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The first prison census in Ecuador began on Monday, August 22, and will be applied to the country’s prisons, which house some 35,000 inmates. This is a step in the prison reform announced at the beginning of the year by the Government to end the chronic violence and massacres between rival gangs that, since 2020, have caused the death of 400 prisoners.
With Eric Samson, RFI correspondent in Ecuador
The “execution phase” of the census will be carried out from Monday “in the 36 Centers for Deprivation of Liberty nationwide,” the National Service for Comprehensive Care for Persons Deprived of Liberty (SNAI) said in a statement.
The registry will make it possible to update the information on inmates to “improve their living conditions and for better administration” of the detention centers.
Although the government knows, by definition, the number of inmates in its prisons, it does not currently have precise statistics on the sociology of people deprived of liberty: on the number of petty criminals, for example, or, on the contrary, on big drug traffickers or assassins.
A risky study
This is the objective of the census, which will be completed within three months in Guayaquil, the largest prison in the country.
The operation is not without danger for the officials, who will be accompanied at all times by police and military personnel, since weapons and explosives circulate in the prison pavilions, as recent clashes have shown.
Limit overcrowding in prisons
The government wants to limit prison overcrowding, which is about 7%, by reducing the number of prisoners awaiting trial, which is about 13,000 out of a total of 32,000. To improve prisoners’ living conditions, the authorities also want to separate rival gang leaders and their members.
Once the census is completed, the most violent prisoners will be concentrated in maximum security prisons, and the rest in medium and minimum security pavilions. Teenagers in prison will be housed in centers away from the most dangerous criminals.
“Centres of Torture”
A pacification committee created by President Guillermo Lasso said in a report last April that Ecuadorian prisons “are considered warehouses for human beings and torture centers.”
The government attributes the massacres, with dismembered and incinerated bodies, to the dispute between gangs linked to drug trafficking who seek control of territories for the sale of drugs inside and outside the prisons.
Located between Colombia and Peru, the largest producers of cocaine in the world, Ecuador faces an increase in drug trafficking and crime.
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