Review of Mariona ... live there

Abstract

All civilized societies have prisons; they are a “necessity.” In developed countries, prisons are better structured to comply with their intended purposes: to reeducate criminals or to make them pay their crimes with a lot of restrictions, sometimes serving long sentences, and sometimes even paying with their lives, depending on the seriousness of their crimes. In fact, the amount of criminals is proportional to the amount of people in the big populations they come from.
The conditions of prisons in “developing countries” are precarious; some lack programs that can help some inmates transfer to probation, or to help those who have finished with their sentences to be reintegrated into society with the certainty that they will not break the law again, or hurt people, generally speaking. Of course, global statistics will always reflect a considerable percent of people who have made mistakes, whether consciously or unconsciously, and who have been able to reconstruct their lives for their own benefit, that of their families and that of society in general.
The Salvadoran prison system houses thousands of inmates, including women - which is a matter of its own. According to the Instituto Latinoamericano de las Naciones Unidas para la Prevención del Delito y Tratamiento del Delincuente, El Salvador is one of the countries with the largest percentages of overcrowding [248%] (La Prensa Gráfca, June 17, 2017).
The Constitution of the Republic of El Salvador establishes in Art. 27 that “The State shall organize prisons with the purpose of correcting criminals; to educate them;” this makes reference to centers of different types all over the country. In this sense, they have been changing with time and some positive advances have been made. For instance, the once general director said that “the rehabilitation program I Change has become a model for the administration of prisons,” (www. presidencia.gob.sv, April 8, 2015). This includes the use of other measures including the creation of farms and the celebration of some cultural events. The last report from the General Direction of Prisons in El Salvador includes the opening of the Penitentiary Unit for Human Rights and the Penitentiary Information Office.

Keywords: Testimony, Prison, Solidarity, Despair, Impotence, Abandonment, Literature, Rehabilitation.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.5377/koot.v0i10.6708
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/11298/794