MONTEVIDEO — They might look like any soccer players in any soccer field. But these are inmates of the Punta de Rieles (‘Rail End’ in English) jail in the capital city Montevideo.
With minimal security, the 500 prisoners of this Uruguayan prison facility can walk freely to work every day, whether they are construction workers or actors in a play in the jail.
The idea is rather unusual : the Punta de Rieles jail is a microcosm of society aimed at humanizing convicts’ conditions and helping them reintegrate society later.
In a relaxed atmosphere, most detainees work in business ventures they launched thanks to their family’s financial help. There is also a bank inmates manage. It lends money to their peers without interest.
To avoid illicit trade, there is no money circulating in the prison, only coupons.
Inmates have thus started a gym facility, yoga, theatre and music workshops, a radio and a grocery shop, among other start-ups.
For the owner of this grocery store, getting money from his family to buy groceries that he would sell in the jail was a ‘sacrifice’. The lower-income household had to borrow money here and there.
It was worth it. Antonio Arellano opened his store in 2013.
He now wants to train other inmates to continue to run the shop once he has finished his sentence.
“This was a life-changing opportunity. Today, I have been trained to have a business or be an entrepreneur the day I step into the street and be free. I can escape delinquency. Since I was a teenager, the only thing I have done was to commit crimes. Today, I have the opportunity to change my life and I have fully taken advantage of it. I have trained myself for tomorrow, to be able to reintegrate into society,” he says.
By empowering inmates, Punta de Rieles has – up until now – offered a model of correctional facility. There have been very rare breakout attempts and few return to a life of crime.
In the past five years, only three inmates left the jail and never returned, according to the director Luis Parodi.
Detainees are free to develop their own business ideas, like cultivating a lettuce field to sell it to other inmates, or making wooden infant cots for outside clients.
Prisoners can also leave the facility a few times a week to study at school and get a chance to find a job afterwards.
In the end, there is little incentive to leave as inmates’ family members can visit them up to three times a week. Their wives can even spend the night.
Luis Parodi, the director, is a fervent believer in human rights for all. Relations with detainees are informal and there is little hierarchy.
He also believes that when convicts have a long-term project, they will commit to it. This will instil a desire to become better citizens.
“We simply think two things: man exists as part of circumstances. In other words, if one change circumstances, one change people. The other thing is that – we go back to the old paradigm of the 1970s – material possession creates people’s consciousness. If I am a businessman for three years, I could think that I might doing that it because it creates material possession, what we do, that generates consciousness,” he says.
With little security, the Punta de Rieles jail is a unique correctional facility based on trust.
Just like you trust your children to stay at school and your employees to work in the office, why wouldn’t a jail trust its convicts who study outside to come back at the end of the day?
Hence, inmates are allowed to connect with the world with their mobile phones.
To advance dialogue and peaceful conflict resolution, the jail is managed mainly by unarmed women with a background in psychology, social work and human rights.
They are all dressed with a light blue coat and a grey pants.
“To be a woman helps a lot in everyday relations (with inmates) because being a woman, a mother creates a different link. Inmates have a special respect for women and what the image of women means,” says Mariela Menezes, Inmate management supervisor.
In reality, convicts in the Punta de Rieles jail are not emblematic of Uruguay‘s prison population.
They are the best-behaved detainees who spent years in maximum security facilities. They are all about to finish their prison term.
Other prisoners might not fit into this liberal correctional facility, especially considering Uruguay‘s high incarceration rate per capita.
“The issue is that, if we send to other jails (inmates) who behave best for this type of jail, how do we manage the rest of (inmates) in the system? How many people will be left? This is something that is not taken into account. The (Punta de Rieles jail) is an experimentation,” points out Walter Posada, an independent criminologist in Montevideo.
With the opportunity it offers for a better society, the Punta de Rieles jail could be a model of facility for other nations.
This is especially true in Latin America, known for its overcrowded and violent prisons.
With its human touch and low reoffending rate, the prison shows that jails can be places of integration and not exclusion.
This video was produced exclusively for The Associated Press on January 10, 2016. Click here to watch it.
