By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS – The government is studying plans to release about 30 percent of inmates from Venezuela’s badly overcrowded and highly violent jails under a new Penitentionary Code recently approved by the National Assembly.

The system is creaking badly as the number of prisoners continues to rise in a system of jails that was never built to accommodate the number of people currently being held behind bars in one capacity or another.

According to National Assembly Deputy Pedro Infante, the prison population stood at 27,889 at the latest count. Critics of the system say installed capacity is sufficient to accommodate perhaps half that number at best.

Tales of small cells for two crammed with four or even five jailbirds have been legion for quite some years. Unsurprisingly, the crowding adds to the tensions that are never far below the surface among men thrown together in close proximity in a hostile environment.

“It’s a recipe for territorialism,” said one ageing guy who finally went straight after a last grim stretch in La Planta, a sinister, square monument to incarceration in west Caracas. “There are turf battles all the time, the barons battle each other. There’s no respite for anybody who just wants to do their time in peace and quiet, without trouble, and get out as soon as possible.”

Bullying and badgering behind bars – and the exchange, voluntary or not, of sexual favors for some sort of protection – is a commonplace to the tougher institutions in prison systems around the world. But one difference in Venezuela is the range of weaponry available to prisoners.

There are the usual baseball bats and home-made knives turned out in workshops or stolen from kitchens. But some prisoners here somehow manage to get their hands on handguns. Several shoot-outs inside prisons have been reported during the last year.

All the more bizarre, there are said even to have been cases of prisoners throwing hand grenades and wielding machine guns in violent exchanges as rival gangs fight for control of floors and blocks.

Unsurprisingly, questions hover over the National Guard, which is in control of security at prisons. It’s asked why the guardsmen seem unable to prevent the flow of firearms into prisons.

And in a society that’s prone to suspicion, it’s suggested corrupt guardsmen may be behind this clearly illegal traffic, along with the supply of drugs and drink to bad guys with connections on the outside.

The government insists that it intends to install a “more humane” and aimed more at rehabilitation rather than punishment. But it’s difficult to see how such laudable aspirations can come even close to achievement in the present circumstances.

Given that the government doesn’t issue regular statistics for crime in what passes for lawful society on the outside, it’s no surprise that there are no official figures about what goes on inside prisons. The Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a non-government organization, tries to fill the gap, but is hardly in a position to provide up-to-the-minute data.

Between January and October last year, the Observatory counted 320 murdered prisoners. That compared with 498 for all of 2007. Rough estimates are that the toll for both 2008 and 2009 may well match that before the count for each year is made.

There have been several outbreaks of violence on a scale that might be deemed of heroic proportions in other circumstances. For instance, on August 18 last, eight inmates met their maker in a massive brawl at Vista Hermosa (Beautiful View) prison in Bolívar state.

Bolívar is not regarded as a particularly violent jail. The Rodeo I and II complex outside Caracas in Miranda state, Yare I and II and the federal jail in Carabobo state all have worse reputations for jungle law at its worst.

The government repeatedly insists that its aim is to build a “more humane” prison system better geared to rehabilitation. Critics claim this is not reflected in the design of two new prisons now under construction in the country. “It’s the same old containment pattern,” said one skeptic, “walls and fences everywhere.”

The idea of releasing almost a third of the prison population has been under study for the last three months. Infante, who sits on the prisons and punishment committee at the Assembly, said he expected President Hugo Chávez would shortly sign it on to the statute book.

From then, Infante added, selected prisoners – and it would appear, many of them have already been picked – would be released on parole. Others would go into a partial form of release, moving out of proper jail into so-called “penitentionary communities.”

Three pilot centers outside the Rodeo and Yare complexes and in Carabobo are ready to blaze the trail. Fifteen more are planned around the country.

Just who gets to live on the semi-outside remains to be seen. By no means are all the people in being held in custody are actually serving sentences. Rough estimates are that about half the prison population is made up of people on remand awaiting trial.

While some of these are villainous individuals whose records suggest a menace to society as a whole and potential trial witnesses in particular, other detainees are said to be facing the possibility of being found guilty for the first time in their lives.

It’s argued that the nub of this particular problem is not insufficient space at prisons but the snail-like pace of the judiciary system in Venezuela. Infante conceded the point but evidently didn’t know the answer.

All this said, law-and-order hardliners view the early or partial release scheme with suspicion. They tend to view it as an attempt to alleviate pressure in prison space through the simple expedient of releasing as many inmates as possible, regardless of the consequences.

This is not the first time that the government has opted to free thousands of prisoners. In President Hugo Chávez’ first year in power, 1999, the prison population numbered 22,915. A year after, the comparable figure was down to 14,196.

Critics point out that the crime rate shot out during the early years of this decade, to the point that a hundred murders a weekend became not that unusual in Caracas. The implication of this is that too many recidivists were released.

The argument is that the wrong people were let out, and it goes like this: no sooner where they out, but they were at it again, and quickly back inside. Ergo, the prisoner figures subsequently went up all over again.

If the doubters have gotten it right, perhaps not all augers well for the new release policy. The number of prisoners is at its highest for years, and they claim the real reason for letting people out is to ease pressure on prisons before the system implodes in chaos and violence.

The penchant for protest would appear to be as common on the inside as it is on the outside. At times, it’s poor food or other inadequacies of life on the inside that are at issue, but by no means always.

Prisoners at the Tocorón jail in Aragua state went on strike last Monday to demand that the warden was dismissed following the death of a fellow inmate. Whether the dead man was a convict, and if so for what crime, or on remand, or whether a guard or an inmate was deemed responsible, wasn’t disclosed.