Daniel Alarcon -Election night in Peru’s largest prison

To understand a place like Lurigancho, it’s best not to dwell on words like prison or inmate or cell, or on the images these terms generally connote. The 7,400 men who live in Lurigancho, Peru’s largest and most notorious penal institution, do not wear uniforms; there is no roll call or lockdown or lights-out. Whatever control the prison authorities have inside Lurigancho is nominal. They secure the gate to the prison, and little else.

The complex’s twenty housing blocks can be divided roughly into two sections: the better-off inmates live in El Jardín (the Garden), the odd-numbered blocks. The greenery withered long ago, but the name and its cachet have remained. Many residents carry the keys to their own cells and are free to wander the grounds as they wish, though some prefer not to leave the relative calm of their territory. The other side of Lurigancho is known as La Pampa (the Plain), the even-numbered blocks, home to thousands of accused murderers and petty thieves. The density here can be twice that of El Jardín, 

Lurigancho held nearly a quarter of Peru’s inmates, and overcrowding had reached a crisis point. The prison, originally built for a couple thousand men, had become home to more than 11,000. Shanks were sold openly, as were crack pipes, ingeniously fashioned from bent scraps of metal. Thin, bare-chested men slumped against the walls, covered in scars, wearing the downcast, narrow gaze of drug addicts. Tuberculosis was rampant. Lurigancho was producing some thirty tons of trash a week, much of it uncollected, while the poorest inmates fed themselves by sifting through this refuse for anything edible. A gray scarf hung from an old radio tower, the prison’s unofficial flag — a memento of a drug-addled inmate who’d escaped from the psychiatric clinic, climbed the tower, and hanged himself. So severe was the crowding that a few hundred homeless squatters had taken over an abandoned building to create an informal twenty-first housing block. In most prisons, if inmates had access to hammers, concrete, bricks, shovels, spades, and the like, one imagines they’d use them to escape. Instead, when I visited Block Twenty-One, I found the residents hard at work, building a wall around their new home so they could have a safe place to walk .

http://www.revistaanfibia.com/cronica/lurigancho-el-gobierno-de-los-presos