DIVEssays in collection argue that Latin American legal institutions were both mechanisms of social control and unique arenas for ordinary people to contest government policies and resist exploitation./div

Rather than reducing criminality, prisons in Latin America drive crime by creating the conditions for its growth.

This title presents a survey of the crime problem in Latin America, which takes a very broad and appropriately reductionist approach to analyse the determinants of the high crime levels, focusing on the negative social conditions in the region, including inequality and poverty, and poor policy design, such as relatively low police presence. The chapters illustrate three channels through which crime might generate poverty, that is, by reducing investment, by introducing assets losses, and by reducing the value of assets remaining in the control of households.

According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations. Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence. Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

This book is the first green criminology text to focus specifically on Latin America. Green criminology has always adopted a broad horizon and explicitly emphasised that environmental crimes and harms affect countries and cultures around the world. The chapters collected here illuminate and describe the “theft of nature” and the “poisoning of the land” in Latin America through and from processes of agro-industry expansion, biopiracy, legal and illegal trafficking of free-born non-human animals, and mining. An interdisciplinary study, this collection draws on research from a wide range of international experts on not only green criminology, but also social justice, political ecology and sociology. An engaging and thought-provoking work, this book will be an essential text for anyone interested in current issues in environmental crime.

Drawing on original data from surveys across Latin America, this book develops a new, compelling theory on the rise of crime in Latin America. It evaluates the economic underpinnings of the upsurge in property crime, drug trafficking, and violence in the midst of economic prosperity and democratization.

Popular Injustice focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as mano dura) in contemporary Latin America, with a particular focus on lynchings in postwar Guatemala.