Convivencia, disciplina y conflicto: Las Secciones Juveniles de las cárceles de adultos en Gendarmería de Chile. Análisis de las actas de la Comisión Interinstitucional de Supervisión de los Centros de Privación de Libertad (2014-2017)

Through a criminological perspective and considering the Chilean Juvenile Criminal Responsibility Law, this article explores the conflicts that emerge both among young offenders serving a custodial sentence in Chilean young offender detention facilities, and between them and the staff of such institutions. We explore the staff's practices for dealing with such conflicts. Thus, we determine the most frequent problems, the causes that originate them, as well as the disciplinary sanctions that were applied in these situations. The empirical data was collected from 112 records of visits carried out by the Inter-institutional Supervision Commission of Youth Detention Centers between 2014 and 2017. We studied these records focusing on three aspects: Discipline, regulation, and social cohabitation. The conclusions show that similarly to adult prisoners, the criminogenic contagion intensifies in prison-like environments. For example, physical assaults among the young offenders, drugs, and others. This study also reveals that the psychosocial teams' and staffs' practices, whenever they face these situations requires them to be able to exert and apply specialised intervention techniques. These practices should be able to manage the conflicts of these young people while being able to focus on reducing the harms of imprisonment.