The essay argues that the birth of the penitentiary in Latin America was a process that must be viewed against the backdrop of institutional changes, contested processes of nation and state formation, struggles over power and social discipline, and shifting discourses about society. The penitentiary was an imported device whose fate must be explored in the context of Latin America's hybrid modernity. Imitation of foreign models and the importation of liberal, positivist, scientific ideas served to strengthen or refashion traditional forms of domination and personal dependence. It was a process of modernization that did not replace the old social structures, forms of interaction, or racial and gender hierarchies but reinforced them. Prison reform in Latin America, unlike the European and North American experiences, became part of a process of state and nation formation in which a rhetoric about modernization and innovation was generally contradicted by the continual, and usually violent, exclusion of the majorities from the exercise of democratic rights and citizenship. Notes