Venezuelan prisons are notoriously horrendous, not least because most of the inmates can spend months or years in prison before their case comes to trial (only to discover that they have already more than served their sentence). Of approximately 20,000 inmates, the majority have not had a trial, and some 300 die violently every year.

Article 272 of the 2000 Venezuelan Constitution reads as follows:

The State will guarantee a penal system which assures the rehabilitation of the inmate and respect for his or her human rights. Toward this end, penal establishments will include spaces for work, education, sports, and recreation; they will operate under the direction of professional penal professionals with academic university credentials, and will be governed by a decentralized administration, under the authority of state and municipal government, and may be subject to privatization. In general, it is preferred that these have the open regime and the character of agricultural penal colonies. In all cases, those formulas which fulfill penalties which do not deprive the inmate of freedom are preferable to those measures relying on imprisonment. The State will create the institutions necessary for post-penal assistance to make possible the social reinsertion of the ex-inmate and will aid the creation of a penal entity whose character is autonomous and with an exclusively technical personnel.

The best of constitutions still require legislation to take force, and the Chávez government (first elected in 1998) and National Assembly certainly got off to a slow start in the enforcement Article 272. It wouldn’t be until 2005 that the Ministry of the Interior and Justice got moving on inspections and prison reform, but after that point, it was decided that all relevant Bolivarian Missions would be immediately introduced into the prisons (e.g. health and education missions).

Cheat sheet: The Missions are the primary vehicle through which the Bolivarian government addresses the mose acute needs of the poor communities. The symbolism is religious, and Mission Christ—whose goal is the total elimination of poverty—is the aggregate of all other missions. A full list of active missions is available here.

More recently, the plans laid out in the constitution for the establishment of less restrictive penal colonies have been put into practice. One is confronted by various billboards and signs advertising the “humanization of the penal system,” through the establishment of the penal colony at Coro.

A document recently reprinted by Critical Resistance—an organization at the forefront of the movement for prison abolition—speaks of how to deal with the few who need to be restrained. The document speaks of “the establishment of a procedure for vigilance and assessment with the objective of elaborating the least restrictive and most compassionate option, and for the shortest period of time possible.” (“Diminishing/Dismantling the Prison System”).

This leaves quite a lot of leeway regarding what counts as moving toward abolition. Is a “humanized” penal colony a significant step, or a necessarily reformist gesture? What are the limits of “compassion” as a criterion more generally? What remains certain is that the Venezuelan prison system falls pitifully short on the criterion of restricting prison to the “few” and for the “shortest period of time possible,” but paradoxically, the best way to address this (at least the latter) would be a streamlining of the “justice” system and the efficiency of the courts, which could very well entail a strengthing of the prison structure that remains.