Ecuador earmarks US$75 million to tackle prison crisis

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Government of Ecuador will allocate 75 million dollars in the next four years to tackle the crisis in its penitentiary system, which in February this year registered its highest peak of violence, with nearly 80 prisoners killed in riots in several prisons in the country.

Several authorities announced this on Wednesday in an event to present the “Restructuring Plan for the penitentiary system”, held at the Carondelet presidential palace in Quito.

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The event was attended by the Minister of Government, Alexandra Vela, the National Service of Integral Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders (SNAI), Fausto Cobo, and the Secretary of Human Rights, Bernarda Ordoñez.

Cobo defined the situation of the country’s penitentiary system as “precarious, chaotic, dangerous and anarchic”, with negative effects for the security of the State, and said that the allocated resources would be destined to meet the needs of infrastructure, technology, security, and human talent, according to an official statement.

He also announced that among the priority actions are implementing the penitentiary benefits process to reduce overcrowding and improve the classification of persons deprived of liberty according to security levels.

The plan for restructuring the penitentiary system also contemplates the rehabilitation and redistribution of the infrastructure of the centers of deprivation of liberty to guarantee dignified conditions of habitability, with the construction of new pavilions and the adaptation of the maximum security pavilions.

It includes an agreement with the Polytechnic School of the Army and the Armed Forces. Through voluntary military service, suitable human talent is selected to form the Corps of Penitentiary Agents to optimize resources.

The Ecuadorian prison system has been under scrutiny for years. There have been countless riots, cases of violence, score-settling, and escapes – this past year alone, there have been more than 100 deaths – that experts blame on overcrowding, internal corruption and lack of training.

Ecuador’s prisons house more than 39,000 inmates, a figure that has tripled in the last three decades and caused a crisis that intensified in the last four years with an overcrowding rate that reached 36% and today is around 30%.

This factor is compounded by disputes over the power of criminal organizations linked to drug trafficking, some of which control their flow from the prisons, and complaints from inmates’ families who have accused prison officials of corruption in some prisons.

Vela clarified that the budget item was approved after a meeting of the Public Security Council (Cosepe) as part of the government’s commitment to resolving the crisis facing the country’s social rehabilitation system.

For her part, the Secretary of Human Rights ratified that in this process, respect for the rights of persons deprived of liberty will be monitored, prioritizing security in the centers.

The most eloquent case of the serious situation occurred in February when two gangs clashed in four penitentiary centers, resulting in the death of almost 80 inmates, although the cases are constant and in July another twenty died in a similar case.