The Sufferings of Prison Inmates

La Nacho has this exhibition on today on the National University's Plaza del Che of portraits of inmates and commentaries about the conditions in Colombian prisons: overcrowding, poor health care and bad, scarce food. In prison, the inmates receive little job training, and after release, they suffer job discrimination.

Prison overcrowding.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Jailors Strike

'Let's go for peace.'

Employees of the National penitentiary Institute, the Inpec, are on strike demanding more money and better working conditions - including reduction in prison overcrowding. Prison overcrowding is a grave problem across Colombia, whose jails are packed with 58% more inmates than they were designed for. At least one has four times its intended population, according to human rights groups.

In addition to causing suffering of inmates, the huge prison population generates a huge economic cost and lots of ruined lives. Over the last year, the government has tried to reduce this overcrowding by releasing some people to home detention who've served most of their sentences.

Another policy option they might consider would be to relax prohibitionist drug policies, which funnel wealth to violent, outlaw groups and also mean the imprisonment of non-violent offenders.

I'm not sure why these guys made 'peace' the catchword of their protest. Perhaps they're Santos voters.

"The nation's prisons are a kind of torture center," leftist Senator Jorge Robledo was quoted in El Tiempo.

The workers' strike has already begun to address the crisis in a small way. Because of the resulting manpower shortage, some prisons have ceased receiving new inmates, and at least one inmate escaped while out for a medical appointment.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

'Hotel' La Modelo Prison

Prisoners crowd themselves against a cell door.
(Photo: Radio Santa Fe)

The news that Colombia may allow some prison inmates convicted of minor, non-violent crimes to leave prison during the day is a step toward a more humane, less destructive prison regimen.

I once read the observation that 'Battling crime by building more prisons is like combating mortality by building more cemeteries.'

That parallel is way off, but does capture some elements of reality. After all, imprisonment stifles lives, destroys families and creates universities of crime. It also costs society a fortune, both in the costs of incarceration and in the loss of productive workers.

But prisoners shouldn't just get free day passes out of jail. That would turn prisons into veritable hotels (albeit no-star ones), whose guests sleep and eat for free and can spend their days as they like - with a great temptation to return to crime.

Inmates in a prison patio. (Photo: El Diario)

Inmates should have to earn these benefits, as the policy proposal stipulates, thru good behavior and by doing constructive things in prison, such as working in prison industries. Once out, convicts should be required to hold real jobs, something which the prison system could help them with. After all, society is much better off when a person's working, supporting the economy and paying taxes, rather than rotting away behind locked doors on the government's tab.

As has been well documented, ex-inmates have difficult times integrating back into society and finding jobs, which is a big reason why many return to crime. This new policy, if carried out well, could reduce that problem.

Day passes will also help reduce Colombia's tremendous prison overcrowding, which produces wholesale human rights violations and will mean prison riots sooner or later. This story in El Universal says that one third more prisoners have been packed into Colombian prisons than they were designed to hold. Some, like Bogotá's El Modelo, hold more than double their designed capacity, El Tiempo reports.



By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

How Governments Built a Cocaine Factory

An inmate in San Pedro Prison with his wife and daughters, who shared his cell.
(All photos by Mike Ceaser) 

Create a government-owned cocaine factory in the middle of your capital city? Who in their right mind would do such a thing? But Bolivia has, in colaboration with the U.S. government, as described in Marching Powder, which I'm reading now.

A stairway in the crowded San Pedro prison. 

A dozen years ago when I lived in La Paz, Bolivia, (and when Marching Powder's author Rusty Young was there) San Pedro prison's cocaine and counterfeit money factories were already notorious.

Many, probably the overwhelming majority, of San Pedro's inmates were there for non-violent drug crimes, such as smuggling or growing coca bushes on their land.

San Pedro is a bizarre, inside-out place in the middle of La Paz, where prisoners pay to be imprisoned and have the keys to their own cells, where tourists visit and where the drugs are smuggled not in, but out. If you don't believe me, then read Marching Powder or visit La Paz yourself.

Protesters, many of them coca leaf growers, protest in Cochabamba, Bolivia against erradication programs and other issues. Many of those in San Pedro prison were very poor people who could afford neither lawyers nor bribes.

With a corrupt and powerless prison administration, experience in the illegal drug economy and almost no food or other supplied from the government, the prisoners made the logical move into manufacturing a product with a guaranteed market: addictive drugs. What else would you expect?

Thomas McFadden, the English drug smuggler who is Marching Powder's protagonist, even calls San Pedro a 'cocaine university.' From the security of the prison, using up-to-date technology and with the collaboration of corrupt staff, McFadden coordinated cocaine shipments to Europe. That was probably not what the drug warriors had in mind when they passed Bolivia's harsh Ley 1008 anti-drug law.

A protesters' fire. 

Whenever something's prohibited, black markets appear. And so San Pedro is the predictable result when unrealistic and unenforceable drug prohibitions meet a poor and thoroughly corrupt society like Bolivia's.

I've visited prisons in Bolivia and two other South American countries, and each had its own kind of tragedy.

A Bolivian campesino, whose coca
field had just been erradicated.

In Paraguay I interviewed several young women imprisoned for smuggling marijuana across the border into Brazil. I'll never forget one, in her early 20s, and just beginning a 15-year prison term which would ruin what was left of her youth. She told me that she'd come from a very poor family, in which everybody slept on the floor of a single room.

"The only ways I could help my family were by smuggling drugs or by prostitution," she recalled, sobbing, "and I wasn't willing to become a prostitute."

A wealthy woman hired her as a 'mule,' to ferry sacks of Paraguayan weed into Brazil. But on her third run she got caught. Altho she'd already been in prison for several years, she said that her family was too poor to visit her - and that she didn't even think they knew where she was. The rich woman who'd hired this expendable young girl? She was still living comfortably outside, most likely with the authorities on her payroll.

A woman handles a sack of coca
leaves in a legal coca leaf market.

In Caracas, Venezuela I accompanied a group of university health workers into one of the city's overcrowded prisons. I don't recall its name, so it may be one of those which have exploded into violence in the last few years. It was nightmarish. The roughest, most violent inmates, who had a fued with other prisoners and with the guards, had barricaded themselves into the upper floors of the main cellblock. They didn't let in outsiders, accepted food only from relatives and tossed their body wastes out the windows. When they were bored or angry, prison staff told us, the toughs picked up their guns and took potshots at inmates on the patio below.

Women weigh sacks of coca leaves in a legal coca market.

A Caracas acquaintance of mine had been imprisoned during the 1990s, I believe in this same prison. There, he was involved in a prison riot. Soldiers were called in. Panicking, the soldiers fired on a crowd of unarmed prisoners in the prison patio, killing dozens. My acquaintance said he survived by burying himself amongst the dead.

Whether government-owned cocaine factories, cemeteries for the living, or criminal fortresses, these prisons are iron and concrete tragedies.

Is the War on Drugs the only reason why these prisons are so corrupt and filled with tragedy? Certainly, not, but it makes things much, much worse.

Related post: Expat Anecdotes

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Undressing to Expose the Prisons' Problems

Walking naked down Ave. Septima to uncover the state of the prisons.

Wives of prison inmates undressed and paraded down Ave. Septima today protesting several things, principally overcrowding and poor conditions in Colombia's prisons.

'No to conspiracy as a justification for extradition.'

While major tragedies haven't taken place here recently, overcrowding has contributed to  the deaths of hundreds of prisoners in a honduras prison, and violent prison riots in Venezuela. And it's probably only a matter of time before a Colombian prison explodes: Medellin's Bellavista prison was built for 2,200 inmates but holds more than 7,000.

And the situation is only getting worse, as the prison population expands at a rate of over 14% annually. In January of 2011, the director of the Colombian prison system said, 2,740 people were imprisoned and only 700 released.

Colombia is building more prisons - at a huge cost in money which could otherwise build schools, homes and hospitals. Worse, locking up a huge number of young people ruins lives and costs the country workers, artists, even potential scientists.

Colombia should consider alternative punishments like social work for non-violent crimes and programs to prevent youths from committing crimes in the first place. I've read about a novel program in Chicago, Illinois which employs ex-gang members who defuse gang conflicts before they turn violent.

And, of course, reforming drug laws could drastically reduce the prison population. Several bills in Colombia's Congress, including one to decriminalize the growing of drug crops, would move the country in that direction - if they're approved.

'Colombia is the only nation which
extradites its children.'

The protesters also criticized the practice of extraditing Colombian criminals to be tried and punished in foreign courts, usually in the United States, and usually for narcotrafficking. Extradition has always  generated opposition on  nationalistic grounds - it's more than a bit humiliating not to be able to try and punish Colombians at home for crimes committed here.

But, there are also human rights and justice issues. Recently, some Colombian narcos have gotten light sentences in the U.S. by spilling the beans on other narcotraffickers. Some have gotten such light sentences that the joke goes that, in Pablo Escobar's time, narcos preferred a tomb in Colombia to a prison cell in the U.S., but today they race to be extradited and receive a light sentence.

 More seriously, many narcotraffickers have also committed grave human rights violations, including mass murders and displacing civilians from their homes and land. But, since U.S. courts care only about international drug trafficking, they face no punishment there for these crimes. In theory, the extradited criminals should be punished for such crimes on their return to Colombia, but this evidently does not always happen. In some cases, Colombian criminals are reportedly living peacefully in the U.S. under new identities. Others are returned to Colombia without Colombian officials even being alerted to their arrival.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours