The Attorney General of Colombia, Eduardo Montealegre Lynett, participated in the Forum for the future of prisons: penitentiary reform and Colombian penal system, carried out in the Auditorium of Universidad Libre – La Candelaria headquarters.

During his speech the Attorney General Montealegre said that he is agree with the general guidelines of the proposed reform to the penitentiary code formulated by the National Government, but this reform is not going to resolve the prison problem or the serious crisis affecting the criminal justice system currently in Colombia.

“If we want to move forward in a penitentiary structure that dignifies man and really meets the purposes of punishment enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights, Colombia has to make progress to a comprehensive reform of its criminal policy. While it is true that there is a breakthrough with modifications to the penitentiary code, we should think about structuring a quite coherent criminal policy and therefore we cannot simply look at the problem on the issue of prison overpopulation, prison overcrowding and health problems that inmates in the country have”, added the Attorney General.

Also, he emphasized that critical reviews have to be made to the Colombian criminal justice system in order to detect structural faults of the criminal policy that has been executing for 20 years.

The senior official said that there are three elements that have contributed to the crisis of the criminal justice system and is reflected in this prison crisis: the maximalist conception of criminal law and the expansion of it, the punitive populism and the retrogression in the protection of the fundamental rights.

The first of these elements, according to the Attorney General, is the easy way. “Instead of understanding the criminal law as the really last instrument available to the State for resolving social conflicts, modern States have recurred to an effortless policy of believing that the solution of social problems inside a conglomerate and a nation is to escape toward criminal law. As the social problems cannot be resolved, as the need of the population cannot be timely solved, there is a simplistic understand that the solution is the categorization of a behavior and to have recourse to a supreme criminal law and the expansion of it, as a way of solving the conflict”.

The second exposed element is to have recourse to a punitive populism that mentions that a criminal policy have been founded on this basis and on a symbolic criminal law for more than 20 year. It means that before the inefficiency of the State in the design of a real policy to fight against crime, it comes to the easy way of a criminal policy based exclusively on the increase of penalties.

“Instead of constructing a true social policy reform, we are recurring to a criminal repression as a way of resolving disputes and making the public to believe that in that way it is fighting against crime” said the Attorney General.

And finally, the third element is that Colombia is presenting serious set-backs on the protection of fundamental rights and basically on the conception of the fundamental right to freedom.

“Freedom is one of the founding elements of the social and democratic State of law. And then the pre-trial detention, which should be an exceptional mechanism within a proceeding, it has become a rule and a general principle. We have constructed an accusatory system based on a pre-trial detention and a loss of liberty that would be exceptional within the proceeding; however, more and more we return to the old days and old times, that we turn detention into a general rule and not into an exceptional mechanism”, stated the Attorney General.

“I think we are still tied to concepts of criminal law which are clinging to retribution as 200 years ago, as we have returned again to thousand-year-old conceptions of ancient codes such as “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. And, in addition, we have not really progressed in the creation of opened prison regimes,” said the civil servant.