Thursday, December 29, 2022 | 10:45 a.m.
Paraguay has 16,536 prisoners, of which only 32% have a firm sentence and the remaining 68% are in pretrial detention, according to the results of the 2022 report of the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture (MNP), which also warned about the situation of overcrowding in prisons.
In its 2022 Statistical Yearbook of Persons Deprived of Liberty, the MNP highlights that number of inmates as of last October 31, and a constant rise in the number of prisoners.
“There is a constant increase in the population, with a permanence of the institutions that are used for confinement: abuse of preventive detention,” says the report.
It reports that in 2013, when the NPM was created, there was a population of 9,300 people deprived of liberty and an increase per year of around 1,000 people is recorded.
Only this year and until October, 1,400 people had entered the prison system, partly because “the policy of response that is being given to criminal conflict is confinement, which worries the NPM.”
For the organization, the prisons are going through an overcrowded situation because the system would be prepared to house only 4,310 prisoners, 12,428 fewer people than are currently imprisoned.
The abuse of pretrial detention
The five prisons with the highest overcrowding rate are the Tacumbú National Penitentiary, the Ciudad del Este prison, Emboscada, San Pedro and Villarrica.
The report details that 87.88% of the adolescents locked up are in pretrial detention and only 12.12% have a definitive measure.
“Pretrial detention is being used very frequently and disproportionately with the adolescent population,” he describes, in addition to noting, that the age at which adolescents come into conflict with the law to a greater extent is 17 years.
The document warns that the lack of data registration of the indigenous population” deprived of liberty constitutes “a serious problem” and that the State “does not know to which ethnic group 69% of the indigenous population belongs.” There are 123 older people and six adolescents from original towns in prison.
As for women, there are 757 deprived of their liberty, and for the NPM, “the presence of women in men’s prison wards, where they are not a priority in the management of the prison, continues to be a permanent concern.”
