Nearly 29 years after the demise of the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, successive democratic governments have failed to find a humane way of running the prison system. Preventable deaths, torture and appalling conditions for inmates continue to be reported.
"Practices rooted in the dictatorship are still
going on in prisons, such as torture, abuse and other mistreatment which must
be eradicated," Paula Litvachky, a lawyer for the Centre for Legal and
Social Studies (CELS), told IPS.
Of course, there is no real "continuity" with
the seven-year regime that kidnapped, tortured and forcibly disappeared
thousands of people, but abuses persist in prisons due to complicity,
indifference and lack of accountability and oversight, she said.
Litvachky, head of the justice and security department of
CELS, is a co-author of the chapter on prisons in the report titled
"Derechos Humanos en Argentina Informe 2012" (Human Rights in
Argentina: 2012 Report), presented this month by the NGO.
The
chapter, "El modelo de la prisión-depósito. Medidas urgentes en los
lugares de detención en la Argentina" (The Prison as Warehouse: Urgent steps
for detention centres in Argentina), describes cases of humiliating treatment,
torture, beatings, arbitrary transfers, excessive punishment, lack of hygiene
and lack of access to healthcare.
In this scenario, CELS censures political and judicial authorities
for denying the problem and turning a blind eye, and criticises "public
indifference" to the serious violations of human rights that occur behind
bars.
There is structural deprivation of detainees' rights, not
only because of the high level of violence and preventable deaths in prison but
also because of deficiencies in healthcare, nutrition and hygiene, as well as
overcrowding, the report says.
CELS has long complained that some of the worst human
rights violations in the country take place in the Argentine prison system, and
especially in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, which holds 50 percent of
the total prison population.
In Buenos Aires, the most populous province, there were
over 29,000 people in late 2011 incarcerated in facilities designed to
accommodate only 18,640 inmates. According to the CELS report, overcrowding in
some prisons is so severe that there is only one bed for every three detainees,
who have to sleep in shifts.
And in even more extreme cases, convicts sleep on filthy
floors, amid nauseating odours, with no water in their cells. In addition, they
have no access to healthcare or medicines, and are fed inadequate rations of
nutritionally deficient food.
In addition to these structural failings, arbitrary
treatment and abuse is handed out to prisoners as well as their visiting
relatives, to the point that visitors may be forced to strip and undergo body
searches. Because of this humiliating treatment, some inmates forgo visits from
family members.
Some of the torture methods are the same as those
formerly used by the dictatorship on political prisoners, like the
"submarine", the practice of submerging the victim's head in water to
produce a near-death experience.
Prisoners have also reported being forced to take
ice-cold showers, receiving beatings with batons or hoses, and being forced to
run through the yard naked. Others have testified to being tortured with electric
prods on the genitals and other parts of the body.
In Litvachky's view, the Argentine Senate should urgently
ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which has already been approved
by the lower house of Congress.
The Provincial Commission for Memory, a body of the
provincial government of Buenos Aires, has received 235 complaints of torture
in prisons, but only 21 of the victims have testified in court due to fear of
reprisals, the report says.
In Unit 51 "Magdalena", a women's prison in the
city of Mercedes in Buenos Aires province, an inmate suffered a miscarriage
after a brutal beating meted out as punishment by a prison guard, according to
a complaint in the CELS report.
There have been cases of people being confined in
isolation for weeks, although the rules only allow a maximum of 23 hours
solitary confinement. "Violent and invasive" body searches are
carried out, in which men and women prisoners are required to strip naked and
spread their buttocks apart for inspection.
The CELS study draws attention to "the
extraordinarily high frequency" of fires in prisons leading to fatalities
among prisoners, as well as the large number of suicides and violent deaths
attributed to fights between inmates.
"The prison staff decides whether inmates can have
visits or make phone calls," the report says. The guards "destroy
inmates' personal property," deny them transport to hospital, and
arbitrarily transfer them between prison facilities, it adds.
There are also reports of corruption and theft on the
part of prison staff, drug trafficking within the prison, arms being smuggled
in to inmates, and even cases of prisoners being forced by the guards to make
armed sorties to commit crimes.
The denunciations in the CELS study are consistent with
the findings of the Report on Human Rights of Persons Deprived of Liberty in
the Americas, presented this month by the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR).
The IACHR, which is part of the human rights system of
the Organisation of American States, documents "the high incidence of
prison violence" in the region's detention centres, which it describes as
"areas that go unmonitored and lack oversight, in which arbitrariness and
corruption have prevailed," as well as the practice of torture.
Livatchky said that in Argentina, concern is primarily
focused on the conditions faced by inmates in the province of Buenos Aires,
where high levels of violence persist amidst a lack of oversight and controls.
"We need a sustained policy to reform and oversee
the prison system," said the CELS lawyer. "This is a huge shortcoming
of the democratic system."
In CELS' view, the prison service should be
demilitarised, and a serious debate should be held on the real purpose of the
prison system.
So far, some officials and judges committed to change
have raised their voices, but only as isolated individuals, Livatchky said.
"Overall, the response is inadequate, and reports of
torture are not declining. Serious investigations are needed, to send a strong
signal that such practices are no longer tolerated," she said.