When Elena first entered the interior of the women’s prison in El Salvador known as “Women’s Jail” she did not imagine that she would sleep on the floor. The cell assigned for her confinement already had 60 women and the capacity was 20. This case was documented by the human rights organization Cristosal, based in San Salvador, whose function is to explain the level of overcrowding that currently exists in Salvadoran prisons. .
Overcrowding in prisons in El Salvador is not a new issue, but it is more acute now: last year the penal system had the capacity to incarcerate 30,864 people, and without having built a new prison, it now has approximately 94,000 prisoners. .
“There is extreme overcrowding in the country, and this implies that the State has to take extreme measures to ensure that people are not at risk, otherwise it assumes direct responsibility,” he told the press. voice of americaZaira Navas, legal head of Cristosal.
But why is El Salvador called by human rights organizations ‘the country with the highest rate of prisoners in the world’? The answer is the exception regime in which it has been seven months.
On the last weekend of March, the gangs, which had apparently been hit with the Salvadoran government’s star security plan called the “Plan Control Territorial,” massacred 88 citizens in three days.
Faced with the emergency, the government of El Salvador asked the Assembly to immediately approve an exceptional regime with which it could besiege historically dangerous communities and capture gang members and their collaborators.
The gangs stopped the killing. But the regime that remains in force has 55,061 captured. A number that, together with the 39,500 prisoners that existed before the regime, exceeds the capacity of the prisons three times.
“Prisons, far from fulfilling the special preventive purpose of resocializing criminals, have been characterized by overcrowding, unhealthy conditions, malnutrition, diseases, epidemics, and shortages of all kinds of materials, including qualified prison staff,” said the Foundation of Studies for the Application of Law (Fespad) in a report on human rights of those deprived of liberty.
Elena, like other inmates, experiences this unhealthiness on a daily basis. Cristosal has spent months documenting testimonies of people who were confined in cells without access to water for consumption or personal hygiene.
Although the situation varies in each cell and prison, in “Women’s Prison” the conditions of imprisonment are classified as “inhuman and degrading” by the NGO.
Elena is one of the women interviewed by Cristosal whose real name was withheld. The case of women shows that access to health services is restricted. “There is no access at any time but at a specific time: once in the morning to urinate and once at night to defecate.” This due to the lack of space and water, reveals the organization in its latest report.
Likewise, there is no regulated communication between prisoners and their families. The little that the relatives know about the detainees is the prison in which they are held. Others with less luck take days to find out the whereabouts of their detained relative.
The administration of prisons such as Mariona in San Salvador places sheets with messages informing the hours in which family members can bring cleaning kits, medicines or food. The packages are sold outside the prisons and vary in price: from 50 dollars to 100 dollars. In a country whose minimum wage is 360 dollars.
Although the capacity in the prisons has already been exceeded, the government carries out large transfers of inmates from one prison to another, such as the one that occurred in September of a group of men transferred to the Women’s Prison.
“Overcrowding and overcrowding increase the risks of emergency situations occurring, cause tension and intra-prison violence, and generate negative repercussions or affect access to services,” stated the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IA Court HR) in an opinion advisory published in May this year.
Government: prisons will not be hotels
The first time the mass incarceration of gang members was used as a security strategy was in 2003, when the Central American country had 6,000 active gang members.
Today, when the gang groups number 86,000, according to figures from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the strategy is repeated, but with more force. Some 300 people have been arrested every day, prison sentences have been increased, and there are cases where gang members who have served their time have been recaptured.
In prisons, the images released by the government show the harsh confinement conditions in which those captured are found. Some people crowded together, others without mattresses to sleep on, and by order of the president, food rations were reduced to two per day.
“The criminals who have caused mourning and pain to Salvadorans are going to be in dim conditions,” Osiris Luna, director of Salvadoran prisons, said a few months ago.
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