Ecuador's military was sent last month to take control of the country's prisons after two major gang leaders escaped and criminal groups quickly sparked a nationwide uprising that paralyzed the country.

In Brazil, two prisoners with ties to a major gang were caught last week the first to escape From one of the nation's five maximum-security federal prisons, officials said.

Officials in Colombia declared a state of emergency in prisons after two guards were killed and several others targeted in what the government said was retaliation for a crackdown on major criminal groups.

In prisons across Latin America, criminal groups exercise unchallenged authority over inmates and extract money from them to purchase protection or basic necessities such as food.

The prisons also act as a kind of safe haven for incarcerated criminal leaders to run their criminal enterprises from a distance, ordering assassinations, orchestrating the smuggling of drugs into the United States and Europe, and directing kidnappings and extortion of local businesses.

When officials try to limit the power criminal groups wield behind bars, their leaders often deploy outside members to push back.

“The main center of gravity, the hub of control of organized crime, is within the prison complexes,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of Ecuadorian military intelligence, and a security analyst.

“That's where, let's say, the management positions are, the command positions,” he added. “It's where they give orders and dispensations to gangs to terrorize the country.”

Latin America's prison population has exploded over the past two decades, driven by tougher crime measures such as pretrial detention, but governments across the region have not spent enough to deal with the surge and have instead often left control to inmates, say experts in the field of criminal justice systems.

Those sent to prison often have only one choice: join a gang or face their wrath.

As a result, prisons have become crucial recruitment centers for Latin America's largest and most violent cartels and gangs, strengthening rather than weakening their hold on society.

Prison officials, who are underfunded, outnumbered, overwhelmed and often paid off, have largely caved to gang leaders in many prisons in exchange for a fragile peace.

Criminal groups fully or partially control more than half of Mexico's 285 prisons, according to experts, while in Brazil the government often divides penitentiaries based on gang ties in an effort to prevent unrest. In Ecuador, experts say most of the country's 36 prisons are under some degree of gang control.

“The gang solves a problem for the government,” said Benjamin Lessing, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies Latin American gangs and prisons. “This gives the gang a kind of power that is very difficult to measure, but also difficult to overestimate.”

The prison population in Latin America grew rapidly 76 percent between 2010 and 2020According to the Inter-American Development Bank, this is far greater than the region's 10 percent population growth over the same period.

Many countries have imposed stricter public order policies, among others longer sentences And more convictions for low-level drug crimescausing most prisons in the region to exceed their maximum capacity.

At the same time, governments have prioritized investing in their security forces as a way to tackle crime and reach out to the public, rather than spending money on prisons, which are less visible.

Brazil and Mexico, Latin America's largest countries with the largest prisoner populations in the region, invest little in prisons: the Brazilian government spends about $14 per prisoner per day, while Mexico spends about $20. The United States spent approx $117 per inmate per day in 2022. Prison guards in Latin America also earn meager salaries, making them susceptible to bribes from gangs to smuggle in contraband or help high-profile prisoners escape.

Federal officials in Brazil and Ecuador did not respond to requests for comment, while federal officials in Mexico declined. In general, federal prisons in Mexico and Brazil have better funding and better conditions than their state prison counterparts.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which runs some of Brazil's most notorious prisons, said in a statement that it has been separating prisoners based on their gang membership for decades “to ensure their physical safety,” and that this practice, according to the Brazilian law is allowed.

Underscoring the power of prison gangs, some leaders of criminal groups live in relative comfort behind bars, running supermarkets, cockfights and nightclubs, sometimes smuggling their families in to live with them.

Ecuador's prisons, experts say, are a textbook example of the problems facing Latin America's penal systems and how difficult they can be to address.

The January riots broke out after Ecuador's recently elected president took steps to tighten security in prisons after an investigation by the attorney general revealed how an imprisoned gang leader, enriched through cocaine trafficking, controlled judges, police officers, prison guards and had corrupted even the former. head of the prison system.

The president, Daniel Noboa, planned to transfer several gang leaders to a high-security facility, which would make it more difficult for them to carry out their illegal activities.

But those plans leaked to gang leaders and one of them went missing from a sprawling prison complex.

A search for the leader in prison sparked riots in the country's prisons, with dozens of inmates escaping, including the head of another powerful gang.

Gangs also ordered members to attack from outside, experts said. They kidnapped police officers, burned cars, detonated explosives and briefly seized a major television station.

Mr. Noboa responded by declaring an internal armed conflict and allowing the military to attack gangs in the streets and storm prisons. According to the military and videos on social media, prisoners in at least one prison were stripped to their underwear and had their belongings confiscated and burned.

The scenes were reminiscent of those in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 to tackle gang violence. About 75,000 people have been jailed, many without fair trials, according to human rights groups.

Two percent of Salvadorans are incarcerated, the highest rate of any country in the world, the newspaper said World Prison Letter, a database compiled by Birkbeck, University of London.

Mr. Bukele's tactics decimated the Central American country's street gangs, undoing years of horrific violence and helping him to a second term.

But experts say thousands of innocent people have been locked up.

“What consequences does this have?” said Carlos Ponce, an expert on El Salvador and assistant professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada. “This will scar them and their families for life.”

The extensive use of pre-trial detention across the region to fight crime has left many people in jail for months or even years awaiting trial, human rights groups say. This practice has hit particularly hard the poorest, who cannot afford lawyers and face a tortoise-like legal system with cases that have been backed for years.

In the first seven months of the state of emergency in El Salvador 84 percent of all those arrested were present pre-trial detention and almost half of Mexico's prison population is still awaiting trial.

“Prisons can be defined as centers of exploitation for poor people,” said Elena Azaola, a Mexican scholar who has studied the country's prison system for 30 years.

“Some have spent ten or twenty years in prison without trial,” she added. “Many leave worse than when they came in.”

In some Latin American countries, prisons are to some extent a revolving door.

About 40 percent of the prisoners in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile are released only to be imprisoned again. Although the recidivism rate is much higher in the United States, in Latin America many people locked up for minor, sometimes non-violent crimes go on to commit more serious crimes, experts say, largely because petty criminals share prison with more serious ones. perpetrators.

Both of Brazil's largest gangs – the Red Commando and the First Capital Commando – actually started in prisons, which remain their centers of power.

Jefferson Quirino, a former gang member who completed five separate detentions in Rio prisons, says gangs controlled every prison he was in. In some cases, inmates often focused on running gang businesses outside the prison using the numerous cellphones they sneaked in, often with the help of guards who were bribed.

The gangs have such influence in Brazil's prisons, where authorities themselves often divide prisons based on gang membership, that officials force new inmates to choose a side to limit violence.

“The first question they ask you is, 'What gang do you belong to?'” said Mr. Quirino, who runs a program that helps keep poor children out of gangs. “In other words, they have to understand where to place you within the system, or you will die.”

That has helped criminal groups grow their ranks.

“The prison functions as a space for labor recruitment,” said Jacqueline Muniz, Rio de Janeiro's former security chief.

“And for building loyalty among your criminal workforce.”

Reporting was contributed by Emiliano Rodríguez Mega of Mexico City; José María León Cabrera from Quito, Ecuador; Thalíe Ponce from Guayaquil, Ecuador; Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá, Colombia; and Laurence Blair from Asuncion, Paraguay.

New York State's Department of Corrections would have the power to remove abusive guards from its prisons under a bill introduced Monday.

Currently, the commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision does not have the final authority to fire guards accused of serious misconduct and often must defer to outside arbitrators who determine disciplinary outcomes. But the bill, introduced by Sen. Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat, would give the commissioner the final say in such cases.

In a memo accompanying her bill, Ms. Salazar, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Correction, said she drafted the legislation in response to an investigation by The Marshall Project, published last year in collaboration with The New York Times . . The investigation found that New York's prison department often tried but failed to fire corrections officers accused of abuse or of attempting to cover it up. The articles, Ms. Salazar wrote in the memo, “painted a grim picture of a staff disciplinary system that is essentially completely broken and ineffective.”

Drawing on a previously secret state database The study, obtained by the Marshall Project, found that in more than 290 cases over 12 years, New York's prison department tried to fire guards accused of abusing inmates or trying to cover up abuse, but only succeeded to fire 10 percent of those officers.

The current disciplinary system “often allows corrections officers to commit serious abuses with impunity,” Ms. Salazar said in a statement.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, the corrections department and the correctional officers union declined to discuss the legislation. Ms Hochul and the union's leaders are negotiating a new contract.

Many of the officers fired since 2010 turned to private arbitrators, who reinstated three out of four guards fired for or covering up abuse. Found the Marshall Project.

Under the proposed bill, arbitrators would no longer decide cases of serious misconduct, including excessive force, smuggling of contraband or sexual abuse of prisoners. Instead, a hearing officer selected by the commissioner would consider the evidence from the department and the employee union and then recommend any disciplinary action to the corrections commissioner, who would ultimately decide. Ms. Salazar's office said the hearing officer should not be a corrections department employee.

The current system, which has been part of the guards union's contract since 1972, gives the union and the prison system equal say in choosing an arbitrator. That means that “the union representing an accused officer essentially has veto power over the selection of the arbitrator for the case,” according to Ms. Salazar's memo.

Brian Fischer, the former corrections commissioner, praised the bill for drawing attention to the department's inability to fire abusive officers. He said the commissioner should have the final say on officer discipline, as is the practice of the New York State Troopers and the New York City Police Department.

“We are responsible for the safety of both the offender and the staff,” Mr Fischer said. “And if we don't have ultimate control, we're essentially left holding the bag.”

The Marshall Project investigation also found that in many cases of abuse, including attacks that killed or seriously injured inmates, the corrections department made no attempt to discipline officers at all. The report also revealed how guards often worked in groups to cover up attacks by lying to investigators and in official reports.

The bill would seek to break through this “blue wall,” Ms. Salazar said in her memo, by giving the commissioner the power to also fire officers who cover up excessive force by deliberately failing to report it or filing false reports.

Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit that oversees prisons, cited a recent lawsuit alleging torture in a state prison as another reason to pass the law. approve. The lawsuit said officers beat a group of men at one facility and alleged that two of the men were taken to a second prison — the Great Meadow Correctional Facility — and put under water, simulating drowning.

“Allegations of waterboarding at Great Meadow call for reform of the employee disciplinary system,” Ms. Scaife said in a statement. “The head of a state agency should simply have the power to fire anyone found guilty of misconduct.”

Chris Summers, president of the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, has previously defended the arbitration system.

“We have no influence on the decision the arbitrator makes,” he told The Marshall Project in December. “It is a system that is independent, fair and just.”

Ms. Salazar's bill is very similar to a 2018 proposal from former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The prison guards union fiercely opposed the measure, which failed to pass the Legislature.

Two inmates in upstate New York say they were brutally beaten by guards and taken to another facility to be waterboarded — a torture method once used by CIA interrogators on terrorism suspects, according to newly filed lawsuits.

Waterboarding gives victims the feeling of drowning. The events cited by the men in the lawsuits took place on October 7 at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Comstock, NY, more than 200 miles north of New York City.

One man, Charles Wright, 44, was taken to a room and forced to lie face up while chained to a bed, his lawsuit said. A guard placed a dirty cloth over his nose and mouth and poured water over it for 45 seconds; another guard stood by, the suit says.

The second man, Eugene Taylor, 32, was taken to a room where a guard – apparently the same one who put a cloth over Mr Wright’s mouth – placed a cloth around Mr Taylor’s face and repeatedly dunked his head in water while other guards stood around it, according to Mr. Taylor’s suit.

The men had been taken from the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, to Great Meadow, where dozens of other inmates were subjected to physical and psychological abuse during a weeklong lockdown and search in early October, according to a separate lawsuit by 44 inmates.

Corrections officers, including special teams from other prisons, gathered in the cells, punching and kicking inmates, slamming their faces into walls and twiddling their fingers, the lawsuit said, adding that the search was sparked by an inmate’s attack on a guard.

The lawsuits, recently filed in the state Court of Claims, come nearly a year after 26 inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., also filed suit, alleging officers there orchestrated abuse during a search of the entire institution in November 2022.

Bruce Barket, an attorney whose firm filed the Sing Sing lawsuit a year ago, said at the time that his firm had reported the allegations to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which he said was investigating with the FBI, which interviewed several people. of his company’s customers. He said the company was cooperating with the federal investigation.

“Given that the Department of Corrections administration apparently approved the brutality, it should come as no surprise that some guards escalated the abuse,” said Mr. Barket, whose firm also filed the lawsuits against Green Haven and Great Meadow tightened.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

Danielle Muscatello, one of the firm’s lawyers, said that when she interviewed Mr. Wright by phone last fall, he did not use the term waterboarding but described what had happened.

“It’s unbelievable that this would happen in our country, let alone New York State,” Ms. Muscatello said.

Thomas Mailey, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which runs the prisons, said the department has not seen the lawsuits and in any case “does not comment on potential or pending litigation.”

While allegations of cruelty in New York State prisons are not unusual, the allegation of waterboarding is.

Christopher Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said his office has received many letters from inmates, which are being read and followed carefully.

“While any atrocity is possible when it comes to New York prisons,” Mr. Dunn said, “we have received no reports of waterboarding.”

Matthew Raymond, an inmate at Auburn Correctional Facility, said in a federal lawsuit that in 2016 he was placed in handcuffs on a table, and a lieutenant held his head by his hair, pulled his shirt over his face and slowly poured water over his nose gutter. and mouth. “He felt like he was drowning and couldn’t catch his breath,” the lawsuit said.

The lieutenant denied the allegations and the lawsuit is pending, said Katie Rosenfeld, one of Mr. Raymond’s attorneys.

The waterboarding described by Mr. Wright and Mr. Taylor, both serving sentences for manslaughter, followed a lockdown in Green Haven and the deployment of special teams of officers, according to their lawsuits.

The state has 21 Corrections Emergency Response Teams, known as CERTs, which are based in correctional facilities and are used, among other things, to conduct searches.

In Green Haven, Mr. Wright’s lawsuit says, officers went to cells and beat select inmates. Officers instructed Mr. Wright to remove his underwear and slippers, place his hands behind his head and turn around. After he complied, an officer struck him in the back of the head, causing him to fall to the ground, the suit said. Officers sprayed pepper spray into his mouth and slammed his head into the floor and a toilet, the lawsuit said.

Mr. Wright’s lawsuit does not identify the guard he accuses of waterboarding him at Great Meadow, but describes him as white with a trimmed beard and mohawk haircut — similar to the description Mr. Taylor gives in his suit.

Mr. Taylor recalled in his lawsuit that after he was taken to Great Meadow, he saw five or six other Green Haven inmates, some of them crying.

Alain Delaqueriere research contributed.

Six former correctional officers at a West Virginia prison are facing federal charges in the death of an inmate who was attacked by a group of guards and died last year, the Justice Department said Thursday.

The inmate, Quantez Burks, 37, had been in the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver, W.Va., for less than a day on March 1, 2022, when he was beaten by a group of officers and died the same day, said Matt Harman, an attorney for Mr. Burks’ family.

According to the indictment, which identified Mr. Burks only by his initials, an officer called for help after Mr. Burks “attempted to push past a correctional officer” while walking from a jail pod to a hallway.

Mr. Burks was then taken by three officers to a “blind corner” in the jail that was not monitored by security cameras, according to charging documents. There they attacked him “in retaliation” for trying to get past the officer, prosectors said.

According to the criminal complaint, one of the officers, Mark Holdren, told the other officers to lie to investigators and say that Mr. Burks had had a heart attack and that he had fought with officers. He also told the officers not to tell investigators that he and other officers had assaulted Mr. Burks, prosecutors said.

Mr. Burks had been jailed after firing a gun on his property and charged with wanton endangerment and obstruction of justice, Mr. Harman said.

The six former correctional officers – Mr Holdren, 39; Cory Snyder, 29; Johnathan Walters, 35; Jacob Boothe, 25; Ashley Toney, 23; and Chad Lester, 33, a former lieutenant – were each charged with conspiracy to cover up the use of unlawful force by omitting material information, and they were individually charged with several counts of giving false and misleading information to investigators, they said federal prosecutors in one rack on Thursday.

Mr. Lester, along with Mr. Holdren, Mr. Snyder, Ms. Toney and Mr. Boothe, was also charged with making false statements to the FBI about Mr. Burks’ death.

Attorneys for the six former officers did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. It is unclear whether the officers were released from prison or resigned.

The main charges the former officers face carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The charges against the former officers on Thursday came after Southern Regional Jail came under scrutiny in a class-action lawsuit alleging that inmates at the jail were subjected to “inhumane” and “deplorable” treatment and conditions. According to federal court documents, that lawsuit is currently being resolved.

An initial autopsy on Mr. Burks conducted by the state concluded that he died of a heart attack, but members of his family later raised questions about his death when they saw his bruised and beaten body, Mr. Harman said. The family paid for a private autopsy, which found the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, neck, torso and extremities, as well as cardiovascular disease, Mr Harman said.

It is unclear whether the state has revised his initial autopsy. The West Virginia Medical Examiner’s Office did not immediately respond to a phone call Thursday.

“They beat this poor man to death,” Mr. Harman said, adding that the indictment was “an important step in finding out what really happened to Quantez and who is responsible.”

Mark Sorsaia, secretary of the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement Thursday that his office, the governor’s office and the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation had alerted federal authorities to Mr. Burks’ death and had assisted in the research.

“We will not tolerate any form of abuse against inmates housed in our state facilities,” he said.

Mr. Harman said he was “begging” West Virginia Governor Jim Justice to make public all documents and recordings related to Mr. Burks’ death.

As tempers flared recently in an entertainment district in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, Joanne Paikea sensed an altercation – or even an arrest – was brewing.

“Brother, you know the police are behind us,” she said, describing her efforts to calm rising tension between two groups. “So you’re going to listen, or you’re going to get arrested. It is your choice. What do you want? Go home and get food, or go to jail?’

Ms Paikea is a Maori warden, one of about 1,000 indigenous volunteers in New Zealand who serve the vulnerable, calm the afflicted and occasionally intervene with the violent, independently of – but in partnership with – the police.

The role of the police has recently come under scrutiny in New Zealand, where lurid crime stories have dominated headlines. Shootings, gang tensions and numerous ram raids – where miscreants rush into shops in cars to loot them – have roiled the peaceful country and become a major issue in last month’s elections.

Christopher Luxon, the country’s new prime minister and leader of the center-right National Party, pitched voters on a new era of tougher punishment, including a pledge to send young offenders to boot camps and to change course on efforts to reduce the prison population.

“We will restore law and order,” Mr Luxon said in his victory speech last month.

Experts have questioned the need for such a shift, as well as the more muscular tactics of Mr Luxon’s party, saying the underlying problems would remain unresolved. Many Maori guards, the majority of whom are women over forty, know them firsthand: economic hardship, alienation, addiction.

In recent months, a cost of living crisis has hit New Zealanders hard. Food prices in October up 6.3 percent year on yearalmost twice as high as in the United States.

This has created a black market for some goods. Stolen cigarettes, which cost about 35 New Zealand dollars (more than $20) per pack, can be exchanged for other valuables. “Some people will trade eight packs for a piece of steak,” said Ms Paikea, who heads the Akarana Maori Wardens Association in Auckland.

New Zealand’s murder rate is far below many other rich countries. But that’s true one of the highest incarceration rates in the worldwith a long history of jailing people for relatively minor crimes.

Many countries are grappling with practical and philosophical questions about law enforcement, including the threat of police violence, the harms of incarceration, and the factors that drive offenders. People like the Maori Wardens, who have been active in New Zealand for about a century, can offer compelling alternatives to low-level crime control.

“They sit between formal community policing and social workers, and are virtually essential to the way certain areas in New Zealand operate,” says Fabio Scarpello. a political scientist at the University of Aucklandsaid.

A few nights a week, Ms Paikea and other security guards go on patrol – what they call “roaming” – along Karangahape Road, a major thoroughfare in Auckland, where, early on a recent Sunday morning, beer-fueled revelers spilled onto the sidewalks and homeless people slumped against storefronts .

The guards are helping where they can – but conditions on the ground are changing, Ms Paikea said, and police have asked them to wear stab-resistant vests for the first time in recent months.

“It’s violence, ram raids, stabbings, robberies,” she said, adding: “Our youth play a big role. We can only do so much.”

The Maori guards say they prefer respect and compassion to more forceful coercion, and the National Party has made no suggestion their role will change. But many voters supported the new government’s more punitive approach to crime.

“The offenders seem to have no fear of the police, no fear of getting caught, no fear of the law or any consequences,” said Sunny Kaushal, president of the Dairy and Business Owners Group, which represents small businesses. “Hardworking people, the store owners, have lost their trust in the police and the justice system.”

Strategies introduced by the previous government, including creating a new criminal offense for ram raids and subsidies lacks guns to blind potential offenders would have been insufficient, he said.

Mr Luxon’s government has pledged to address what party leaders described as a “crisis” in the criminal justice system by introducing tougher sentences for offenders, and by introducing tougher penalties for offenders. criminalizing street gang meetings and the wearing of badges by the public.

New Zealand has a particularly high percentage of gang members. Many members are Maori or Pacific Islanders suffering from urban poverty. While experts say not all gangs, nor all divisions of those gangs, are necessarily criminal, they are often seen as linked to profit-oriented crime, especially the sale of drugs such as methamphetamine.

Many voters see government efforts to collaborate or collaborate with gangs as a waste of their tax dollars. But the guards have access that formal law enforcement officers do not have, and Ms. Paikea said they had sometimes acted as formal security at the sometimes awkward funerals of gang members, where their mana – a Maori word meaning personal power or authority – guarantees respect.

“We want people to feel comfortable with us,” says Garnet Wetini Weston-Matehaere, director. “Our magical instrument is our mouth.”

The Wardens’ diverse backgrounds, they say, give them insight. Ms. Paikea, who now works in environmental health, spent years on the margins of society, living in her car and having run-ins with law enforcement. Mr Weston-Matehaere, a retiree, once worked as a police officer and a prison guard. Others survive on disability or unemployment benefits.

The emphasis is on respect, said Mr Weston-Matehaere, who often described himself as a grandfather.

“One of the things I always wanted to do during my working years was help people,” he says. “Every job I had, I did the exact opposite. Being a Maori warden opened my eyes and gave me what I wanted.”

Mark Mitchell, the new police minister, has a very different philosophy aimed at holding offenders accountable for their actions.

“As long as humanity has existed, you will have bad people who want to do bad things,” Mr. Mitchell said, a former mercenary and police officer.

Experts have questioned that approach, as well as data claiming to show higher violent crime overall.

“The figures are manipulated to fit the agenda,” says Ronald Kramer, a criminology lecturer at the University of Auckland. Without addressing the underlying economic problems, he added, policymakers would not be able to tackle the problem.

Part of the new administration’s strategy to tackle offenders includes expanding military-style boot camps for at-risk youth to those as young as 15.

Critics said the camps risked exposing young people to violence and bringing them into contact with other young thrill seekers. “All the research tells us that boot camps don’t work,” said Sara Salman, a criminologist at Victoria University of Wellington. “We do not want to criminalize young people.”

That ethos was at the heart of why people trusted the guards when they might not have trusted the police, Ms. Paikea said.

“They know we’re not there to arrest them,” she said. “We are just here to help them.”