Prisons

Costa Rica’s Justice Minister Cecilia Sánchez Romero was forced this week to defend before the Legislative Assembly the partial release of hundreds of inmates to reduce overcrowding. The program has sparked criticism from various sectors, including the Public Security Ministry.

Their reality is a 4x4-meter cell of cement and iron, where only a few rays of sunlight enter each day and where sleep comes on concrete beds. Among the inmates are leaders of rival drug gangs that have launched a violent turf war in the streets of San José’s southern and western neighborhoods, leaving a toll of 165 deaths in only nine months. Here's a look.

There are few set criteria governing how transgender inmates should be handled by Costa Rican prisons. Many men who identify as women are sent to men's prisons.

Located in San Rafael de Alajuela, La Reforma prison is the biggest in Costa Rica. The Tico Times recently visited the prison and took portraits of some of the inmates.

Inside cellblock A-2, simple wooden frame bunks line as much floor space as possible. Inmates, many shirtless in the heat, lounge on their bunks if they’re lucky enough to have a bunk. The cellblock is crowded – designed to hold 40 with 108 living inside – but people squeeze by each other like strangers on a crowded sidewalk. Anything that doesn’t fit on the floor hangs from the ceiling and the walls. “Just wait till nighttime,” says a toothless inmate doing a 30-year sentence who called himself Francisco, “that’s when it gets bad."

A Colombian prisoner given permission to undergo surgery to fix a breast implant took advantage of her trip to the operating room to get liposuction.

Costa Rica’s Supreme Court ordered prison officials to come up with a plan to relieve overcrowding in the San Sebastián prison within one month. The court said prisoners "are sleeping on pieces of mattresses or on the ground, putting up with the cold” and rats climbing out of the drains at night.

In 2005, the country’s prisons were 4 percent overcrowded. Today there are an additional 4,793 people behind bars, bringing the overcrowding rate to 54 percent. There are a total of 13,923 people in prison in Costa Rica.