Hidden in Plain Sight: Incarceration’s racialized health impacts in Latin America

Incarceration has vast and unequal impact on Black and white health and wellbeing. Research conducted primarily in North America describes incarceration’s racialized impacts beyond prison walls, where racial minority families are locked into racialized and durable cycles of disadvantage. Yet in Latin America, the links between incarceration, racism, and human health and wellbeing are both underexamined and misunderstood. The region is frequently mischaracterized as homogenously ‘mixed race’ rather than racially plural, and existing research focuses on disease outbreaks inside prisons, omitting incarceration’s family- and community-level health impacts. This mixed-methods program of community-based participatory research will illuminate incarceration’s racialized health impacts in Latin America. Working with a cross-national multi-sectoral network of stakeholders, it uses newly available racial disparities data to create the first ever portrait of racial inequality across prisons and community health in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Comparative ethnography in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico maps and conceptualizes how incarceration perpetuates racially unequal profiles of health and wellbeing among families and communities. Community partners participate in the development of public engagement strategies to shape public conversation about incarceration’s impacts at the local level, culminating in policy recommendations for mitigating the community-level harms associated with racialized systems of incarceration.