The Ones the Bolivarian Revolution Left Behind

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez declared the other day that Venezuela’s prisons need an overhaul. A case of the Bolivarian government seeing a developing problem and reacting to it? Hardly. At the least, there is certainly nothing proactive about the idea that the country’s prison system requires attention. Venezuelan prisons have been a human rights disaster for many years, and a serious and sustained government response is long overdue.

As far back as 1997, the year before President Chávez was first elected president, Human Rights Watch was calling attention to the inhumanity of Venezuela’s prison system. Eleven years later, things are much worse. Whereas in 1996, 207 prisoners were killed out of an inmate population of 24,000, by 2007 the number of deaths had risen to an astonishing 498 out of 21,000 – over 2 percent of all inmates, not to mention the over 1,000 other injuries. The 2 percent figure is truly incredible. Put in the generally used terms for homicides, it equals an incredible 2371 deaths per 100,000 inmates. Contrast that to the Venezuelan murder rate – one of the world’s highest – which at a mere 45 per 100,000 makes the country as a whole a veritable Sweden in comparison to what prisoners face. Add in the severe shortages of food and health supplies and the scale of the problem begins to come into focus. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that a majority of Venezuelan prisoners have not even been convicted of crimes but rather are held in pretrial detention, often for years, as acknowledged by the president himself.

The tremendous injustice of this situation is evident. In addition, as previously discussed in this post, it has broader governance implications. Most prisoners are still eventually released, and the more hardened they become while inside, the more likely that they will continue their criminal ways once they have reentered society. In Venezuela, where a majority of the population considers crime the country’s most pressing problem, this has dire implications.

This issue is an example of the type of governance failure for which, after ten years in power, the Chávez administration bears a substantial portion of the blame. (For a bizarre alternative explanation, see this post and the Spanish-language article on which it is based). Given the preexisting rot, it is unlikely that the prisons could have become a model within a decade, but it is clearly sufficient time to forge new strategies. Nonetheless, few major undertakings have occurred. A few new facilities have been built, the country’s vaunted orchestral training system has entered the prisons, and there has been some talk of adding “humanist” elements, but results have yet to be seen. Indeed, Chavez’s announcement that an overhaul is required, as if the worsening of the problem has not been utterly apparent for many years, is somewhat insulting to the families of the victims. Prisons are not the most glamorous issue, and prisoners are not the most sympathetic victims in any society where injustice remains prevalent. But it is precisely the inability to solve real problems – whether crime, traffic, garbage, or something seemingly remote like prison violence – that has led to signs over the last year of increasing vulnerability in the Chávez administration.