Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Prisons: In Jail, But Not Sentenced

BY Richard M. Aborn and Ashley D. Cannon

From issue: Natural Resource Extraction in Latin America, Winter 2013

Millions of people languish in miserable conditions in prisons across the Americas, awaiting trial. (Video interview available.)

[...]

On any given day, in the majority of countries in the Western Hemisphere, the total pretrial detention population averages below 20,000 people. The countries with the highest estimated pretrial detention populations on an average day are, not surprisingly, those with the largest general populations. The United States heads the list with 487,000, followed by Brazil (190,000), Mexico (98,000), Peru, Colombia and Argentina (31,000–34,000), and Venezuela (29,000).1

As a result of these high pretrial detention rates, 10 to 40 percent of the entire incarcerated population is behind bars without a conviction in most countries in the Americas. The highest proportion of pretrial detainees among the total prison population is in Bolivia (83.6 percent), followed by Paraguay (71.2 percent), Haiti (67.7 percent), Venezuela (66.2 percent), Dominican Republic (64.7 percent), Uruguay (64.6 percent), Panama (60.8 percent), Peru (58.6 percent), Guatemala (54.4 percent), Argentina (52.6 percent), and Honduras (50.1 percent).2

Another way to measure where pretrial detention is highest is to estimate the rate of pretrial detention as a proportion of the general population. This provides a standardized comparison across countries of varying sizes, and is not altered by changes in the sentenced prison population. Here, several countries far outpace the global average of 40 pretrial detainees per 100,000 in the general population. Panama (223) heads the list, followed by Uruguay (180), the U.S. (157), the Dominican Republic (136), El Salvador (113), and Peru (111).

https://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons