Prison-Market: Clear Commercial Rules vs. Labyrinthine Judicial Processes in Paraguay’s Penitentiaries

Abstract

In Paraguay, prisons represent an extreme reflection of the country’s social inequalities. This ethnographic article analyzes how penitentiary institutions operate as regulated markets structured through negotiation, money, and power, where the relationships between staff, inmates, and relatives are organized by clear economic rather than legal rules. Based on systematic prison research conducted since 2005, and updated through fieldwork carried out between 2023 and 2025 in five penitentiaries, the article reconstructs the everyday dynamics that sustain this informal system: entry and visiting fees, payments for cells and services, internal hierarchies of collection, and the batallas, a term used by inmates to refer to income-generating activities. The methodology combines participant observation, interviews, and long-term conversations with inmates and prison staff, from a reflexive standpoint that recognizes the cooperation and trust built over years of fieldwork inside penitentiaries. The data are produced and interpreted within the frameworks of critical criminology and the political economy of punishment, articulating the contributions of Foucault, Baratta, Rusche, and Kirchheimer with recent studies on prison co-governance and criminal governance in Latin America. The findings show that the Paraguayan prison not only punishes but also commercializes survival: everything has a price, and everything can be negotiated. While internal economic transactions are predictable, the legal sphere, processes, sentence calculations, hearings, constitutes a labyrinth of uncertainty. Thus, the prison emerges as a space of economic administration of punishment, generating millions of guaraníes monthly, meticulously distributed among prison agents, directors, administrative officials, and their political patrons.