This is taken from the autobiographic account of Thomas McFadden, a British national who spent nearly five years in the San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia, for drug smuggling. With the help of another inmate, McFadden was able to set up a contract to purchase a prison cell from a Bolivian prisoner and to take over the cell for US$1,200, an amount that also included the former owner's television, refrigerator and some of the furniture he had brought into the prison (Young and McFadden, 2004, pp 107-8).

In a paradigmatic way, this episode illustrates one of many aspects of the reality of the contemporary Latin American prison system that is difficult to imagine for outside observers and analysts, but which an increasing number of people throughout the region are confronted with in their daily lives – most of all those belonging to the marginalised segments of Latin America's urban population. In fact, throughout the last two decades or so, the formation of what Loïc Wacquant described in great detail for the US and the countries of Western Europe as the emergence of a ‘neoliberal Leviathan’ in the guise of a ‘penal state’, that resorts to ‘punitive containment as a government technique for managing deepening urban marginality’ (Wacquant, 2010a, p 204; emphasis in original), can also be identified for Latin America (Müller, 2012).