¿Motines o acciones colectivas de reclamo? Discursos mediáticos durante el COVID-19 sobre el sistema penitenciario peruano y las personas recluidas

Mass Media has a leading role in the construction of social symbols, values and practices. To identify the images of prisoners and prisons, in this article, we focus on the discourses of the Peruvian written press about the collective actions (categorized as riots) of prisoners in the context of COVID-19. Through critical discourse analysis, we analyze 81 notes of the seven most-read journals in Peru which inform about the first collective claim actions that occurred in four prisons: Ro Seco, Picsi, Castro Castro and Anexo Chorrillos. The results are organized into three axes: (a) Explanation of the diaries about collective claim action; (b) Men's prisons: Collective claim action defined as riots; and (c) Women's prisons: Collective claim action defined as non-riots. We argue that the notes reproduce the image of prison as a punishment institution, with a tendency to delegitimize collective actions and to portray prisoners as subjects propelled by emotions with no possibility to establish a dialogical encounter. Also, discourses are embedded with stereotypes of crime and gender. Mass media informs through the simplification of the prison system, providing unidimensional images of prisons and prisoners. This makes it difficult to create holistic views that aid to understand the hindering and claims for prisoners' rights in order to establish processes of dialogue to construct alternative resolutions to violence.