Monitoring prison corruption: why and how we adapted a guide for Latin America 

Corruption in prisons is often seen as something exceptional, yet in practice it is experienced as a routine that structures access to basic necessities. In some jurisdictions, corruption ends up determining who eats better food, who has access to healthcare, who can study or work, who can call their family, and who stays safe. In prison systems where everyday life is already shaped by precarious conditions, that routine distorts how resources are distributed, creates hierarchies, and normalises abuses that directly affect the human rights of people in prison. 

In Latin America, this concern has become more urgent due to profound changes that have been building for years. Overcrowding and sustained growth of the prison population put pressure on essential services, infrastructure, security, and internal management. Relocation has also intensified, driven by migration flows across the region and increasingly transient lifestyles. When family ties weaken or become sporadic, the lack of access to information, support, and protection is exacerbated, and informal intermediaries tend to be involved. At the same time, prison staff preparation and institutional capacity do not always keep pace with these transformations, enabling the normalisation of everyday illegality. In this scenario, legitimate authority is weakened, the capacity to exercise control declines, and the prison setting enables the institutionalisation of criminality in all its complexity. 

That complexity is expressed through power dynamics that form within prisons and often mirror patterns seen in neighbourhoods and communities. Hierarchies emerge in which those with greater resources, stronger leadership, or wider networks that exert dominance over more vulnerable groups in prison through extortion, threats and violence. In parallel, evidence shows the emergence of illicit internal markets that sell drugs, weapons, mobile phones, and even access to basic services, including food, healthcare, work, and education. These conditions are reinforced by structured practices of charging and extortion that exacerbate inequality. Corruption therefore stops being an isolated incident and becomes a condition that facilitates transactions, enables abuse, and sustains parallel forms of control, often with the participation or tacit approval of various levels of the prison administration. 

In this context, torture prevention mechanisms play a relevant role, because their work on the ground allows them to detect patterns, document practices, and turn observations into actionable recommendations. Said capacity is particularly important when corruption is systemic yet opaque, transforming scattered traces into substantiated evidence that underpins preventive action and safeguards rights. 

With the aim of strengthening that role, Penal Reform International and the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre developed a monitoring guide that provides an overview of corruption risks in prisons and the steps to follow when corruption is detected. The guide, enriched through an experts’ meeting in London in 2023, sought to offer concrete tools to detect and address corruption and to protect the rights of people in prison, particularly in contexts where justice and penal systems face structural weaknesses and accountability gaps. 

From the outset, one idea took hold and proved decisive for the work that followed. The guide highlights the importance of situating corruption within the specific contexts in which prisons operate. This requires taking into account the characteristics of the general prison population and vulnerable groups, the legal framework and how corruption is defined and criminalised, as well as corruption risks and types of corruption, among other factors that must be contextualised to make effective observation and monitoring possible. In other words, the value of a global guide increases when it allows to engage with concrete institutional realities, internal power balances, incentives, and the real scope of action available to monitoring mechanisms in each country. 

With this premise in mind, the process of adapting the guide to the Latin American context became a space to critically reassess the general framework and to operationalize it as a tool for practical observation. The work was developed through a joint effort between Penal Reform International, Chile’s National Preventive Mechanism, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Catholic University of Chile’s Justice and Society Study Centre. The aim was to bring together representatives of National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs) from across the region and collectively build a tool that is useful, validated and actionable. 

The process unfolded in two stages. The first, held online in January 2025, involved the participation of jurisdictions that conducted a diagnosis of corruption within their prison systems, guided by the risk indicators proposed in the original guide. That discussion made it possible to identify clear commonalities, as well as relevant differences linked to legislation, institutional arrangements, prison governance, visit conditions, documentation practices, and channels for advocacy. This first step helped establish a shared map and a common language. 

The second meeting took place in person in Chile in July 2025 and was key to moving towards a more refined and operational tool. Building on the information gathered, the group decided to develop an approach that focused directly on corrupt practices and their effects on principles, guarantees and basic rights. To make the tool as useful as possible for monitoring purposes, each topic was linked to potential sources of information, affected groups, and guiding questions for the observation teams. In addition, a module was incorporated to discuss strategic routes for action, as it was essential to reflect on the crucial role of detention monitoring bodies when dealing with corruption which operates in grey areas and in everyday interactions that complicate oversight. 

The result was a regional guide that organises observation across dimensions connected to daily life and basic guarantees. These include living conditions, access to rights, reintegration and progression, drug use, contact with the outside world, access to justice and due process, physical integrity and security under the State’s legitimate authority, and sexual integrity. Each dimension is framed as a concrete space for observation and questioning, and it builds on the idea of triangulating information, identifying patterns, and producing evidence that can be sustained and verified. 

Above all, this guide adapted to the Latin American context seeks to provide a way to operationalise a phenomenon as broad, ambiguous and difficult to grasp as corruption. Corruption happens at the margins, camouflages itself, becomes normalised, and can spread so widely that it becomes invisible. When that happens, it becomes unmanageable, because it is unclear where to look, what to ask, how to document it, or how to prioritise it. This instrument is designed precisely to address that challenge by making practices and patterns visible, identifiable, and definable, so that monitoring teams can observe in a more systematic, comparable, and prevention-focused way. The aim is to make corruption observable, so it moves from a general intuition to a set of identifiable practices with verifiable impacts on human rights. 

This process was made possible through collaborative work between institutions and through the participation of national torture prevention mechanisms from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. It was also supported by the research team at the UC Justice and Society Study Centre and with editorial support from Penal Reform International and the Inter-American Development Bank, together with Chile’s National Preventive Mechanism. The final guide aims to be a regional tool built from real monitoring experience, designed to strengthen capacities and support preventive action where it is most needed. 

Access the guide in Spanish here: Link.

Corruption in prisons: a guide for detention monitors: https://www.penalreform.org/resource/corruption-in-prisons-a-guide-for-detention-monitors/  

Guide to monitoring corruption in prisons in Latin America: https://justiciaysociedad.uc.cl/guia-de-monitoreo-de-corrupcion-en-carceles-de-latinoamerica/