Colombian Jails Will Now Allow Cell Phone Service To Prisoners

In no more than six months, the Colombian National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (INPEC) and the Ministry of Technologies for Information and Communication will have to adapt their current telephone system to new standards. The Constitutional Court has ordered the country’s government to implement an accessible cell phone system in all of the country’s prisons and that its attainable for interns.

The plan is that interns can receive phone calls, something that they currently can’t and that it is affordable to their economy, that has good service and that they are monitored in order to avoid their use for committing crimes. The inwards already use cell phones that they receive through irregular ways, mostly because the phone cards that they sell inside the prisons are too expensive and have limited minutes on them.

The Court also ordered both entities to take precautionary measures to avoid the recurrent abuses perpetrated inside the prisons. “Pre-paid telephone cards have become the currency that circulates inside our country’s jails and these are used to pay for extorsions and establishes a commerce system that encourages corruption and illegality, which attempts against the goals for which the criminal sanction was imposed in the first place and it augments the risks against the inwards lives and integrity.”

The High Court also proved that “Restriction of a prisoner’s right to communication with the outside world and particularly with their family members is the result of the high cost of the telephone services that are destined to them, especially for their inability to receive phone calls.”

The Court also suggested to the government that it reaches out to the Minister of-of Technologies for Information and Communication in the Criminal Policy Council so he can participate in the construction of penitentiary policy and ordered the Council and INPEC to implement a “pilot model of internet access or other means of communications that contribute to making the communication of the prisoners with their families and outside world more efficient.”

It was pointed out by the Court that even if a detained person does lose some of his rights, the right for communication can only be restricted to some extent, but definitely not suspended in its entirety for it is key to the resocialization of the prisoner and denying it would be qualified as “inhumane and cruel treatment.”

Article inspired by Deborondo // Cárceles de Colombia tendrían celulares e Internet por orden de la Corte Constitucional