Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has made important progress in strengthening the rule of law, however, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we continue to lag behind when compared to high-income countries, such as those of Western Europe. We understand the rule of law as the neutral and anonymous application of rule, where those who apply them are also subject to them. There are different ways in which the rule of law can deteriorate. One of these is the unequal access to justice, since this is a basic service to which everyone must have access in an expeditious manner. Justice that is delay, becomes, actually, injustice.

This #GraphForThought focuses on the number of people who are in prison without a conviction, in Latin America and the Caribbean. Why does excessive use of pre-trial detention or a slow resolution of a person's legal situation undermine the rule of law? Basically, for three reasons: it undermines the presumption of innocence[1], it can encourage corruption and, finally, it can promote criminality. Pretrial detention significantly increases the likelihood of conviction and is related to the socio-economic conditions of the accused. That is, a person who has been detained for some time prior to his sentence tends to be more likely to plead guilty to the crime with which he is accused, and, in addition, has a relatively more unfavorable appearance before the court, inspiring less confidence than a person who has not been detained while awaiting sentence. Importantly, evidence shows that people in vulnerable groups constitute the largest proportion of people detained awaiting justice, and this is particularly true for judicial systems that operate through the bond payment mechanism. This fundamentally violates the first principle of the rule of law - that the law be applied equally for all - since it is certain vulnerable groups to whom justice comes slower. Likewise, corruption tends to manifest itself during the waiting-for-a-sentence stage because, in many cases, it is subject to less scrutiny, and, in turn, is subject to greater discretion compared to subsequent judicial stages.

Unfortunately, the negative impacts are not only limited to the weakening of the rule of law. According to the most recent economic literature, it also has negative causal effects on the economic and individual results, and, at a more aggregate level, on economic and social well-being. This results because it is costly to keep people in detention, and their trajectories of socioeconomic achievement is altered. In a related way, in addition to reducing employment, detention pending conviction increases future crime through a criminogenic effect (although its net effects are ambiguous), something that is consistent with the economic literature that studies the negative impact of crime incarceration in general, as well as detentions without conviction, on the formation of social and human capital.

The evidence for LAC is consistent with this pattern. According to data from the World Prison Brief, on average, the percentage of people detained without a conviction for Latin America and the Caribbean is 43%. [2] That is, more than 4 out of 10 people in prison in the region are there without a sentence. When we examine the subregional averages, we see that in the Caribbean this percentage is even higher, close to 52% of the population detained is awaiting justice, which is almost double the number observed in the European Union.