The Minister of Justice of Peru, Ernesto Álvarez, defended this Tuesday the implementation of new prisons inspired by the model of El Salvador, within the package of measures that the future Government of Keiko Fujimori is studying to tackle overcrowding in prisons and reinforce citizen security.
In statements to the Andina news agency, Álvarez detailed that his proposal involves building "hangar-type prisons, following the model of El Salvador," but not intended for high-risk inmates, rather for those who do not pose a "social danger."
"Those people should go to a minimum-security prison to be able to work during the day (...) to reduce their own sentence through penitentiary benefits and have a job opportunity afterward. The large prisons, those that have already been built to have high-level security, should indeed house those criminals who committed violent crimes," he said.
The Justice Minister emphasized that inmates classified as high-risk "should not have any type of penitentiary benefit" and that they must be subjected to "extremely strict regimes" in which all visits are "severely" limited.
"Those people who have shown that they do not deserve to continue living in community, in Peruvian society, must have severe restrictions to effectively separate the non-violent from the violent, which is not happening in prisons currently," he argued during the interview.
Álvarez also pointed out that "we also have offers from some regional governors to build a prison in remote areas of the city, but there is a curious case: in many cities, greater citizen security is demanded, but at the same time, there is a reluctance to have a prison in the region. It is a contradiction."
In this line, he stressed that "the wave of crime" makes it necessary "to have many more" penitentiary establishments, both for "first-time offenders and for dangerous offenders." He recalled that "we have the land and the prison in Ica, which is the second prison that Ica will have. We are politically working on the possibility of expanding some high-security prisons," he asserted.
Later, he indicated that "in the future it is possible that we can build other prisons, even with help and technology from abroad, but it would be an act of populism to say that Chalapalca is going to be abandoned. On the contrary, we need more Chalapalcas. We must look for where and under what conditions," he added, referring to the maximum security prison located in the province of Tarata, in the department of Tacna.
The minister has also raised the need to introduce changes in the Criminal Procedure Code and in the National Penitentiary Institute (INPE) as a structure. "This is a chain where we are going to influence with legislative decrees to try to modify the current situation," he explained during the interview.