By Celia Medrano*
In Central America, talking about the human rights of prisoners is almost a crime, more than a few people claim that the majority of Central Americans are willing to accept the violation of the human rights of others, to endorse or disregard this violation, as part of the guarantee that those “good people” can be safe, for that reason, no government has resisted the temptation to win the political acceptation that entails announcing “Mano Dura ” (Iron Fist) policies in prisons.
However, even if those who try to disclose the situation are exposed to some sort of public stoning, it is important to talk about the human rights of people deprived of their liberty, measures that use violence against violence itself offer very few sustainable results at medium and long-term. We must understand that the overcrowding in detention centers, without even distinguishing between those serving a sentence and those being prosecuted for committing a crime, as well as prolonged or indefinite isolation in prisons, deny the very purpose of the exercise of “putting criminals in cages”, as the Argentinean criminal law teacher Alberto Binder ironically put it.
The purpose of a prison should be to create conditions aimed at the rehabilitation of the people who have committed a crime. Most constitutional regulations in Latin American set that the purpose of a prison is to “Develop work habits and to seek social rehabilitation”. The rehabilitation process does not begin when the person is released from prison. Readaptation implies the duty of the State to organize the prison system to achieve this goal from the moment the person is deprived of liberty.
Impose to the persons deprived of their liberty to prolonged isolation and detaching them indefinitely from their family ties and exercise this practice as a collective punishment, distances the person more and more from the ultimate goal of social readjustment. The family is the main vehicle for the desire of the person deprived of liberty to be reintegrated, and their willingness to not commit a crime again. Readaptation is not the responsibility only of state institutions. It is a society responsibility and as well of each one of us as part of it, the creation of familiar and communitarian environments respectful of the human rights of the persons deprived of liberty.
Depending on the existence of these conditions, breaking down discriminatory stigmas and approaching this issue from a human security perspective, crime and recidivism can actually
be prevented. However, the viscerality of governments, particularly populist governments, in their treatment of people who have committed crimes has reached unacceptable levels of violation of basic rights in penitentiary centers, including the right to life.
In the preliminary report on the In Loco visit to El Salvador last December by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) states that this country has the second highest rate of imprisonment in the world, with 604 per 100,000 inhabitants. Some prisons live with up to 600% overcrowding, and 60% of the country’s tuberculosis cases are concentrated in these prisons.
It depends on us that violence is no part of our daily lives. We should always remember the words of one of the world’s most famous prisoners who became president of his country after almost 30 years in prison: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.”.
That prisoner was Nelson Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose example inspired the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the “Mandela Rules”, a guide under which those who claim to be democratic governments and respectful of human rights should guide their actions in public policy on security and the prison system.
*Celia Medrano is a Salvadoran journalist who specializes in Human Rights, approach to Education for Peace and Public Management.
