, coworkers, neighbors, and friends on the outside. We learn that one cannot draw the line between the two worlds so distinctly: in many ways, life in the Lima prisons was a reflection of the forms of clientelism and hierarchy that characterized Peruvian society, a point made most elegantly in Aguirre’s analysis of inmate loyalty to political leaders outside the prison during the Augusto Leguía regime. But Aguirre contends that prisoners were also at odds with the system of patronage and used alternative vocabularies — from the language of human rights to the language of tattoos — to express themselves.Breaking the book into three parts, Aguirre first introduces some of the key elements related to prison reform encapsulated in the debates between legalistic and increasingly medicalized notions of criminality. Criminological theories, no matter their lack of rigorous research or consensus, enjoyed tremendous cachet among Leguiísta policymakers, who translated these scientific studies of crime into legal and penal codes and guides on prison management. The second part takes a closer look at the prison experience, revealing the contradictory nature of rehabilitation and reform. On the one hand, the state sought to implement the strategies that famed Peruvian eugenicist Carlos Enrique Paz Soldán designed to inculcate morality, a commitment to hard work, and good citizenship, while the simultaneous neglect and abuse of inmates was commonplace. Relating the horrors of solitary confinement known as la sepultura in El Frontón, Aguirre observes how violence seemed endemic to the penitentiary; in it, a “true regime of terror reigned” (p. 106). The author concludes that despite the attempts by the modernizing Peruvian state to make the prison a model of discipline and order, that “customary order” was built not according to prison design but through personal negotiation, bribery, and resistance, creating a more porous boundary between inmates and prison authorities. In this sense, Aguirre suggests that the idea of authority can be imagined as a floating concept that could be invoked by prison employees, wardens, and inmates, each exerting their leverage over one another in ways that mirrored the racial, spatial, and gendered notions of patronage in society. This idea is best exemplified by the small group of caporales — individuals drawn from the convict population to assist in prison administration — who at times held certain authority over prison officials by virtue of their special knowledge of the prison’s inner workings.The author’s examination of inmate correspondence, particularly the prisoners’ sketches included in the final chapter, offers a valuable perspective on political prisoners, prison administration, and inmate abuse. The extensive documentation and compilation of arrest records for the period of his study, as well as the tables on the number of inmates, painstakingly broken down by categories of age, race, regional origin, and occupation, are illuminating and indispensable data for scholars working in criminality or labor history.Aguirre’s work reaffirms just how important it is that we study the institutions inhabited by subalterns in order to understand the mechanisms of authoritarian rule. His research suggests new ways to see how power is exercised through contestation, solidarity, ambivalence, and—as often is the case in Peru’s prisons — through acts of violence.