Legal culture in Bolivia: intrinsic engine of the Status Quo

Abstract

Despite the complaints by NGOs, the advocacy and academic papers, there is a predominant practical deficiency in the application of the penitentiary system in Bolivia, which expresses family problems in recent decades. The frustration generated by this apparently immovable phenomenon gives rise to a meta-problematic. It is not enough to understand the nature of legal problems if the operation of the engine that allows this predominance is not taken into account. Understanding the functionality of complex social and institutional problems at the national level is insufficient if the political and cultural context in which they are found cannot be conceived. From a psychological and sociological perspective, one must explore “beyond” such problems and consider their antecedents, their political agents and the “bad habits” in Bolivian culture to determine what possibility exists regarding the social sciences to influence or combat them plausibly within the national reality.