Legal challenges over conditions in Costa Rica’s prisons have more than doubled in five years, as the government’s push for a harder prison regime runs up against its legal duty to feed, house and provide medical care to the people it holds. The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala IV) received 2,130 prison-related cases in 2020.
By 2025 the figure had reached 4,780, an increase of 124%. The cases include amparo petitions, which seek protection of constitutional rights, and habeas corpus petitions, which challenge the legality or conditions of a person’s detention. The pressure has not eased this year. Between January and September 2026, the court logged 4,139 such cases, an average of about 460 a month compared with roughly 398 a month in 2025. Prison matters were the second most frequent subject of the court’s rulings.
The Ombudsman’s Office has recorded a parallel rise. It received 2,681 prison-related complaints in 2025 and another 1,350 between January and July of this year, most of them concerning failures to provide medical care. The complaints describe spoiled food, portions too small to sustain inmates and missed meals for people with conditions such as diabetes who require specific diets. They also cite long delays in medical treatment and difficulty reaching health services.
Twenty people in custody died of natural causes between January and August 2026. Human rights organizations have pointed to the figure as a sign of possible shortcomings in medical care and nutrition inside the prison system. The rise in cases tracks a deliberate hardening of prison policy. Under the previous administration, the Justice Ministry cut back family and conjugal visits, reduced parcels and removed commissaries and cash from maximum-security units.
Since taking office in May, the current government has gone further, removing microwaves and televisions from cells. The most consequential change came on June 1, when Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar banned daily food deliveries from families across the prison system. Relatives may now bring only two containers of food on visiting days, down from as many as 15 a day previously.
Aguilar said 158,000 parcels were sent to a prison between January and May and that inspecting them required as many as 200 prison officers a day. He said the deliveries were being used to smuggle drugs and that some inmates ran an illegal trade in food and clothing. He has said the government will not reverse the measure and that the prison system can feed its roughly 20,000 inmates.
President Laura Fernández backed the restrictions and urged the minister to tighten them further. She rejected the official description of prisons as institutional care centers, saying they are simply prisons for people convicted of serious crimes. Maureen Esquivel, spokesperson for Familias Penitenciarias Unidas, a group of inmates’ relatives founded in 2019, said families began noticing deficiencies more sharply in 2025, after the new prison rules took effect.
With outside food barred, she said, inmates now depend entirely on prison meals, which she described as never having been sufficient, and many suffer stomach problems including gastritis and ulcers. Esquivel attributed much of the increase in court filings to the restrictions. She said her group has prepared template amparo petitions so families can file cases themselves, and that some relatives turn to the court because inmates are sleeping on floors or in bathrooms.
Overcrowding compounds the problem. The National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture, the oversight body attached to the Ombudsman’s Office, reported that the number of inmates held above official capacity rose from 2,772 in 2020 to 6,164 in February 2026. The Justice Ministry put the adult prison population at a record 21,173 on Oct. 7, up from 14,907 at the end of 2022. Ministry officials have put overcrowding at 59% and said the new high-containment prison will bring it down to about 15% once it is full.
That facility, the Center for High Containment of Organized Crime, or CACCO, opened on Oct. 14 at the La Reforma complex in Alajuela with space for 5,100 inmates across five modules. It received its first 123 inmates on Oct. 26 and is expected to reach full capacity in December. At its inauguration, Fernández pledged that the human rights of those held there would be respected.
The conditions under which inmates are held are not a matter of discretion. Costa Rica’s Constitution prohibits cruel or degrading treatment, and the country is bound by the American Convention on Human Rights. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, call on states to provide food of adequate nutritional value and health care equivalent to that available in the wider community.
The government’s approach has already drawn institutional criticism. In late September, the Ombudsman’s Office condemned a video in which Aguilar confronted inmates, describing their treatment as humiliating. The Justice Ministry has not publicly addressed the court figures. Its stated position has been that the restrictions are necessary to restore order and security inside the prisons.
The growth in prison cases is also adding to the workload of the Constitutional Chamber itself, which had resolved 37,706 matters of all kinds by the end of September and projects more than 45,000 rulings for the year. Whether the CACCO eases conditions in the rest of the system, or simply shifts the pressure, may show up first in the number of cases reaching the court in the months ahead.
