Ecuador started this Monday the first prison census of its history, with which it seeks to register the more than 32,000 prisoners currently incarcerated in the country’s 36 prisons, where since 2020 more than 400 inmates have been killed in different clashes between rival criminal gangs.
The registration began in the prison of Tulcán, capital of the northern province of Carchi, bordering Colombia, and will take about three months, as anticipated by the national prison service (SNAI), in charge of managing and guarding Ecuadorian prisons.
(Also read: Ecuador initiates a new strategy to mitigate the prison crisis)
The census will be carried out by two teams, one from the north and the other from the south, and both will meet in the city of Guayaquil, where the Litoral Penitentiary is located, the most populous prison in Ecuador, where they were registered. the bloodiest and most macabre episodes between prisoners last year.
This process is coordinated with the Human Rights Secretariat of the national government and has the support of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), the general directorate of the Civil Registry and the National Police and Armed Forces.
Of the more than 32,000 prisoners who were incarcerated in Ecuador’s prisons at the end of July, 30,440 were men and 2,065 women, according to the latest report published by the SNAI, and close to 13,000 prisoners, equivalent to more than a third, are imprisoned without sentence, in a provisional prison regime.
(You can read: Ecuador, involved in a spiral of social violence)
They ask for decent conditions
According to the SNAI, the census will facilitate the collection and updating of sociodemographic information on persons deprived of liberty to improve their living conditions and for better prison administration.
At the opening ceremony, held this Monday in the Tulcán prison, the director of the SNAI, Pablo Ramírez, stated that the Government’s objective is “to create public policies and strategies to transform the quality of life of persons deprived of liberty” with the strengthening of medical care and access to specific treatments.
Ramírez stated that the purpose is to establish “state policies that are consistent over time, that transcend as a goal, creating a prison model that encompasses the principles of human dignity.”
On his side, the Secretary of Human Rights of the Government, Paola Flores, reiterated that the commitment of the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, is to “transform the prison system” so that prisoners have conditions.
(Also: Latin America: the wave of violence in prisons in recent years)
IACHR recommendations
Precisely, the dignity of prison conditions was one of the recommendations made by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in its report issued in March on the prison crisis in Ecuador.
In that report, the IACHR also urged the Ecuadorian State to regain internal control of prisons, in the hands of criminal gangs, and to develop a crime prevention policy where the main strategy is not imprisonment as a deterrent mechanism.
In this sense, the Executive began in July the process to hire 1,400 new penitentiary officers, which will almost double the current staff and thus reinforce the surveillance of the prisons, where the latest massacres have shown the ease with which the prisoners introduce machetes or including assault rifles.
A program of pardons and commutations of sentences is also being carried out with prisoners convicted of minor crimes who have served most of their sentence, as well as the formulation of the first national public policy on human rights for the prison population.
(Keep reading: Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency in Guayaquil)
reduce overcrowding
This has allowed the overcrowding of the Ecuadorian prison system, with a capacity for 30,169 inmates, to drop from 16.69% to 7.74% so far this year, although there are some prisons that are still around 50% its high overcrowding.
However, the massacres among prisoners caused by clashes between rival gangs that dispute the internal control of the prisons have not stopped for the moment, and the last one occurred in July in the Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas prison, where they were murdered. 12 convicts.
This massacre followed another that occurred in the same prison in May where 44 inmates were murdered, with the same pattern of extreme cruelty that turned the prison into a bloodbath and a pile of decapitated and dismembered bodies, whose identification took more than one week to the authorities.
For the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization, the factors that explain this violence are overcrowding, lack of state control and the power acquired by criminal groups, according to a report published by this organization in July.
EFE
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