The politics of carceral visibility in Ecuador: human dignity, state power and the public performance of security

This study examined how Ecuadorian digital news media framed, valued, positioned, and followed the penitentiary situation at the Cárcel del Encuentro (CPL Santa Elena No. 1) during 2025 and 2026. Grounded in critical realism, it moved beyond the empirical visibility of news events to interrogate the deeper generative mechanisms associated with prison disease, isolation, institutional opacity, and punitive governance. A purposive corpus of retrievable digital publications from Ecuadorian news outlets was examined through qualitative content analysis and frame analysis. The coding focused on transmitted messages, protagonists, adjectivization, news positioning, follow-up, visual framing, headlines, and interpretive orientation. The media field organized the case through four dominant frames: official control and denial of epidemic risk; humanitarian alarm around tuberculosis, malnutrition, and family testimony; securitized punishment and the symbolic transfer of “dangerous” inmates; and restricted access to information. These frames revealed a stratified reality in which visible events such as deaths and prisoner transfers were connected to deeper structures including punitive populism, militarized prison governance, institutional secrecy, social abandonment, and the cultural dehumanization of incarcerated bodies. The findings indicate that prison dignity is not a rhetorical supplement to security policy but a constitutional, ethical, pedagogical, and public-health condition for democratic life. Ecuador’s penitentiary crisis cannot be addressed through isolation alone; sustainable security requires rehabilitation, education, health care, family contact, transparent oversight, and preventive social policies.