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Inside the world’s toughest prisons. (2020). Season 4, Episode 1, “Paraguay: The Most Dangerous Prison on Earth” [Television series episode]. Netflix.

Johnson, A. (2017). If I give my soul: Faith behind bars in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford University Press.

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Míguez, D. (2008). Delito y cultura: los códigos de la ilegalidad en la juventud marginal urbana. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos.

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Reyes-Quilodrán, C. A., & Guzmán, D. P. (2022). Evangelical belief and nonviolent behavior in Chilean inmates. Religions, 13(2), 112. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020112

Scheliga, E. L. (2005). Sob a proteção da Bíblia? A conversão ao pentecostalismo em unidades penais paranaenses. Debates do NER, 6(8), 57-71.

Thompson, D. C. (2022). Evangelical Christianity as infrastructure in Brazil’s penal system. Journal of Latin American Studies, 54(3), 457-479. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X22000426

Washington Office on Latin America. (2025). Mass Incarceration and Democratic Deterioration: Three Years of the State of Exception in El Salvador. WOLA. https://www.wola.org/analysis/mass-incarceration-and-democratic-deterioration-three-years-of-the-state-of-exception-in-el-salvador/

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Young, R. (2003). Marching powder: A true story of friendship, cocaine, and South America's strangest jail. St. Martin’s Press.

Notes

1 Ottoboni (2000) provides the foundational account of APAC’s origins and methodology. The model has since been adopted in over seventy facilities across Brazil and has attracted international attention as a viable alternative to conventional incarceration.

2 The twelve elements of the APAC methodology are described in detail in Ottoboni (2000). The mentioned Journey, adapted from the Catholic Cursillo movement, functions as the spiritual centerpiece of the program and has been the subject of both admiration and criticism from Protestant and Baptist observers.

3 The low recidivism figure for APAC graduates versus that in conventional Brazilian prisons is reported consistently across multiple evaluations. See Ottoboni (2000) and subsequent assessments by Prison Fellowship International.

4 Dias (2008) documents the dominance of evangelical organizations among faith-based prison programs in São Paulo, noting the dominant religious presence of evangelical churches, predominantly Pentecostal in orientation.

5 Scheliga (2005) provides a detailed ethnographic account of Pentecostal practice in Paraná state prisons (particularly in Curitiba), documenting the physical and social distinctions between evangelical cells and the general prison population.

6 Chile’s prison overcrowding has been documented by multiple international organizations, including the International Centre for Prison Studies. As of 2023, the system operates at approximately 131% of design capacity, with significant variation between facilities.

7 Barrios-Fernández and García-Hombrados (2025) employ a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of evangelical church openings, in the neighborhoods where released inmates return to live, on twelve-month reincarceration rates among property crime offenders. The eleven-percentage-point reduction (approximately eighteen percent in relative terms) is statistically significant and robust across multiple specification checks. Effects on violent offenders are smaller and less precisely estimated.

8 Reyes-Quilodrán and Guzmán (2022) interviewed 174 male inmates—87 Evangelicals matched with 87 non-Evangelicals through proportional random sampling—from Santiago Sur and Santiago 1, finding that evangelical inmates exhibit lower violence, greater compliance with institutional regulations, and more cooperation with prison professionals and officials. The authors document that evangelical inmates organize into a highly structured, pyramid-shaped social community whose emotional support and daily routine appear to drive these behavioral differences.

9 Fondevila and Vilalta-Perdomo (2024) analyze data from the Survey of Incarcerated Populations in Latin America—5,700 inmates surveyed in 2013/2014 across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, and Peru—and find that two of the most commonly assumed correlates of prison violence (overcrowding and poor living conditions) actually predict the opposite of what international literature suggests. The most overcrowded prisons with the worst conditions (Brazil and El Salvador) had the lowest reported rates of theft and beatings. The authors conclude that dominant prison gangs in self-governed prisons effectively suppress disorder—abandoning their predatory nature and establishing procedures to “manage” conflicts and “regulate” the operation of internal markets—replacing the state’s failed governance with their own. This empirical pattern undergirds the broader observation that when the state vacates its custodial responsibilities, alternative power structures arise to fill the vacuum.

10 The emergence and function of evangelical pavilions in Argentine prisons have been documented by scholars, including Daniel Míguez and others working within the sociology of religion in Latin America. These pavilions represent a unique form of religious self-governance that has attracted attention from both criminologists and theologians. Joaquín Algranti (2018) in Social Compass is the most-cited recent piece on the Argentine evangelical-prison phenomenon.

11 Young (2003) is the standard popular account of Bolivia’s San Pedro prison, supplemented by ongoing journalistic coverage in the BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Academic treatments are scarce; the system has been studied more by anthropologists and travel journalists than by criminologists, in part because the Bolivian state’s official position oscillates between denial of the conditions and tacit acceptance of them.

12 The interpretation of Romans 13:1-4 is genuinely ambiguous on the question of who defines “good” and “evil.” If God’s law is the standard (“sin is the transgression of the law,” 1 John 3:4), the magistrate’s authority is bounded by it; if the state itself (or public policy) is the standard, the passage commends submission to whatever the civil authority (in any culture or era) declares to be good or evil—a posture against which Isaiah 5:20 pronounces explicit woe. The hermeneutical question turns on the historical referent, given that the Bible is for all peoples of all eras. Substitute “Nero”—the emperor actually reigning when Paul wrote—or any subsequent tyrant, such as Stalin or Pol Pot, for the abstract noun “authority” throughout Romans 13:1-4, and Paul appears to commend the absurd. Greg Bahnsen, leading theonomist, avoided this difficulty (Theonomy and Christian Ethics [1977/1984], chapter 19) by holding that Paul was, in fact, describing the future Christian magistracy of the postmillennial era; I find that reading untenable. The only sensible alternative, given the First Century setting in which Paul actually wrote, is that he describes the state as the entity that, in actual practice, defines for itself what it treats as good and evil—a description of political reality, not an endorsement of it. Self-serving rulers from King James I onward have predictably preferred the contrary reading, which conveniently identifies their own pronouncements with God’s law; James himself laid out the absolutist version in The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), arguing that the king answers to God alone and that subjects owe him obedience even when his commands are unjust. I develop this argument at length in Behind the Walls, chapter 19 above and chapter 30 below, where I argue that the dominant Reformed reading of Romans 13:1-4 has functionally licensed the very tyranny Paul’s letter is sometimes invoked to justify—a reformed or revitalized Divine Right of Kings doctrine, dressed in covenantal vocabulary but substantively continuous with the absolutist political theology the Stuart monarchs found so congenial. See also Bible and Government: Public Policy from a Christian Perspective (Alertness Books, 2003); Christian Theology of Public Policy: Highlighting the American Experience (Alertness Books, 2006); and the forthcoming Suffering Unjustly: Imprisonment, Wrecked Families, and Property or Wealth Destruction Affecting Christians in Modern Democratic Societies, publisher to be determined.

13 The episode is Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons, Season 4, Episode 1: “Paraguay: The Most Dangerous Prison on Earth,” released on Netflix on July 29, 2020. Host Raphael Rowe spent a week at Tacumbú documenting conditions in the Tinglado section and Pavilion D, with a reported guard-to-inmate ratio of approximately 35 to 4,000. Tacumbú’s chronic capacity violations have also been flagged by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on multiple occasions.

14 Kevin Whiteacre, Chair of Criminal Justice at the University of Indianapolis, and Amanda Miller, Chair of Sociology at the same institution, began an oral-history research project at Belize Central Prison in 2012 and have published evaluations of the Kolbe Foundation’s management. Whiteacre and Miller (2017), Oral History in Belize Central Prison, document the rehabilitation-oriented shift, the unusual employment of former inmates (nine of their interviewees disclosed criminal histories prior to employment by the Foundation), and the broader Christian, but not strictly evangelical, character of the programming. The Foundation itself takes its name from St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan martyr executed at Auschwitz in 1941.

15 The state of exception was first invoked under Articles 29–31 of the Salvadoran Constitution and has since been continuously renewed; see Amnesty International (2024) and the Washington Office on Latin America (2025).

16 Incarceration figures from World Prison Brief data and the WOLA (2025) report. The 1,659-per-100,000 figure represents El Salvador's age-adjusted rate as of late 2024; the absolute prison population exceeded 110,000.

17 Donohue & Levitt (2001) document the empirical association between state-by-state variation in U.S. abortion legalization and subsequent state-level crime declines. The authors carefully resist the policy inference that “abortion reduces crime and therefore abortion is good policy”—but their argument has often been read that way in popular discourse.

18 Levitt & Dubner (2005), Chapter 4. The original 2001 finding has been challenged on technical grounds (Foote and Goetz 2008), with Donohue and Levitt issuing methodological corrections that nonetheless preserve the core empirical pattern.

19 See Amnesty International (2024); Human Rights Watch (2026); and WOLA (2025) for the most comprehensive recent documentation. Cristosal’s reporting through 2024 is also indispensable; the organization closed its San Salvador offices in 2025 amid escalating governmental repression.

20 The cessationist position holds that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit were given for the purpose of authenticating the apostolic message during the foundational period of the church and ceased when the canon of Scripture was completed. See the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, and the broader Reformed theological tradition on this question.

21 InSight Crime (2017/2023) documents how Latin American prisons function as the principal incubators of organized crime in the region. While the report does not focus on religious dynamics specifically, it establishes the institutional context (corruption, gang governance, state failure) within which evangelical conversion comes to function as one of the few credible exit pathways from criminal networks.

22 Johnson (2017) provides the most detailed published ethnography of the phenomenon. Conducting extended fieldwork inside Pentecostal cells in Rio de Janeiro's prisons, he documents how gang leaders treat conversion to evangelicalism as a credible exit signal—a non-threatening way for members to leave criminal life without the violent reprisals that ordinarily accompany attempts to disengage from organized crime. Johnson's work demonstrates that this pragmatic tolerance, while it raises uncomfortable questions about the purity of motive in some converts, also creates an environment in which genuine spiritual transformation can and does occur—precisely the parable-of-the-sower dynamic discussed earlier in this chapter.