Across Argentina

By Carolina Camps

I began this documentary project in Unit 33 of Los Hornos women’s prison in La Plata, near Buenos Aires, with a brief visit in 2004. In 2007 I felt the need to return for the type of images that required me to get closer to the inmates. Wanting to go deeper into their lives, I worked in the maternity wing where the inmates lived with their children until the age of four. There were 63 children inside at that time.

They are children who were mostly born in jail and whose perspective of the world was confined to within the prison walls. They never committed a crime, but they were child prisoners. When they reached the age of four, the saddest day for their inmate mothers, they were sent outside to live with their extended family, or in a state institution if they don’t have one.

By Carolina Camps

“My stepfather raped me when I was a child. I remember that he always hit me hard on the head. My mom always said that I lied. Then I got engaged to be married and left home. He also hit me…I don’t know why but one day I killed him.”

This was the first story Maria de los Angeles told me in the psychiatric ward of Prison 33. She takes medicine five times a day, doesn’t know how many years she’s been in jail, or how many she has left.