Last week, Ecuador announced it would begin to withdraw military forces from the prisons, over a year and half after deploying them to break criminal control. The news marks the beginning of the end of a policy that has been an inflection point in the country’s criminal history.

InSight Crime’s James Bargent and Ecuadorian investigative journalist Karol Noroña discuss why the military intervened in the prisons in the first place, what the intervention changed – and what it didn’t – and what’s next for a prison system that had become an operating base for organized crime.