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Maybe it was trying marijuana and cocaine at age 12. Maybe it was the abuse from her mother and the hunger that her four siblings went through since they were little or the beatings from her ex-husband. Erenia Cerdas cannot identify the first step in her life that went wrong. What she is clear about is that getting hooked on crack when she was barely 21 took the reins of her life away from her. Everything that came after happened automatically. Even agree to carry some wood to the Cocorí prison, in the center of Costa Rica, without knowing that they were loaded with grass. This, however, is the best thing that could have happened to him.
By then he was living on the street and begging for money to consume. He had gone through 16 rehabilitation centers and 10 years ago they had taken away custody of his three children, two twins who are now 19 years old and a third, 17. “My life was centers and drugs, centers and drugs.” , recognizes at the foot of the ruins of Cartago, an imposing church that was left half-finished after the Santa Monica earthquake more than a century ago. At the end of November 2021, a friend called Cerdas and asked him for the favor of bringing to the prison “some merchandise for the crafts” that the prisoners made. This 38-year-old woman didn’t mind helping him. When she arrived, an officer put a punch into the wood and several small packages of marijuana fell out.
Minutes after they detained her, all the alarms and a shootout rang: they had seized a much larger shipment. “They used me as a hook [cabeza de turco] for another to happen,” she says, still disappointed.
The suspicion that she had been deceived, her condition as a street dweller and her addiction were key for the court-appointed lawyer to request that Cerdas’ case not be handled by ordinary justice. A crime like this before 2013 would have cost him between eight and ten years in prison. However, since then, there has been a sort of asterisk in the penal code, known as 77 biswhich reduces the sentence from three to eight years when the participant in the crime is a woman in vulnerable conditions, has people under her care or is elderly.
This reduction allows the judge the option of referring the case to any alternative measure to prison; The most transgressive is restorative justice, which prevents the accused from setting foot in jail and gives both victims and perpetrators a space to speak. Rita Porras, clinical psychologist from the Prevention Projects Unit of the Costa Rican Drug Institute, comments that it is very positive for users to know that there is a procedure in the judicial system that allows “second chances” to repair the damage caused to people. and the community. “Ultimately, the situation of these women is the result of a vacuum in the State,” explains Zhuyem Molina, judge, public defender in Costa Rica and one of the drafters of the restorative justice law. “The State’s response cannot be to punish them for having been poor.”
Restorative justice is a different view from the roots. Although punitive justice is based on punishment and isolation, this option in the Costa Rican model suggests talking about conflicts, not crimes, and reparation, not condemnation. Thus, the restorative justice law approved in 2018 and supported year after year regardless of changes in governments, establishes a plan of several sessions between the judge, the prosecutor, psychologists, social workers, the victim (or civil society that represents the party). offended) and the offender. The requirements are three: that it be the first crime committed, with a sentence of less than three years – excluding cases of violence against women – and that all parties want to resolve it in this way. Within a month, as stipulated by the rule, an agreement must be reached on how the damage can be repaired.
In the case of Cerdas, the resolution consisted of being admitted to a detoxification center for seven months and attending a support group for former addicts and community service for two years. “I chose the Genesis Foundation, which is Christ-centered, because I got out of this hole only thanks to the hand of God,” she says. She now leads a team for the newcomers and has returned to live with her youngest son. “I always wanted to change my life and quit drugs. I tried 16 times, but I didn’t know how to do it. I had no one to help me,” he explains.
This measure is also a clear commitment to incorporating the gender perspective in the courts. In Latin America, 70% of imprisoned women are in prison for micro-trafficking crimes. “When you know the X-ray of those who are inside, you realize that the damage to society is much greater if you lock them up, because they are heads of households, single mothers, vulnerable women… And the circles of crime tend to repeat themselves in their families if they go hungry,” he explains. Coletta Youngers, senior advisor at the American human rights NGO WOLA. “They are not dangerous people that you have to keep away from society.”
“This is not a soft hand or impunity”
But the most conservative sectors do not see it the same way. The commitment to alternatives to prison is diametrically opposed to the speeches of neighboring presidents such as the Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, who has based his entire security policy on locking up anyone suspected of being linked to gangs. to have the highest incarceration rate in the world. His speech has emerged as a panacea and has served as an inspiration for other sectors in Ecuador, Honduras or Colombia, until it permeates society. that links security with “iron fist” policies.
Celia Medrano, a renowned human rights defender, remembers the attempts to bring a law like the Costa Rican one to El Salvador in the case of women who were forced to introduce drugs by gang members, in 2014: “We did an enormous job, but we were never able to do that the Public Ministry understood the difference between a woman who does it under extortion and one who does not. We never achieved a differential approach. Nowadays, proposing something like this is absolutely unthinkable since the country’s logic is the opposite of ‘you are free until proven otherwise’. “There are still many detractors. Also in Costa Rica,” laments Teodoro Bermúdez, a prosecutor who has worked with this modality since 2014. “Some think that this is pandering. “You are always afraid of the new.”
Jovanna Calderón Altamirano, head of the Office of Restorative Justice of the Judiciary of Costa Rica, agrees and considers that criticism of the restorative process comes from ignorance of the model and this growing “punitive populism”: “People believe that these processes They are very permissive and seek to benefit the accused. And it is not like that, this is not a soft hand or impunity. These are processes with a lot of control and monitoring and active responsibility to repair the damage caused.”
In 2022 alone, 2,379 restorative justice cases were closed, with 98% satisfaction of all parties. “It is not an abolitionist model nor does it want to end prisonization,” he adds. But he clarifies: “Any type of conflict can be addressed through restorative justice with qualified personnel, the necessary resources and as long as there is will on both parties.” Including, according to Calderón, crimes of gender violence, which were excluded from the first bill due to pressure from the feminist movement. “Costa Rican society was not mature enough to understand that this is a very avant-garde law.”
A law that is also having great results, since only 4% of those accused reoffended in crimes during the two years of monitoring carried out by the Judiciary. In Colombia, the percentage of prisoners who return to prison for a new crime is 36%. In Chile, 52.9% and in Mexico it is around 60% in robbery crimes. These psychosocial approach processes are, in addition, much faster (between one and three months) and 86% cheaper than ordinary cases, according to the Judiciary.
Cindy Torres Ortiz, 33 years old, is part of that 96% of reintegrated people in Costa Rica. It does not cross her mind to bring drugs back into prison or return to the ex-boyfriend who, from prison, forced her to do it weekly for a year. “I was very in love, he made the decisions and I just accepted. It wasn’t a business for me, it wouldn’t let me work for someone else. She was his employee,” explains this mother of three children. “When they caught me, I felt relief. “I wanted it to be over,” she admits. Now Torres has spent practically five years without using and graduated from high school.
“Continuing to think that prison is the solution to all our problems is a disaster for Latin America,” says Luis Andrés Fajardo, deputy defender of Colombia. In the last two decades, the prison population in Latin America and the Caribbean has skyrocketed by 120%, while in the rest of the world it has only increased by 24%. Here, in addition, one in three people imprisoned has not yet been sentenced. “The interesting thing about the process is the active role of the perpetrator and that he asks what the victim wants,” explains Fajardo.
That was the question that the first precursors of this type of criminal law had in mind, which emerged in the mid-70s in Canada, with a strong focus on how they resolve conflicts. indigenous communities: without punishment and with the horizon set on reintegration. Restorative justice was also key in the peace processes in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Spain.
“I didn’t have that opportunity and I’m paying the consequences.”
The story of Berta Robles (fictitious name) did not allow second chances. This Nicaraguan with raven eyes and hair receives América Futura in a room at the Vilma Curling Rivera Prison at the end of October with sweaty hands and an averted gaze. She is sitting on a plastic chair a few meters from the cell where she has slept with 25 other women for four years. She takes a deep breath and tries to rewind.
She has been living without papers in Costa Rica for more than 20 years and juggling paying the expenses of her five children since she got divorced. She dedicated herself to prostitution, but the $16 per client she received was not even enough for the rent. “I didn’t want to continue in that place,” she says. Therefore, when a colleague told her about how “easy” it was to put drugs in jail, she agreed. Her sweaty hands gave her away to the security guards. “I wasn’t cut out for that, they realized right away,” she laments.
The first time they caught her, they gave her the option of going free with alternative measures, different from restorative processes. There was no circle of words or search for reparation, but rather commutation of sentence for service to the community. The debt left by the seizure of the drugs forced her to try once again. The last. In April 2019 she was sentenced to six years in prison. “I didn’t have another chance. “I am paying the consequences,” says Robles before a long silence. No dating advice, no graduations, no birthdays for her children. She says she has missed everything. Day to day passes slowly. She studies, works, goes to all the activities that are proposed to her and spends just enough time with her other cellmates. “I just want to get out of here, jail is not the best place to change.”
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