The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935
328
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935
328eBook
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Overview
Drawing on a large collection of prison and administrative records archived at Peru’s Ministry of Justice, Aguirre offers a detailed account of the daily lives of men incarcerated in Lima’s jails. In showing the extent to which the prisoners actively sought to influence prison life, he reveals the dynamic between prisoners and guards as a process of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance. He describes how police and the Peruvian state defined criminality and how their efforts to base a prison system on the latest scientific theories—imported from Europe and the United States—foundered on the shoals of financial constraints, administrative incompetence, corruption, and widespread public indifference. Locating his findings within the political and social mores of Lima society, Aguirre reflects on the connections between punishment, modernization, and authoritarian traditions in Peru.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822386438 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/27/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Carlos Aguirre is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon, Eugene. He is the author of Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854. He is the coeditor of several books, including Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times, also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
THE CRIMINALS OF LIMA AND THEIR WORLDS
The Prison Experience, 1850-1935By CARLOS AGUIRRE
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3457-6
Chapter One
THE EMERGENCE OF THE CRIMINAL QUESTION (1850-1890)
On August 24, 1861, the recently founded law newspaper La Gaceta Judicial published an article under the title "The Moral Situation." The author, a lawyer named Gabriel Gutiérrez, outlined what he thought were the major causes of the "alarming" rise in crime in Lima. "How could we explain the moral situation in which we are immersed, due to the gradual increase in the number of crimes that are committed?" Gutiérrez asked at the beginning of his article. His response came in the form of a long list of factors that, according to him, contributed to the growing levels of criminality in Lima. Intermittent political instability and civil wars, for instance, had "corrupted the [people's] customs, drained fiscal resources, destroyed agriculture, condoned militarism, eradicated the prestige of all principles, divided the population into antagonistic parties, [and] engendered profound enmities," as a result of which increasing numbers of people were taking to the streets and roads in order to commit crimes. The growing number of idle hands resulting from the decline of localproduction, in turn caused by an "excessive and disorganized free-trade policy," was seen as another source of crime. Because work represented an "essentially moralizing element," its opposite, idleness, necessarily led to criminal behavior among the lower classes. Alcohol consumption and gambling were also cited as major factors in criminality. Gutiérrez rejected the legal and customary practice of treating inebriation as a mitigating circumstance for criminals; in his opinion, the correct attitude was just the opposite: "The individual that has put himself voluntarily in the aptitude of committing a crime should be punished more severely."
A psychological, somehow compulsory propensity to seek richness and luxury was also blamed for the growth of criminal activity. The author considered this "a sort of furor or disease," a "gangrene of all classes of society" that in the case of the poor and middle classes would require the commission of crimes to keep up with the cost of living this kind of artificial life. The situation had even added negative effects on Peruvian society because most, if not all, luxury goods were imported, thus further hurting local production. Additional fuel for rising crime rates was supplied, in Gutiérrez's judgment, by public diversions. The abundance of festivities, he posited, underscored the dimensions of unproductive idleness among the Lima population and their corruptive effects on the population's attitude toward labor and social discipline. Moreover, lack of education produced a ferociousness of character which, he stated, made people even more prone to crime and violence. Gutiérrez estimated that three-quarters of the population of Lima were illiterate.
The recent abolition of slavery (1854) also had an impact on the levels of crime in the city, according to the author. Former slaves, "abject beings with an obtuse intellect, subjugated by the lash of the overseer," were unable to differentiate the "materiality of the flesh" from "the spirituality that animates it." They bore not a single idea about the organization of society, their rights, or the respect they deserved. They were a sort of "undomesticated and enchained tigers" that, suddenly incorporated into society, given rights, and elevated to the same position of other citizens, abandoned their masters' homes and, lacking an industry, "rushed into roads and cities to make their living out of theft and the knife." Furthermore, the abolition of the death penalty in 1858 had been interpreted by criminals as a guarantee of impunity. Such a "noble reform" was "inopportune" because it came at a time when "our manners have reached a level of alarming relaxation, civil wars have corrupted our habits and character, the penitentiary system has not yet been implanted, [and] our penal legislation is extremely vicious." By protecting the criminal's life, Gutiérrez said, legislators had automatically condemned society to death. Finally, deficiencies in the administration of justice-especially leniency motivated by compassion toward the criminal and tardiness in the application of justice-as well as an inefficient and irregular police service encouraged crime, for they made things easier for criminals. Incarcerating criminals was not a solution since, instead of transforming or deterring them, jails and prisons further corrupted inmates.
Gutiérrez was not alone in depicting crime as an acute social problem, even a potentially dangerous one for the country's stability. His article belongs to a growing genre of writing that during the second half of the nineteenth century offered a critique of the material and moral defects of the city of Lima and its inhabitants, one of whose most conspicuous manifestations was criminality. Statements about crime and similar topics came from a variety of commentators, including state authorities, physicians, lawyers, hygienists, policy makers, journalists, and travelers. Although not always in agreement, these social critics shared a concern with social disorder and plebeian morals. Crime in the city of Lima was depicted as a phenomenon that went beyond the accumulation of isolated incidents of violation of the law to become a sort of social pathology resulting from multiple, complex causes, a threat to the stability of Peruvian society, a sign of social decomposition, and consequently an issue demanding prompt and energetic responses from the state.
Gutiérrez's list of factors contributing to criminality included various types of phenomena, ranging from inappropriate or inopportune state policies (free trade, abolition of slavery, abolition of the death penalty) to chronic deficiencies in the social system (inadequate judicial and police institutions, lack of education) and the endurance of popular forms of socialization (alcohol consumption, gambling, public diversions). Gutiérrez blended a critique of the morality of the urban poor and its alleged predisposition to disorderly behavior with a conservative critique of liberal social and economic policies. This conservative/authoritarian view of social problems such as crime seemed to express the anxieties of certain sectors of the Lima population vis-à-vis social and political changes, and it reiterated the demand for more severe state responses to what they viewed as the threatening increase of disorder by the lower classes. Crime, prostitution, alcoholism, poverty, gambling, and other such "vices" were discursively condensed and transformed into a single "social problem" that, at times, was deemed to be reaching alarming proportions. This semantic operation would have important consequences, for it was used to justify exclusionary policies, offered simplistic answers to very complex problems, and shaped state repressive policies. By connecting crime with certain plebeian forms of socialization and culture or, as frequently happened, by explaining crime as the inevitable result of those cultural forms, it was constructed, in addition, as a problem associated only with the lower classes of society. Crimes committed by members of the self-proclaimed decent sectors of society were rarely mentioned in those statements. The formulation of what I'm calling the criminal question thus also expressed and at the same time reinforced the class biases that shaped these efforts to "interpret" certain social phenomena.
Concern with crime in Lima was certainly not a novelty of the 1850s. There had been periods of notorious social instability, the wars of independence and the violent conjuncture of 1835, for instance, that provoked alarmist commentaries about the criminal activities of various subaltern groups, including slaves, plebeians, bandits, and the like. In fact, antecedents of the forms in which crime was perceived during the period considered here could be traced back at least to the sweeping reforms of the late colonial period. But the type of intellectual framework that sustained the emergence of the criminal question, as well as the political and cultural context in which it appeared, was quite distinct and novel. I argue that the criminal question was an intellectual and political construction that crystallized during a very concrete period (roughly, between 1855 and 1860) and not only constituted an intellectual exercise to explain the nature of crime and to promote possible solutions, but in fact was part of a much more ambitious effort to interpret society, social relations, and the nature of state intervention in the establishment of boundaries of acceptable behavior. In other words, when speaking about crime, its causes, and its remedies, these authors were also proposing a new discursive framework in which to understand Peruvian society and its problems. The new attitude toward crime emerging in the 1850s and 1860s reflected a growing concern with urban morals, labor discipline, and political control as well as a demand for more intrusive and effective state policies.
CONSTRUCTING THE CRIMINAL QUESTION
Gutiérrez's portrait of Lima's morals was in fact a mix of various sets of old-fashioned prejudices, stereotypes, fears, reactions to and interpretations of quite recent social and political transformations. The years 1854-60 witnessed a series of dramatic episodes that generated a greater sense of insecurity among various sectors of the city's population. The abolition of slavery in 1854 and of capital punishment in 1856 in conjunction with the artisans' riots of December 1858 (to name only the most notorious such episodes) were all perceived by influential sectors of the public opinion as major threats to Lima's social order. The time-honored notion that the most effective way to achieve order and obedience was through the use of harsh punishment translated into paranoia once severe forms of social control like slavery and the death penalty were removed (even if in the latter case it was only temporary).
The abolition of slavery in December 1854 was both preceded and followed by an outcry of warnings about the dangers associated with the manumission of slaves. After abolition, commentators attributed the allegedly increasing levels of crime to the release of thousands of slaves who had no purpose in life other than to become involved in vice and crime. The abolition of slavery had opened up a new social and political scenario by altering, at least in the strictly legal sense, the already blurred lines between color and citizenship status and the relations of dependence between slave owners and their subjects. Landowners and other members of the upper classes expressed their fears that slaves would abandon haciendas and houses en masse to avoid work and take up a life of crime. Without slavery, they implied, blacks would not feel compelled to work. This attitude reflected racial stereotypes nurtured by centuries of slavery, but it was also related to the former owners' political battle to secure access to the labor force of free blacks. Whether or not ex-slaves turned into criminals is virtually impossible to assess. Santiago Távara, a supporter of abolition, concluded that they did not. Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, on the other hand, provided statistical evidence to back allegations that abolition was indeed an important factor in the rising level of crime: in 1857, according to Fuentes, blacks represented 23.1 percent of prisoners in the Carceletas jail, a proportion more than double the black share of the Lima population, 11.34 percent at that time.
The image of slaves-turned-criminals reflected the overall mental framework among important sectors of Peruvian society following the abolition of slavery. For many, former slaves did not deserve full citizenship. Given their moral and intellectual handicaps, they argued, only harsh labor and social and political control would prevent them from destroying society. President Ramón Castilla, who had signed the abolition decree in the midst of the civil war he was fighting against then-president General José Rufino Echenique, responded to landowners' pressures by enacting a decree shortly after his triumph in January 1855 that forced agricultural ex-slaves to work on their former plantations for at least the next three months; at the same time, it allowed former slave owners to discharge old, sick, and troublesome ex-slaves. Former slaves who did not go back to work would be treated as vagrants and sent to the guano islands. In order to check the supposedly rising incidence of crime, Castilla also reinstated in June of that year the Tribunal de la Acordada, a colonial institution that was viewed as a harsh and effective instrument to punish and deter crime. Although the association between the abolition of slavery and the rise in criminality is far from proven, it appeared as a clear and transparent case of cause and effect in the minds of conservative commentators and in the measures adopted by the Castilla government. That image would persist in the years ahead, and authors like Gabriel Gutiérrez would embrace it as an established truth and incorporate it into a more ambitious interpretive scheme.
Other antecedents to the emergence of the criminal question can be found in debates over the death penalty. Capital punishment had existed in Peru throughout the colonial period. As elsewhere, public executions were designed as punitive rituals to chastise the aggressor and dissuade the rest of society from committing unlawful acts. During the early independent period Peruvian constitutions retained the death penalty, but tended to restrict it to cases of so-called atrocious crimes. Illegal executions of highway robbers and other criminals were also common during these decades. Influenced by both liberalism and Catholicism, some opposition to capital punishment began to appear in the 1830s. The author José Manuel Loza launched a philosophical/religious attack on the death penalty, drawing from Christian and other Western philosophers. Apart from being contrary to God's law, the death penalty was deemed "ineffective as a repressive means, useless for teaching a lesson [escarmiento], unjust in its application, and destructive of industry and of the most laborious and miserable race." Loza favored the penitentiary as a more suitable form of punishment.
The death penalty was abolished by the liberal Constitution of 1856 following a campaign led by such liberals as José Gálvez. Article 16 of the constitution was unambiguous: "Human life is inviolable; the death penalty cannot be imposed by law." This measure generated a series of alarmed complaints that the lack of "appropriate" responses to crime would cause it to proliferate. For Fuentes, for example, "the abolition of the death penalty has also been the abolition of the little public security that we enjoyed ... never before have so many crimes been committed than in the last year." The message was unequivocal: crime was on the rise because society was not severely punishing criminals. The minister of justice opined in 1858 that "a misunderstood philanthropy has declared inviolable the lives of the evil murderer, the arsonist, and other such criminals," while the law-abiding citizen had been left "abandoned to the cruel knife of the bandit." The death penalty was deemed the only deterrent against potential law-breakers, especially at a time when, it was argued, former slaves were increasing their criminal activities and the Lima penitentiary (envisioned by many as the only hope to control crime) was still under construction. According to this apocalyptic vision, Lima society was at risk of being enveloped in uncontrollable crime and violence.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
I. Apprehending the Criminal
1. The Emergence of the Criminal Question (1850–1890) 17
2. The Science of the Criminal (1890–1930) 40
3. Policing and the Making of a Criminal Case 65
II. Prisons and Prison Communities
4. Lima's Penal Archipelago 85
5. Faites, Rateros, and Disgraced Gentlemen: Lima's Male Prison Communities 110
III. The World They Made Together
6. Daily Life in Prison-Part I: The Customary Order 143
7. Daily Life in Prison-II: Prison Subcultures and Living Conditions 164
8. Beyond the Customary Order 185
Conclusion 213
Appendix 223
Notes 237
Bibliography 277
Index 297