Prisons: Dark Region | Article Mario Luis Fuentes

Mario Luis Fuentes.

Prisons are the space of condemnation, but also a territory where the state sovereignty is blurry, leaving in its place an exception regime, where the rules of the law are amenable to the law of gross force of crime. In a modern imaginary, the prison was built as the final direction of the legal punishment, a space where the violation is resolved by the insulation of the criminal.

Nevertheless, the Mexican penitentiary reality rudely denies what kind of view of legal rationality or rehabilitation intention. The prison system system, far from a mechanism for social reintegration, has become a place of partial shade, where organized crime replaced the state; Indeed, violence usurped the law, and revenge is imposed on justice.

In recent years, Mexico has come to the model of the fight against the competition of criminal justice in order to guarantee more fair, transparent and fair judgments. Nevertheless, the 2008 judicial reform missed the decisive element: a penitentiary system. The procedural forms were changed, but the structure of the prison remained untouched, the heiress of an ineffective punitive model and a violation of human rights. Therefore, although part of the audience and files is modernized, the prisons remain attached to dynamics, which react more to the nineteenth century than the XXI.

The Mexican prison does not act in accordance with the logic of the law, but under the report. According to the recent data of the National Penitentiary System of 2023, INEGI, overflow, corruption and violence remain structural features of the system. If the prison is an institution aimed at correction, the state failed in its main goal. Instead of offering the reintegration space, Mexican prisons reproduce crime and marginalization, guaranteeing that the one who enters them comes out with the lower capabilities of social adaptation and with a greater likelihood of criminal recidivism.

One of the pillars of any system of justice attached to human rights is the constant improvement of its institutions. However, in Mexico, prison centers were transferred to structural oblivion. In the reports of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), unhealthy, a shortage of medical services and the lack of effective reintegration programs were constantly documented. There is no work, there is no education, there is no adequate psychological attention. Instead, there is systematic violence, extortion network and parallel energy structures that determine life in prison.

The concept of the fine in Mexico is distorted. It is based on the premise that the punishment in itself is a kind of adjustment of accounts between the state and the criminal, not considering that the prison, which does not rehabilitates, is ultimately more of more violence. While European countries built prison models based on the state of universal well -being, where imprisonment does not imply a loss of fundamental rights, in prisons, Mexico became an exception, where the renunciation of their most important obligations.

There is more Puczan in Mexico than the correction tool, is the embodiment of punishment as revenge. The punitive discourse based on criminal populism nourishes the idea that the offender is an irreconcilable enemy with society, a threat that should be neutralized from a restriction, if possible, without taking into account, not considering that crime is a complex phenomenon in which The definition of sociocultural and economic factors affect a very relevant method, such as inequality, lack of opportunities and violence and structural marginalization.

On the other hand, disproportionate fines and inhuman conditions of solitude reflect the absence of a criterion of proportionality in Mexican criminal justice. Unlike advanced legal systems, where the sanction is determined in accordance with the damage and the possibility of rehabilitation of the offender, in Mexico, prison punishment is in itself, devoid of all civilizational rationality. It does not matter whether this person has committed a slight crime or a serious crime: once inside, the prison acts as a black hole, which absorbs what is the possibility of processing in a minimum normality in social space.

Thus, one of the most alarming aspects of the Mexican prison system is control that organized crime in prisons. For decades, the prison ceased to be places for a full domain of state sovereignty in order to become criminal enclaves, where criminal organizations establish their own rules. This leads to the Kvot collection for prisoners, privileged access to drugs and weapons for certain groups and perpetuating the hierarchy of power, which supports the most vulnerable in modern slavery.

Not guaranteeing safety and order, the prison authorities became passive accomplices of this reality. In many cases, prison are simple administrators of the regime imposed by criminal groups. This “seizure of this area of ​​the state” for organized crime not only is an institutional failure of huge proportions, but also undermines the likelihood that the prison can perform any rehabilitation function.

In short, we can say that the Mexican prison system is an exception zone where the law is supplanted arbitrariness, crime and violence. While in European prisons were conceived as the expansion of the state of universal well -being, in Mexico they are the remnants of the archaic and dysfunctional model of punishment. It is extremely important that the state takes responsibility for the transformation of the prison system from the point of view of human rights, guaranteeing decent conditions, eliminating corruption and resumption of control over solitude centers.

Reforming the prison system is not an act of indulgence with offenders, but an indispensable measure for social security and stability. Justice cannot be reduced to revenge. He should strive for rehabilitation, reintegration and, above all, crime prevention. While Mexico does not reform his penitentiary system, the prison will continue to remain a device for perpetuating violence, the space where the state fails, and crime will win.

Source: Aristegui Noticias

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