El Salvador's inhumane prisons

Vivieca Pavon, Ph.D. Candidate at the  University of Texas-Dallas, and Michael Weintraub, Associate Professor in the School of Government at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia, reflect on a recent visit to Central America in Institutional Failure in the World’s Most Violent Country: Prison Conditions in El Salvador for Political Violence @ a Glance.

Any reform will almost certainly need to cope with the interlocking causes described above, including avoiding pre-trial detention; addressing problems of delays in the judicial system; increasing the capacity of authorities responsible for corrections, and thereby reducing the burden on the police in managing bartolinas; and establishing reinsertion and rehabilitation efforts not only for those in prisons, but also bartolinas.

This, of course, assumes that we know what works in preventing crime and improving justice sector processes, particularly in fragile countries. A number of efforts underway rigorously seek to monitor and evaluate interventions related to security and justice. Empowering government and civil society actors to develop and implement pilot policies that use advanced methods of impact evaluation is our preferred path. We don’t know what will demonstrate success. But absent public policy experimentation — accompanied by strong monitoring and evaluation plans — the horrific state of Salvadoran prisons is likely to persist. If things do not change, we are not only condemning detainees to such conditions, but also likely ensuring detainees’ recidivism once released. The best approach to ending cycles of violence is to develop a set of pilot interventions that, if successful, can be subsequently scaled up. The security and human rights challenges in Central America are profound. Experimentation and data-driven approaches to citizen security and justice have the potential to materially change the quality of life for the region’s most vulnerable.

Prisons routinely violate human rights in El Salvador. They are breeding grounds for hardened criminals. And they are hotbeds of criminal activity in their own right. El Salvador has not figured out what to do with its prisons for the last two decades, and I have little confidence that they will do so anytime soon. How an innocent man wound up dead in El Salvador's justice system.