Throughout the last three decades, almost all Latin American countries witnessed a dramatic growth of their inmate population that is indicative of the rebirth of the prison in the region. This article contextualizes the rebirth of the prison in contemporary Latin America in empirical and theoretical terms. To this end, it offers a discussion of the expansion of Latin American imprisonment, changes in the region’s prison regimes and their embeddedness within wider social and economic contexts, as well as of the impact of institutional histories, larger economic and political transformation processes and globally circulating penal ideas and institutional models, all of which contribute to the growing punitiveness of contemporary Latin America states and politics.