The overpopulation in the prisons of Mexico doubles in just five months

There are more and more people within Mexican prisons. The centers were already saturated at the end of last year, when the monthly National Penitentiary Statistical Information Notebook published in December that the country’s prisons housed 235,197 people. Then, overpopulation was estimated at 10,157 prisoners and there were 118 prisons with excess inmates. In just five months, the number of imprisoned people has increased and overpopulation has doubled until it is 20,212, while saturated centers have increased to 133.

The number of new income to prison has increased considerably so far this year. Last December the income had dropped to 12,739 after several months with figures between 13,000 and 15,000 new monthly imprisoned. However, in February and March of this year the 16,000 revenues were exceeded. In parallel, the number of people who leave prison has stagnated. The difference between income and expenses has become larger, increased the population in prisons.

The State of Mexico is the main affected by the excess of the prey population, with 22,048 people above the capacity of the prison centers last April. He is followed by Sonora with 4,588 and then Durango, with 2,348. The prisons with more available places are in Mexico City and Baja California.

The Civil Organization for Human Rights thus legal warns of the dangers of the saturation of prisons. On the one hand, a more favorable context for violation of human rights within prison is created. Safety tasks are also difficult to have more prisoners to control and ensure that the effects on leaks, riots, quarrels and homicides in the centers are already being noticed. Without going any further, on May 4, Sául Francisco Hernández, leader of Los Salazar and “main generator of violence” in Sonora, escaped from the prison of Hermosillo just 39 days after his capture. A month ago he died under surveillance in the Eastern manly preventive prison in Mexico City the alleged serial feminicide Miguel Cortés, who had been waiting for his trial between bars for a year. And last week in Oaxaca, a penitentiary crisis was unleashed with the escape of a prisoner, the death of two of them within a prison and the arrest of the deputy director of the Menive Penitentiary Center of Tanivet and three custodians.

The director of Thus Legal, Jose Luis Gutiérrez, indicates that the prisoners are increasingly overcrowded in their cells and increases violence between them. “By not having the capacity or facilities or staff, which is the great crisis of the prison system, problems such as self -government are encouraged. We see this issue with great concern,” he details in conversation by phone. He assures that in the ruling of income in prisons already overflowing, they do not reach food or medicines for all. The drinking water received by inmates is not enough to correct demand and ranks for medical consultations with increasingly long. “By social networks they ask us to intervene in severe cases such as those who need dialysis urgently. There is no penitentiary personnel to attend to them, there is no space,” he laments.

Regarding the causes, Gutiérrez points out as main factors the expansion of the crimes catalog that involves informal preventive detention and the campaigns period before the judicial election. The modification of the informal preventive detention, approved at the beginning of the year, included extortion, the issuance of false fiscal vouchers and crimes related to the production and sale of fentanyl to the existing list of violations of the law that allow the Judiciary to imprison someone before the sentence is issued. The Government of Mexico approved the extension despite the judgment of the Inter -American Court of Human Rights, which ordered him to eliminate this figure.

On the other hand, Gutiérrez indicates that judges, prosecutors and public defenders are mired in their campaigns before the judicial election of June 1. “They are not attending to cases. The processes are paralyzed and less people leave,” he points out and insists that the problem of overpopulation is encouraged from the Judiciary, in which the prosecutors themselves come to double the terms of crime investigation while the defendants wait in prison to finally be exonerated. “This problem is extremely exacerbated by the inoperative of justice administration systems,” he says.