Word: prison
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...Venezuelan prisons are notoriously violent, and news of riots is common in the local press. Last January, 16 inmates at the Uribana prison were hanged, killed and stabbed to death as rival gangs battled for control. Inmates often rebel or go on hunger strikes to protest long procedural delays that leave them locked up for years before they're given a sentence. The Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a Caracas-based NGO, says that the country's jail system has the worst homicide rate in Latin America, calculating that 22 of every 1,000 inmates died violently...
...Interior Ministry rejects those numbers. "I doubt the scientific rigor of such an alarming rate," Fabricio Perez, general director for custody and rehabilitation at the ministry, told TIME. His colleague, deputy interior minister Ricardo Jimenez Dan, took aim at the director of the NGO, Humberto Prado, a former prison director under a previous government. "It would seem that the drama that our jails are living is the only way of life and sustenance that he has," the deputy minister said...
...Perez maintains that human rights conditions in jails are better now than before President Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998. But he was unable to produce official statistics on prison homicides. He said the state has a comprehensive plan for the prison system that includes training new prison staff, providing new equipment, and building 14 new jails to reduce overcrowding - construction on the first three is already under way, he says. But the dire conditions in a prison system that now houses many Europeans has prompted the European Commission to looking into funding a program to rebuild prisons...
...conditions are more tolerable. There, inmates can have access, for a price, even to such luxuries as Direct TV or an Xbox. Some install kitchens in their rooms and pay someone to bring food from outside, so as to avoid the sardines and third-grade meat served in the prison. Funds come from prisoners' families and, in some cases, taxpayers' money in their home countries...
...Many of the foreign inmates are awaiting repatriation to their home countries, under bilateral prison transfer agreements. But their departure requires the necessary paperwork to be completed by the notoriously slow Venezuelan bureaucracy. "Obviously if you've got people being killed all the time, you want the prison transfer agreement to work," a consular official at one embassy said...