“There are 15,000 people deprived of liberty who do not have a sentence, which represents almost 40% of the prison universe,” Garzón explained, in a presentation before the National Assembly (AN, Parliament).
Garzón took office last week, the same day that a massacre originated in a fight between gangs in the Litoral Penitentiary, in the port city of Guayaquil, left 119 inmates murdered.
According to the head of the SNAI, Ecuador’s prisons have capacity for 30,196 people, so there is 26% overcrowding in the prison system, although each prison has its own characteristics.
According to official data, there is also a deficit in the prison surveillance and security corps, said a dispatch from the Sputnik agency.
Garzón warned that there is not a sufficient number of judges to process prison cases, so at the moment there are about 5,000 backlog files.
After revealing these figures, Garzón demanded that the National Assembly work on a Social Rehabilitation Law because the prison system is governed by the rules of the Comprehensive Organic Penal Code (COIP), which only refers to the punitive part and leaves out rehabilitation of the prisoners.
After the massacre, the government of Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency throughout the prison system, and launched a plan of measures to improve the situation in the prisons.
The program includes reinforcing controls to avoid weapons in prisons, promoting new constructions to avoid overcrowding, pardoning the elderly, women, people with disabilities and the terminally ill, and repatriating foreign prisoners.
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