Prison Mayhem: Venezuela's Explosive Penitentiary Crisis
Ungar, Mark
In response to rising poverty and growing crime, the Venezuelan government has been busily shoving its "undesirables" behind prison walls. Massive overcrowding has been the flash point for...
...The harsh jails that symbolized 27 years of repressive rule under Juan Vicente G6mez were torn down in 1937 and new ones were built...
...In a 1990 nationwide poll, 43% said that delinquency was their chief worry...
...The federal criminal code mandates that judicial officials must inspect prison conditions every 15 days and hear prisoner complaints...
...Unable to stem the rise in murder, drug trafficking and other violent crimes, the government has instead focused on misdemeanors such as loitering and lacking proper identification...
...Universities like the National University's Institute of Penitentiary Education have established programs in criminal-policy studies that are developing new proposals and ideas...
...These new movements, including the left-wing Causa R, together with reform-minded elements within AD and COPEI, have spearheaded efforts to reform the worst aspects of both the criminal-justice process and the penitentiary system...
...Throughout the entire Venezuelan system, prison buildings are in dire need of attention...
...have fallen into disuse.1 2 Legal-aid, bail and prisoner-work laws legislated in the early 1990s helped reduce Venezuela's prison population from an all-time high of 31,400 in 1992 to just under 25,000 in 1995 through outreach to the poor and alternative methods of conflict resolution...
...This does not include the 2,826 in provisional liberty...
...Also fueling the violence is the institutionalized abuse of inmates by prison officials...
...2. Central Office of Statistics and Information, Anuario Estadistico de Venezuela, 1993 (Caracas: Presidency of the Republic: 1993), Table 631-04, pp...
...Others end up serving more time than their sentences would have dictated...
...It's the only criminal 'policy' the government has, and it's seen as being 'tough' on crime...
...15.El Nacional (Caracas), March 14, 1995...
...In comparison with other countries, Venezuela spends only a tiny amount for prisoners' basic needs...
...Today, that figure is over 70%.9 The bottlenecks begin in the courts-too mired in a crumbling infrastructure and a lack of judges to handle even a fraction of the cases before them...
...The Venezuelan state is so disorganized," said a recent report of the national comptroller, "that it is at the point of disappearing-if it hasn't done so already...
...Prisoners also plot mass escapes, which, like the gang rivalry, often end up in riots and uncontrolled bloodshed...
...For example, most of the Assistance Centers established by a 1980 law, which helped thousands of exprisoners and kept their rate of recidivism below 4...
...While neighboring Colombia budgets about $319 a month per prisoner, Venezuela forks out a scant $56...
...The defendant's only right during the sumario is to view the official court file, which cannot be copied...
...For a brief period in the early 1980s, open prisons, which allowed prisoners to work outside during the day, were in operation...
...The initial criminal investigation, known as the sumario, also impedes detainees from having an adequate defense...
...As a result, even greater levels of / from the courtyard of Retbn de Catia prison in Caracas, 1994...
...1 3 (The cost of living came a distant second at 15...
...short-term effect, however, unless the Venezuelan government addresses the lack of institutional coordination and the poor protection of detainee rights that have all but destroyed the criminal-justice system...
...3. Author's interview with Mirna Yepez, Director of Information of the Ministry of Justice, April 20, 1995, and with anonymous officials of the Office of Penitentiary Security of the Ministry of Justice...
...Only a few lynchings occurred in 1994, but this year a lynching has been reported almost weekly...
...Hope for more long-term changes in Venezuela's prisons rests on efforts to decentralize the federal government, which would mean greater leverage for the country's 22 state governors to tailor penitentiary policy to the prisons in their jurisdiction...
...Minors are often held in the same cells as adults, despite laws mandating that they be jailed separately...
...The Attorney General has proposed the elimination of the powerful judicial police...
...Since 1990, the rate has fluctuated between 68% and 75...
...The only consistent government policy has been ever-increasing rates of incarceration, followed by official claims that those arrested are the "real" source of crime...
...Assaults are up 16%, and robberies have jumped 26%.2 The Venezuelan government, however, has failed to devise a coherent, viable policy to deal with this crime wave...
...In another survey, 69% said they were likely to be the victim of an assault or a robbery within the next two months, and-reflecting the widespread perception of the police--65% said they believed their attacker would be an officer from one of the police forces.14 Such fears and distrust have fed into a wave of vigilante-style justice in poor neighborhoods throughout Caracas...
...Venezuelans' greatest fear is violent crime...
...The sumario, which examines the charges against the accused and the events surrounding the case, is carried out in secret, supposedly to prevent external interference...
...Though no official statistics are available, the rate of HIV infection is probably as high as that in Brazil, where 35% of female prisoners and 20% of males have the AIDS virus...
...They are an extension of the legal system, of government practices and the way leaders portray the issue of law and order...
...799-800...
...In press interviews before their recapture, the prisoners complained of inhuman conditions and unbearable overcrowding...
...Individuals are often arrested in police sweeps for not possessing identity documents, and many are then held indefinitely because of their prior criminal records...
...In some cases, legal provisions set up to protect defendants actually keep them ensnared in the judicial bureaucracy...
...El Globo (Caracas), April 3, 1995, p. 7...
...Criticism of Venezuela's prisons by the press and international human rights organizations has also generated pressure for change...
...Also see Natacha Salazar, "Children Stalk Venezuelan Cities," Reuters News Service, (June 24, 1996...
...Currently, 62% of Venezuelans live below the poverty line, while prices for basic foodstuffs have risen beyond the reach of 75% of the population.' Crime has risen just as dramatically...
...Yet inhumane prisons survived the region's transition to democracy intact...
...8. National Comptroller's Office, Annual Report to the Congress of the Comptroller of the Republic, 1995...
...A profile of the prison population, overwhelmingly poor and young, also reflects the linkage between growing crime and poverty...
...4. In Argentina, about a third of the prison population is HIV-positive...
...7 Such massive overcrowding has been the flash point for a spiraling rise in prison violence...
...violence and instability have come bursting back out through those walls...
...in 1994, at least 354 inmates were killed in the jails, and over 700 were seriously injured...
...Things weren't always so bad...
...On average, the length of detention from the point of the detainee's initial declaration to the first sentencing lasts four years, and the average criminal trial can take four-and-a-half years...
...In part because of the political instability that has wracked the country for the past several years, new groups have emerged to challenge the traditional domination of the Venezuelan political system by Democratic Action (AD) and COPEI...
...Prisoners who are awaiting trial often share cells with those already tried and sentenced, and 38NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY those convicted of minor offenses, like petty theft, with prisoners convicted of murder...
...As a result, health conditions are abysmal in many prisons...
...As a result, the vast majority of detainees receive little or no legal representation...
...For the most recent information on prison conditions and rates of incarceration around the world, see Observatoire international des prisons, Rapport 1995: les conditions de detention des personnes incarceres (Lyon: France, 1995...
...Despite their particularly horrible conditions, the prisons of Venezuela and other countries are not an isolated phenomenon...
...Today, they too are underfunded and inconsistently applied...
...rowing public anxiety, fueled by a lack of government direction, is the third and most entrenched problem surrounding the prison crisis...
...Prison escapes have also captured headlines recently in Brazil, where 130,000 prisoners are squeezed into facilities meant to hold less than half that number...
...Last April, for example, a botched escape at Argentina's Sierra Chica prison in Buenos Aires province sparked a mutiny by 1,000 inmates...
...6 The General Penitentiary of Venezuela prison in the western state of Guhrico, for example, was built for 750 but holds up to 2,100...
...In the aftermath of a violent riot in Maracaibo viewi National Prison in western Venezuela in January, 1994, prison officials nonchalantly told the press that they had no accurate body count because they could not identify all the body parts...
...Prison officials then blamed other inmates for the murders, but the prisoners vigorously denied the accusation...
...12.Alexandra Elia de Molina, "Alternative Measures to Imprisonment," Policia Cientifica, Vol...
...9. Estimates vary widely...
...Yet abuse against inmates at the hands of regular prison officials is a daily occurrence in Venezuela's jails...
...Their revolt against atrocious living conditions and long delays in the trial process quickly spread to 18 other prisons across the country...
...Instead, officials have pandered to the public's fears by both condemning and tacitly supporting the practice of vigilantism...
...While the political and economic institutions that have generated the prison crisis cannot be changed overnight, it is important to cultivate greater public understanding of how these institutions affect ordinary citizens...
...At the Aparecida de Goias prison near Brasilia, 40 inmates took dozens of officials hostage in April and then escaped...
...Of those surveyed in an April, 1995 poll, 92% said that they believed that neither the nation's leaders nor its institutions were capable of resolving the country's problems...
...1 6 Reform efforts to respond to Venezuela's prison debacle, however, are gaining steam...
...See Calvin Sims, "On Every Argentine Cellbock, Specter of AIDS," The New York Times, March 22, 1996, p. 4. 5. Office of Penitentiary Security, Ministry of Justice...
...Some linger on in prison even after being acquitted twice...
...8 The government's first step out of this chaos is to confront the immediate cause of prison overcrowding-the large percentage of prisoners awaiting trial...
...The only thing I would ask," says Roberto M., who was recently released from El Dorado prison after five months for not having his identification card, "is that everyone understands how hellish these prisons really are...
...4 At El Dorado prison in the Amazonian state of Bolivar, spending amounts to about 18 cents per prisoner per day...
...But even when such visits do occur, they are rarely followed up...
...7. For trends in child abandonment and youth crime, see the Anuario Estadistico de Venezuela...
...Prisoner agitation continued, however, forcing a new investigation...
...Prison Mayhem 1. The Ministry of the Family, Venezuela ante la Cumbre Mundial Sobre Desarrollo Social (March, 1995), p. 23...
...In a nationwide poll conducted last year, 57% said they favored lynchings.15 Even in the face of such extremes, government officials have not devised a coherent policy to deal with the crime epidemic or its underlying causes...
...The violence erupted after inmates threw fire-bombs into cellblocks housing rival gangs, triggering clashes in which approximately 150 prisoners were stabbed, shot, drowned, decapitated and burned to death...
...Sign reads: "No More Impunity " Vice Minister of Justice said the rate of unsentenced inmates in his country was around 90...
...Once the dust settled, however, the Venezuelan government did not investigate the lack of personnel or even the source of the fire-bombs...
...He has worked extensively with human rights organizations in Venezuela...
...The release of a mentally ill prisoner from Ciudad Bolivar prison, for example, was held up for 11 years because of bureaucratic snafus...
...Over 500 people are arrested yearly under the Law of Vagabonds and Crooks, a military statute from the 1930s which allows for the arrest of "suspicious" individuals or those "fomenting vices in public...
...The violence reached such heights in 1994 that at the end of that year, the Minister of Justice ordered the national guard to take over the administration of seven of the most violent prisons...
...One exasperated official from the attorney general's office said that although public prosecutors are supposed to be present when a detainee gives his or her statement to the police, detainees are routinely brought to police stations with clandestine basements where confessions are often extracted under torture...
...1, No...
...Other nongovernmental actors are also pressuring for change...
...A new, more modern prison system was set up after a new Constitution was ratified in 1961...
...Ineffective leaders, a restless military, economic instability, growing poverty and soaring rates of violent crime have turned Venezuela from a Extensive overcrowding forces some prisoners to sleep in the courtyard of the infirmary at Reten de Catia prison in Caracas...
...Peru's Family members of victims of police violence protest in 1995 against official impunity...
...Besieged by rising crime rates, yet unwilling to confront difficult policy choices, governments throughout Latin America have been busily shoving their "undesirables" behind prison walls...
...Using large stashes of weapons, the prisoners took hostages and managed to gain control over five prisons...
...Yet there is a serious shortage of public defenders, and those that do practice are seriously overloaded, handling an average of 300 to 400 cases a year...
...Last year it replaced hundreds of corrupt guards at Ret6n de Catia prison with newly trained personnel...
...Many regulations on probation and conditional liberty introduced in the 1980s have since become dead letters because of a lack of follow-up...
...In the last few years, the government even began a camVOL XX, o 2 EPT/cT 196 4 VOL XXX, NO 2 SEPT/Ocr 1996 41REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY paign against corruption in the prisons, estimated to account for $10.6 million per year...
...Media criticism has focused on the heavy-handed tactics of the national guard when it has intervened to reassert control over the prisons...
...Unprecedented levels of prison mayhem-including killings, riots and mass breakouts--have shaken several Latin American countries in the past few years...
...Inmates who denounce the inhumane conditions or who demand improvements frequently face harsh retribution...
...Office of Penitentiary Security, Ministry of Justice...
...4, October, 1992...
...The prisons of Venezuela-one of Latin America's longest-standing democracies-offer a dramatic example of how quickly constitutional principles can buckle under the weight of bureaucracy, political expediency and socio-economic insecurity...
...The matter was never resolved, however, as the government simply dropped the investigation...
...Today, the virtual breakdown of penitentiary sysVOL XXX, No 2SEPT/OcT 1996 37 0 C I w n Mark Ungar is a Ph.D...
...The following month, 53 inmates escaped from Carandiru, the country's largest prison, by digging a 100-yard tunnel...
...In El Salvador, about 77% of its 6,300 prisoners are unsentenced...
...This law's automatic appeals process--coupled with bureaucratic incompetence-has kept many detainees incarcerated while awaiting higher court review...
...Out on the streets, meanwhile, forces like the Caracas Metropolitan Police carry out mass detentions, conduct illegal curfews and commit arbitrary killings-all with little accountability...
...Instead, it blamed a handful of inmates for "engineering" the violence and duly shipped them off to a penal colony on the other side of the country...
...It shows: there is one bed for every four inmates, prison cells are infested with vermin, and prisoners go without shoes, adequate clothing, eating utensils or clean bathing water...
...About 70% of prisoners are between 18 and 25 years old, and 20% are between 26 and 29.3 Nearly 70% have not finished elementary school, and most are manual workers and agricultural laborers...
...Massive overcrowding has been the flash point for unprecedented levels of prison violence...
...Typhus, cholera, tuberculosis, scabies and numerous other viruses run rampant...
...candidate in political science at Columbia University...
...Angry mobs have spontaneously lynched criminals caught en flagrante delicto in the poor neighborhoods of the city, while some communities have formed watch groups that plan to take the law into their own hands...
...The brutal conditions that have triggered such violent outbursts and risky escape attempts seem to be a throwback to the military regimes of the past...
...Rights protection is even more precarious inside the prisons...
...The country's 32 prisons are both an outlet and a reflection of this ongoing crisis...
...Although this riot was unusually bloody, its causes and consequences were anything but unusual...
...In an attempt to break up a hunger strike of hundreds of inmates protesting conditions in Maracaibo prison in 1990, the national guard packed off a group of 239 prisoners to El Dorado, beating them en route...
...The national guard killed rebellious inmates after a prison riot in 1991 and dumped their bodies into "wells of death...
...Things fall apart and stay that way," says Luis A. Lara Roche, warden of Ret6n de la Planta prison...
...Author interview, Juan Scatolini, Director of the Human Rights Office of Buenos Aires Province, La Plata, Argentina, November 16, 1994...
...Consultores 21 (Caracas), January, 1990...
...VoL XXX, No 2 SEPTr/OCT 1996 37REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY tems throughout the region exposes the fault lines of democracy in contemporary Latin America...
...Huge backlogs of this kind are a chronic problem in Latin America, especially compared to the poorer countries in Europe and even Africa.10 In Argentina, for example, about 75% of the actual prison population in Buenos Aires province has waited over two years to be sentenced...
...Events following an inmate uprising at the General Penitentiary of Venezuela in October, 1991 reveal the extent to which officials may go-not only in the use of deadly force to quell restless prisoners, but also in covering up their acts after the fact...
...Space is at such a premium at Caracas' massive Ret6n de Catia prison that anyone lucky enough to string a hammock from the ceiling, or to find a stair to sit on, will not budge for days for fear of losing the coveted spot...
...The attorney general's office carried out an investigation, and concluded that the inmates allegedly killed by the national guard had simply been transferred to other jails...
...Almost 60% of prisoners were charged with crimes against persons in the 1960s...
...No amount of due-process provisions in national or international law seems capable of counteracting plain institutional indifference...
...ut even arresting the most violent criminals will not make a dent in the prison crisis without a sustained attack on the problems that underlie it...
...Marcanalisis 21 (Caracas), January, 1990...
...Due to the combination of corruption and an insufficient number of prison authorities, whole areas of many prisons go unpatrolled...
...When the riots ended after a negotiated settlement, the worst prison crisis in Argentine history had left 21 dead and 35 wounded...
...When democracy was reestablished in Venezuela in 1958, some 50% of the country's prisoners awaited trial and sentencing...
...But unless these various initiatives and openings add up to an honest look at the causes of the country's social, political and economic ills, they will have little chance of succeeding...
...Because of their inability to keep track of exconvicts, coupled with the poor quality of resocialization programs inside the prisons, many penitentiary officials are reluctant to release detainees...
...Most of the agencies responsible for overseeing the prisons and guaranteeing prisoners' rights work at cross-purposes or do not work at all...
...As elsewhere in Latin America, crime rates in Venezuela have skyrocketed in tandem with growing poverty, which has nearly doubled over the past decade...
...While under 100 prison deaths were reported each year during the late 1980s, over 200 deaths were registered in 1990...
...This time, the wells and the corpses of several prisoners were found...
...The criminal code gives the police wide control over the penal process, and their superior organization and actual physical control over detainees allows them to dominate the sumario and other pretrial procedures...
...By the late 1970s, however, that percentage had dropped by half, while the percentage of those charged with property crimes jumped from 21% to 45%, and has stayed that way ever since...
...Mentally ill prisoners receive no special treatment...
...One prisoner at Ret6n de la Planta said he had spent five years there in the 1980s before being acquitted...
...Only after months of prisoner agitation were the bodies discovered...
...Today, however, Venezuela's prisons are the most overcrowded, inhumane and violent in the region...
...Several attempts to have the law declared unconstitutional have failed...
...Since 1990, the murder rate has increased by 73...
...The most evident of those problems is the insufficient amount of spending on both prisons and prisoners...
...Either the government is completely incompetent, or they want the law to stay as it is," said a resident of Catia, a poor barrio in Caracas, who was detained in one of the many police roundups carried out under law...
...model of stable constitutionalism to a nation on the edge of collapse...
...At the national level, the judicial police has used its criminal-investigative powers to create a sophisticated network that has all but replaced the authority of judges over arrest procedures and treatment of detainees...
...Because of these delays, some prisoners languish in jail for eight years before being found innocent...
...Members of Congress from COPEI and Causa R, for example, recently introduced a bill proposing a penal procedure code which would eliminate the sumario...
...Once there, prison officials severely limited their contacts with families and lawyers...
...At the same time, the greatest percentage of crimes involve property crimes, not acts against persons...
...As a result of this overcrowing, basic protections are routinely ignored...
...El Diario de Caracas (Caracas), March 15, 1995, p. 2. 16...
...This poor coordination among state agencies running the criminal-justice system has given rise to the systematic violation of detainees' rights...
...Tocuyito, a prison facility in Valencia designed for 1,500, has held between 1,700 and 4,500 inmates...
...The rise of new political forces, coupled with a 1989 law replacing presidential appointment of state governors with direct elections, may give new impetus to state-level efforts to initiate penitentiary reforms...
...Stable governments flush with oil revenues maintained relatively humane prisons in Venezuela over most of the past 60 years...
...A penitentiary system originally built to hold 15,426 inmates actually holds anywhere between 24,000 and 27,000.5 Some facilities have operated at three to four times their capacity...
...Compounding the slowness of the Venezuelan judicial system is the fact that many of those arrested lack resources to hire private lawyers and must rely on stateprovided public defenders...
...After the national guard put the riots down, prisoners claimed that rebellious inmates had been murdered and their bodies dumped into "wells of death...
...As a result of inadequate resources and rising crime rates, overcrowding has become a permanent feature of Venezuela's prisons...
...Visiting lawyers and families easily smuggle weapons to inmates, who form heavily armed rival gangs that fight for territory and haggle over control of a lucrative drug trade in cocaine and heroin within the prisons...
...6. Information on the prison populations is from the Office of Information and the Press Department of the Office of Defense and Civil Protection, both agencies of the Ministry of Justice...
...The 1994 Narcotics NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY Law is a case in point...
...Left to fill the vacuum created by this disintegrating public administration are Venezuela's numerous police forces...
...Such equivocations and empty rhetoric have served mainly to verify the belief of most Venezuelans that the government is ill prepared to address crime and the conditions that feed it...
...Packed in a facility built for 800, most of Maracaibo's 2,500 inmates were heavily armed and unpatrolled...
Vol. 30 • September 1996 • No. 2
