CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The main purpose of my research project is to historicize the prison reform in the Argentinean provinces. It somehow emerges as a response to a prison history that has been thought and described from Buenos Aires and Ushuaia, where the most emblematic prisons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were built. The comparative proposal of my research, however, is not an attempt to search for similarities and differences between the models and the peripheral cases. The comparative effort is based on the hypothesis that most of the Argentinean provincial prisons (not the federal ones) cannot be explained from Buenos Aires or Ushuaia experiences. Those cases constitute exceptions, but local cases would constitute the rule. The provinces of Córdoba, Santa Fe and Tucumán were selected by their proportional demographic and economic growth, as being some of the pioneer provinces building ?modern? penitentiaries and for possessing important penitentiary archive material. They were some of the leaders of the Argentinean provinces prison reform. The analyzed period constitutes, in some way, the history of the triumph of confinement over other forms of punishment. Although the prison evidenced, since its beginnings, its inconveniences and dangers and, nevertheless, there was no alternatives or ways towards the civilization and the punitive modernity. Its level of imposition over the other sanctions changed over the years and, at any moment, there was a consistent and equal punishment. It was focused on a sector of the population and, within that sector, it was very different according to the judicial status, convicted, prosecuted, or belonging to the penal minorities: women, minors and psychiatric patients. The construction, administration and maintenance of traditional, transitional and innovative spaces marked the penitentiary reforms in the provinces, which showed progress and setbacks in this century.

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