“There will be no general sentence reduction”: minjusticia on the project

“Prisons will not become a hotel,” said Justice Minister Néstor Osuna ahead of hundreds of Internet users’ statements about the bill that creates the portfolio to resocialize the country’s inmates.

The official chose to share a series of seven videos, each one minute in duration, in which he explains step-by-step the goals and strategies outlined to, if passed by Congress, drive criminal justice reform. and penitentiary system of the country.

“The overall theme is to modernize the penal and prison system in such a way that it offers society the best that a system of this type can offer and not what is happening today where we have a pure prison system that has turned prisons into schools of crime in which people learn to commit crimes better, which offers no security or sense of security to society, which does not rehabilitate the victims and which has made prisons a place of simple suffering, of corruption, of cruelty, of shortcomings, that Colombian society must stop witnessing and play along,” Osuna began through his social networks.

Likewise, he assured that the project is not aimed at reducing sentences, but that he wants to propose benefits for detainees who have gone through various resocialization processes.

“If you finish high school in prison, if you learn a trade, if you take a course in prison, if you work in prison, you can get benefits so that you keep the connection with your family, so that you contribute to your family so that it can recover the victims and also so that it can be repaired for when it re-inserts itself into society,” he said.

Next, the portfolio leader referred to the 72-hour “prize” received by those deprived of their freedom and how he intends to maintain this strategy over time.

“72 hour permits. That already exists, for everyone? No. (…) But for other offenses there is the possibility to get 72-hour permits once part of the sentence has been paid. What’s the point? That the prisoner does not lose ties with his family, that he can see them from time to time. Of course, if he goes away for 72 hours and doesn’t return, he loses benefits and falls back into a harsh prison system. Experience shows that people who currently have a 72-hour permit almost always go back to prison; that is, it is not problematic. But that’s just one of the benefits, there are more,” he corrected.

In the same line of benefits, Osuna decided to expand and clarify his proposal that inmates work, indicating that this benefit will not apply to all inmates, but to those who have served a significant portion of their sentence.

“There has been a lot of talk in the press about going to work during the day and back to prison at night and some who are trying to caricature and mock the project have said I want to turn prisons into hotels. The first thing I would tell them is to go to a prison and see how much of a hotel they think,” he launched.

“If an agreement is made between Inpec and a private or public company so that some people can develop a job, for example building tertiary roads, working in a factory, people who have already served a significant part of the sentence (more than half), have they have access to that job and, sure, when they finish work, they go back to prison at night,” the minister said.

According to the official, the current penitentiary system does not restore the victims and does not provide a sense of security on a national level, which is why it is necessary, in his words, to look for another way.

“Our system tries to ensure that a person’s prison process helps them come out better than they came in. That is, the opposite of what is happening today. That allows him to have a different life plan than he came in with, which allows him to see that there are opportunities to live quietly and with dignity, outside the world of crime and, in the sense, that committing crimes does not pay,” he said .

In addition, he stressed that “this idea of ​​harsh, cruel punishment, which I know we are used to, that is the message that has been permanently beamed to us, is useless. They have not given us what they promised us, with those prisons horribly overcrowded for years, we have not felt more security, nor less crime, nor more rehabilitation,” he concluded.