Monday, August 24, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
HUMAN RIGHTS-HONDURAS: Prison Means Long Stay for Inmates
Thelma Mejia
- Prisoners held in the 24 jails in Honduras face an uncertain length of stay, almost mounting to a life on “death row”, because of overcrowding and court delays in trials and sentencing, the Justice Ministry admits.
Official records state that of 8,662 criminal cases before the courts, only 801 have been concluded.
Gladys Caballero, viceminister of justice in Honduras, told IPS that while there is no death penalty in Honduras, “the prisoners are already living on a kind of death row.”
As an example, she cited cases where a person spent 18 years in prison without trial and “then suddenly the judge gives him a sentence of nine years more, on top of the 18 he has already done.”
“For us, that is incredible, because while these people committed some crime, they are human beings whose human rights should be respected,” she added.
In an effort to correct this situation, the Ministry of Interior and Justice petitioned Congress to free those prisoners who have already spent more time in prison while awaiting trial and sentencing than the maximum possible penalty for their alleged crimse.
The proposal, however, went nowhere.
According to Caballero, Congress has a strong aversion against anyone charged with a criminal offence “because they have no idea how they live, what their daily life is like.”
Some sense of Honduran prison conditions can be found in the Tegucigalpa Central Penitentiary, in the capital, and the Choluteca Prison, in the south of the country.
Built in 1882, the Central Penitentiary now has 3,000 inmates, far beyomng the center’s estimated capacity of 400. Prison food is budgetted at 5 U.S. cents per serving – and there are no plates.
In Choluteca, where the climate is particularly hot, prisoners are taken out to the prison yard to sleep, due to overcrowding inside.
For each 100 prisoners there is only one guard, earning a monthly salary of 58 dollars. The guard is equipped with a World War II-era weapon, and receives four rounds of ammunition each month.
“The prisoners don’t leave because they don’t want to, the vigilance is symbolic, since these weapons are cast-offs from the Armed Forces. The guards are obviously unable to provide effective human security,” Caballero remarked.
Interior Ministry officials revealed that when two inmates recently escaped from Choluteca Prison, two guards were unable to stop them because one had a broken weapon and the other’s bullets misfired.
Supreme Court Justice Rigoberto Espinal Irias says that law enforcement is certainly the “Achilles’ heel of Honduras.”
Espinal Irias said that the plight of prisoners in jails here was symptomatic of the general situation, because “in a society suffering desperate unemployment, hunger and poverty, justice is like a glass of water in the desert.”
While legal services that would “require a change in mentality and constitutional reforms, so that judges would no longer kow-tow to economic and political power, as many do now,” he said.
The judge said that there is concern in the Judiciary to resolve the prisoners’ situation, because far from being rehabilitated the system is “training professional criminals.”
His concern was shared by authorities from the Interior and Justice Ministry who claim that Honduran prisons are not centers for rehabilitation but “crime schools” that threaten to weaken society even more.
The judiciary and the penitentiary system were the themes of a recent seminal convened by the United Nations’ University for Peace, headquartered in Costa Rica, which is establishing a cultural program for peace and democracy throughout Central America.
Print
|
HUMAN RIGHTS-HONDURAS: Prison Means Long Stay for Inmates
Thelma Mejia
- Prisoners held in the 24 jails in Honduras face an uncertain length of stay, almost mounting to a life on “death row”, because of overcrowding and court delays in trials and sentencing, the Justice Ministry admits.
(more…)
Print
|
