McPrison — the newest NAFTA import

I’ve heard the claim that Mexican pop culture reflects U.S. pop culture … but lags a couple of years behind.  When it comes to things like pop music, or movies, the results may be odd (a children’s party down the street over the weekend featured a disc-jockey playing Village People hits and Gloria Gaynor… all that was missing was the mirrored ball to turn colonia Sanchez Celis into West Des Moines Iowa, ca. 1978.

Post NAFTA (or maybe, more accurately, Post Napster) pop cultural incursions have been more rapid.  It’s probably a harmless trend (and Mexicans have their own way of absorbing foreign influences), though there are those who would (and will) continue to harp on the coarsening of culture, courtesy of the colossus of the North, and blah, blah, blah.

It looks though, as if a less benign trend is making its way here.

The federal government announced plans to build 12 new prisons that will be franchised to the private sector… This with the intention of reducing overcrowding in Mexican prisons (Mexico Today).

Many cheered when the Obama Administration claimed the “war on drugs” was over, and there was a new paradigm at work. All well and good, but I thought (and I’m not the only one) that the “prison-industrial complex” was too big, and too economically important to be shut down.  The “war on drugs” was too good for businesses — or certain business — to just disappear.

Using the argument that there are too many criminals being arrested (even with periodic mass jailbreaks, Mexican prisons are overcrowded) and — since Felipe Calderon has put off signing a narcotics decriminization bill — we can probably expect the “war on (certain) drug dealers (but apparently not on others)” to lead to more prisoners.  Miguel Angel Guiterrez of Reuters lays out the problem, and the Calderon Administration’s solution… one that — given the track record of these “private prisons” — doesn’t bode well:

Dozens of violent clashes have rocked jails this year and a stream of inmates have escaped. Last month drug hitmen dressed as police screeched up to a northern Mexico prison in a convoy of vans and freed 53 prisoners who were seen on security cameras pouring into the street.

…

Mexican media count 22 jailbreaks this year and some 40 prison feuds, fueled by guns smuggled in by visitors and lax or corrupt guards who let prostitution and drug peddling go on within prison complexes.

April alone saw 19 riots in jails in Mexico City, where wealthy inmates bribe guards for spacious cells with televisions, while others sleep on bare floors in crowded conditions, Mexico’s Human Rights Commission says.

…

Public Security Minister Genaro Garcia Luna said on Tuesday that a dozen additional prisons, built and run by private companies, would be ready to hold Mexico’s top criminals by 2011.

Genero Garcia Luna is the guy whose house is much too big (and too highly assessed) to be built on a civil servant’s salary, but he claims it was investments… in GEO Group, perhaps?

There is no question that an increasing tendency to send people to jail, even for minor social offenses, has led to both overcrowding, and is a step back from the generally benign intentions of Mexican penology… where prisons are called “Centers for Social Readaption”  —   the theory being that jail is not a punishment for a individuals’ wrongful act, but a controlled environment for learning to live in a less-controlled one.

One thing that really bothers me is that Islas Marias will be turned into a private prison for serious criminals, instead of the refuge for social misfits it is now.  The hopes of turning the Americas’ last prison colony into a wildlife refuge are again thwarted.