In a courtyard at Lurigancho, one of the most dangerous prisons in South America, convicted kidnapper Alejandro Nuñez del Arco leads more than a thousand of his fellow inmates in Full Body aerobics sessions:
An excerpt from Daniel Alarcón’s 2012 profile of the prison offers a glimpse of daily life there:
Because there are about a hundred inmates for every guard (the average in the United States is six inmates per guard), the authorities tend to look the other way when it comes to contraband like drugs, alcohol, cable television, and cell phones — the sorts of comforts that can make prison life tolerable. Drugs in particular help take the edge off the overcrowding and keep an otherwise restive population in an acquiescent haze. As one trafficker told me, “It’s the only way to control these beasts.” He found it frightening to contemplate Lurigancho without its daily fix. Overdoses are common, but there are only sixty-three doctors for the 49,000 inmates in Peru’s prison system, and just a handful of those are assigned to Lurigancho. Enough food for two scant meals a day is delivered to the prison gates, but everything else — from maintenance to discipline to recreation — is the responsibility of the men inside. Each block is run by a boss, a ranking figure in the Lima underworld, whose authority within the block is unquestioned.
The Dish 