The Crime Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
Violent Women. Female incarceration and drug markets in Latin American Prisons
Professor Gustavo Fondevila, División de Estudios Jurídicos, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico
About the seminar:
In this paper, we examine an understudied topic of female incarceration: violence in women’s prisons. Proportionally, women’s prisons in Latin America register higher levels of particular forms of violence than men’s prisons. As opposed to violence in male facilities where factors such as an individual’s violent past, long sentences, gang membership as well as overcrowding and poor living conditions raise the likelihood of prison violence, in women’s facilities these living conditions are much better, yet violence, proportionally, is reported more frequently. We compare levels of violence used by men and women, and analyze several determinants of victimization of females in prisons. We identify drugs account for the new criminal role of women (growing incarceration associated with their participation in illegal businesses), but they also contribute to the transformation that has occurred inside women’s prisons: the drug-related disputes and riots of recent years in the region.
About the speaker:
Gustavo Fondevila is a professor and researcher at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico, where he concentrates on empirical and comparative quantitative criminology.
Specifically, Fondevila focuses on criminal justice and prisons in Latin America by use of surveys of prisons, court records and more. His most recent work examines the relationship between prison violence and criminal government within prisons of the region. He also studies criminal justice institutions from a quantitative perspective, such as prosecution, defense and courts.
Crime, Justice and Society Seminar Series
The Crime, Justice and Society seminars are co-hosted by the Criminal Law and Criminology subject areas of Edinburgh Law School and are open to all. We particularly welcome students from our LLM and MSc programmes to join us.