Death penalty: Dialogues of emancipation (2013)

Title: “Death penalty”. 
Author: Francisco Papas Fritas. 
Technique: Soga neon and wooden staircase. 
Description: The death penalty continues in Chile despite having been abolished in 2003. Currently Francisco Papas takes about a year requesting statistics about deaths inside prisons in Chile for the past 10 years. Requests made through the Transparency Act to the Minister of Justice, the Gendarmerie Director and the Legal Medical Service have been systematically denied. It is not only that the institution does not want to make that information transparent, but also does not enforce it. Neither does it observe the vexatious and power-seeking between the inmates themselves, effects of rivalries intensified by overcrowding. There is also no systematized information about the various diseases that cause the lack of oxygen, the poor conditions of the prison infrastructure, the bad food and the physical and emotional violence against the inmates. To these figures-which will have to start to be collected-must also be added the early deaths suffered by many people incarcerated when they are released, deaths caused by the various ill-treatment that they had suffered in the course of their imprisonment. Taken together, one can see that these lethal practices contribute to a policy of annihilation of what is called “margin” and “poverty.”