Buenos Aires penitentiary recidivism: between penitentiary recirculation and punitive expansion

Abstract

Recidivisms is a public problem, but in its construction, the role of institutional practices (police and judicial) that contribute to reproducing “prison recidivism” is lost sight of, charging the phenomenon to the account of “repeat offenders”. This article proposes to address a series of dimensions of this problem from discuss the expansion of prison confinement, address prison recidivism as a conceptual category (with its lights and shadows) and interpret the results of the first report of the Criminal Policy Under secretary of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights of the Province of Buenos Aires, which carries out a demographic description of the Buenos Aires prison population.