Panel Discusses “Addiction to Punishment” for Drug Offenses in Latin America

On January 30, 2018, a panel of drug policy experts shared findings from their research on the effects of Latin American laws criminalizing drugs. The Schell Center-sponsored event, entitled “Drug Laws and Incarceration in Latin America,” specifically addressed drastically rising levels of incarceration as a result of these laws and their disproportionate impact on already disadvantaged groups.

The majority of the panel was dedicated to presenting the results of “Irrational Punishment: Drug Laws and Incarceration in Latin America,” a study published by the Research Consortium on Drugs and the Law (CEDD), which includes researchers based throughout Latin America. Three of the panelists––Rodrigo Uprimny, Coletta Youngers, and Sergio Chaparro––were researchers from the CEDD. So was the panel’s moderator, Catalina Pérez Correa, a Visiting Human Rights Fellow at the Schell Center this year. The fourth panelist, Ernesto Zedillo, is a Yale professor and former president of Mexico.

Throughout the presentation, the panelists emphasized that the trend of rapidly increasing incarceration rates in Latin America is largely attributable to, in Chaparro’s words, governments’ “addiction to punishment for drug-related offenses.” In Colombia, for example, the prison population incarcerated for drug offenses increased nearly 300 percent between 2001 and 2014. The panelists trace Latin America’s present crisis to the late 1980s. After the 1988 launch of the U.N. Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, the region saw the introduction of harsh laws and harsher penalties concerning drug-related activity. Now, Uprimny said, drug law is characterized by “punitivism” and “rigidity.” There is very little room for judges and prosecutors to be flexible with drug offenders, he said, as many countries impose mandatory prison sentences or even enforce pretrial detention for narcotics-related crimes.

Panelists noted that the majority of people who are incarcerated because of these laws are low-income people who enter the drug trade because of economic necessity and prove easier for authorities to target than powerful drug lords. Their crimes are nonviolent and often involve relatively small quantities of drugs. Youngers insisted that because their roles, once vacated, are so easily filled by other people seeking economic stability, “their incarceration has absolutely no impact on the drug trade itself.”

The panelists explained that those who most suffer as a result of the harsh criminalization of drugs are ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA individuals, women, and other vulnerable communities. Youngers highlighted the plight of women in particular, who are often pressured into the drug market by boyfriends or partners and may experience violence, including sexual violence, before and throughout their involvement in the drug trade. Youngers reported that in most Latin American countries, the majority of incarcerated women are in prison for minor, nonviolent drug crimes. She added that between 80 and 90 percent of those women are single mothers, so their incarceration is harmful to their children as well.

The panelists raised different potential solutions to the injustices they described – from promoting alternatives to incarceration to decriminalizing drugs. Zedillo favored the latter. “One very ugly face of this problem is incarceration,” he acknowledged, “but there are other ugly faces.” Condemning the 1988 Convention, he argued that decriminalization would address issues such as violence related to drug trafficking in addition to incarceration. Uprimny agreed with Zedillo, but asserted that strategies such as identifying alternatives to incarceration and reinterpreting rather than rejecting the Convention are also important. It is crucial, he said, to “propose concrete things that states can do immediately.”

All agreed that such immediate change was critical. “We blew it for a hundred years,” Zedillo said. “Now let’s do better.”

By Madeline Batt