El Salvador has taken tentative steps to reduce its overcrowding. One afternoon, a group of female prisoners hoisted sharp farming tools — not in a fight, but to tend to crops at a prison farm that opened in February. A similar program for men will open this month, sending hundreds of prisoners nearing the end of their terms out of overcrowded jails.
“There was not much to do in the other prison,” said Blanca de Palazos, 46, finishing a six-year term for selling contraband cigarettes. “But here there is plenty to do, and most of us like growing food and being productive.”
El Salvador has also stepped up supervision of prisons. A bank of 30 television screens in the prison agency in San Salvador, the capital, beams images from every penitentiary in the country in an effort to document trouble.
But as one official put it, “Nothing is going to change overnight.”
He was right. A week later, three inmates were killed in a prison brawl.
”![Work programs for inmates like the Mara 18 gang members cost money, and the prison world in Latin America remains an upside-down, alternative universe with little public or political will to right it. “Our budget does not have a lot of resources,” said Nelson Rauda, the director of prisons in El Salvador. “If the choice is to build a children’s hospital or a prison, which do you think is going to get done?”
Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Also related: Inmate’s Lament: ‘Rather Be Dead Than Here’ [NY Times]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0yk4efpAn1qzs6yjo1_1280.png)
Work programs for inmates like the Mara 18 gang members cost money, and the prison world in Latin America remains an upside-down, alternative universe with little public or political will to right it. “Our budget does not have a lot of resources,” said Nelson Rauda, the director of prisons in El Salvador. “If the choice is to build a children’s hospital or a prison, which do you think is going to get done?”
Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Also related: Inmate’s Lament: ‘Rather Be Dead Than Here’ [NY Times]
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. (via nprfreshair)
Thanks to Juan Crow, you don’t even need to go to jail if you’re Hispanic/ Latin@/ Chican@ to experience discrimination on par with that of the Jim Crow era. Also I’d be interested to read what ending the drug war (completely walking away akin to Ron Paul’s idea) does to countries like El Salvador (which receives $200 million from the USA to ameliorate the problems caused by gangs.) Confused? Watch this Al Jazeera video about life in San Salvador.
Related: Alabama’s racist new immigration law: From Jim Crow to Juan Crow
(via nprfreshair)
The immigrant as a commodity. Private prisons don’t care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night at their prisons, this is a money making scheme that destroys families and lives.
Roberto Martinez-Medina died in CCA’s Stewart private detention facility in 2009. He was arrested for not having a driver’s license.
CCA whistleblower Bryan Holcomb has exposed how the company repeatedly ignored Medina’s pleas for care of his heart ailment and how they cut medical care costs to make a profit.
CCA profited off of Medina’s incarceration and the lack of health services. The deteriorating conditions are directly related to cutting costs for profit.
CCA has gone to great lengths to hush Medina’s death.
Demand an investigation today. Nobody should die for a corporation to make profit.
Sign the petition at Immigrants For Sale.
