Mexico's Prison System Needs to Be Modernized in Accordance With International Standards - Experts Emir Olivares Alonso - La Jornada
go to original February 21, 2014

Mexican prisons are a “region of disaster”, areas of corruption, and markets of “human misery” where everything has a price: life, integrity, food, sex, and the hope of a better future. A profound clean-up should be done in the Mexican prisons or on the contrary, they will continue to be places where corruption and impunity reign.

The condition of the penitentiary system is explained this way in a study carried out by academics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), at the request of the University Program for Human Rights.

In the presentation of the study titled “Proposal to Save Human Rights in the Penitentiary System”, Sergio García Ramírez, from the Institute for Judicial Research (IIJ) at UNAM and one of the authors of the study, believed that the prisons must eliminate corruption, train the guards, and have a system that safeguards the basic fundamental rights of the inmates.

... The study notes that in Mexico there exists an abuse of preventative detention [holding accused persons awaiting trial] for which they should apply alternatives of punishment and penalties outside of jail. This has caused overpopulation and the violation of essential rights of the prisoners, such as health, a good diet, education, and training.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Janine Rhyans

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