Exporting Punitivism: How U.S. Policy Shapes Nayib Bukele’s Carceral State in El Salvador

In 2017, the Equal Justice Initiative published an article entitled “America Is Exporting Its Extreme Prison System across the Globe”. The article claims that the United States is purposefully encouraging other countries to adopt our model of incarceration through monetary assistance, foreign policy, and government partnerships programs. For any Americans educated about the current state of the U.S. detention systems, this should be alarming. The United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and the country’s incarceration rate is higher than any other OECD country. The incarceration rate has grown rapidly since the 1980s.' The prisons and jails in the United States are frequently overcrowded and in bad condition, with little programming or structure to prevent recidivism. As a result, the U.S. recidivism rate is the highest in the world.” The United States justice system is also notably racist, with Black and Hispanic Americans making up over half of the incarcerated population despite only making up thirty percent of the overall U.S. population. On many levels, the U.S. detention system is failing. Why should the United States export it? One of the countries highlighted by the Equal Justice Initiative article is El Salvador. This country could be an especially interesting case study of the exportation of the U.S. prison model because of the history of how the U.S. “exported” gangs to El Salvador through the deportation of young salvadoran convicts in the 1990s. These gangs are wreaking havoc on the country, controlling large swaths of territory and enacting extreme violence upon Salvadoran communities. In some ways, the U.S. helped create the problem of gangs and crime in El Salvador. Now, through sharing its prison system, the U.S. is proposing a way to fix the problem it created. This project aims to understand: first, what are the effects of U.S. programming in El Salvador, and secondly, how is that affected by the public-facing foreign policy strategies of the Trump and Biden Presidencies? There is much to be said about this question for every country in Latin America since the turn of the 20th century, but this project is focusing primarily on El Salvador after the election of President Nayib Bukele in 2019.