60 Minutes goes inside CECOT, El Salvador’s mega-prison built for industrial-scale confinement

CBS’s 60 Minutes offers rare, on-camera access to CECOT, the 40,000-capacity “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo” that anchors El Salvador’s mass-incarceration campaign. What’s notable here isn’t a shiny AI showcase but the blunt, industrialization of detention: regimented intake lines, biometric processing, full-spectrum CCTV, and what appears to be aggressive RF jamming to sever outside comms. Under the hood, this is a command-and-control problem more than a criminal justice one-moving, housing, monitoring, and provisioning tens of thousands with minimal staff through hardened workflows and layered perimeter tech.

The bigger picture: CECOT is a blueprint for state capacity via carceral infrastructure, not a pilot. At scale, the technical risks look familiar to operators-single points of failure in power and networking, jamming spillover, and the brittleness of centralized monitoring if maintenance or funding slips. It also raises procurement and export questions for the surveillance supply chain, as vendors of scanners, cameras, jammers, and management software become de facto policy actors. Worth noting: the footage validates operational claims about throughput and control, but it doesn’t resolve the parallel due-process and rights concerns tied to the state-of-exception model. For technologists, the lesson is less about novel algorithms and more about how standard industrial systems-when tightly integrated and relentlessly enforced-can reshape outcomes at national scale.