The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze how prison systems in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico respond to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). It explores the challenges these institutions face, the actions taken, the beneficiaries from such measures, and their immediate effect. We argue that governments and prison authorities struggle to put in place comprehensive measures to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19 within these institutions and that more concrete and swift actions are needed to address the magnitude and the consequences of the pandemic. This paper uses both primary and secondary data to describe the current prison situation and analyze institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in these countries.

This article highlights intra-regional variation in the extent of the COVID-19 outbreaks in South America generally and then provides an assessment of the nature and extent of outbreaks in South American prisons. Country-level differences in front-end, withinprison, and back-end early release mechanisms are also described. The article concludes with an assessment of two alternative future directions for prison reform across this region.

This article documents the extent of COVID-19 outbreaks in the North American, Central American, and Caribbean regions, and then compares the country-specific COVID-19 mitigation strategies implemented in the largest prison systems in these regions. We offer a preliminary assessment of the short-term impact of the COVID-19 prison mitigation strategies used in these regions, within both correctional and community settings. At this time, it appears that the governments with greater success controlling COVID-19 outbreaks in these regions are the governments adopting early prison and jail population reduction strategies.

Research Summary:In this article, we provide a global snapshot of the recent (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018) expansion of the private sector's involvement in both institutional and community corrections systems. Variation in the use of private-sector organizations to manage both institutional and community correction populations is examined within and across global regions, with a focus specifically on the utilization of privatization in the 50 countries with the highest prison populations. The key private-sector organizations in each global region are also identified, and the "new technology" acquisitions by these companiesdocumenting the expansion of prison-based organizations into community corrections-are considered. In addition, the available evaluation research on the comparative effectiveness of private-versus public-sector management of both prisons and community corrections is reviewed. Based on this review, we offer our assessment of the available data on global developments in the privatization of corrections, as well as the available research on the comparative performance of public-sector and private-sector corrections.Policy Implications: Policy makers considering the advantages and disadvantages of privatization in either their institutional-or their community-based corrections system need to consider not only whether performance improves when the private sector gets involved but also pendent, high-quality evaluations in countries currently using privatization to help manage prison, jail, and/or community corrections populations. K E Y W O R D Scommunity corrections, prisons, privatization DATA AND METHODWe begin our review by highlighting privatization initiatives in each global region based on available databases, published reports, newspaper articles, and other publically available documents in which the public sector's role in corrections is described. We caution the reader that our review is preliminary and that our ability to document the expansion of the private sector into community-based corrections systems varied both within and across global regions. 3 Next, we examine the utilization of privatesector companies by corrections systems in the countries with the 50 largest prison populations. More than 90% of the world's prison population is located in these 50 countries.A third area of inquiry involved the identification of the key players in the global private corrections market, with a focus specifically on whether the global expansion of private prisons and community corrections programs has its roots in the two largest U.S. private prison providers-GEO Group and CoreCivic. 4 By examining the recent technology and community corrections facility acquisitions by GEO Group included in the company's most recent filing before the Security and Exchange Commission, the movement of these prison-focused companies into the community corrections arena can be documented. We conclude our review by summarizing the resu...

No abstract