There are shoemakers to mend boots, electricians to fix the circuits exterminators to clear out the roaches, plumbers to clean out the pipes. Transactions are completed in cash between inmates an honor system, enforced with the threat of violence, appears to prevail. Prisoners buy and sell residences, which may range from luxurious suites in the two-story garden apartment-type dwellings that surround the central plaza to cramped spaces inside sweltering boxes of cardboard and plywood at less-desirable addresses. Shopkeepers pocket decent earnings, selling their businesses when their time is done. Principles of capitalism and the free market reign supreme, the benefits accruing to entrepreneurial inmates and to cooperative guards and prison administrators. Inside the facility, a thriving penal ecosystem has evolved, nourished by institutionalized corruption that is acknowledged by everyone, including the reform-minded warden. There is relatively little evidence of the metal bars and barbed wire that are ubiquitous in U.S. Most inmates-including murderers, rapists and other violent convicts-are free to travel almost anywhere amid the sprawling warren that is the complex. citizens are among those imprisoned, mostly for drug and weapons-related crimes.Īt the penitentiary, only the chronic troublemakers and those deemed in need of protection are confined to the 20 or so cells. (Relatives have been allowed to reside inside the 34-year-old facility for more than a dozen years, although no one seems to know exactly when the curious practice began.) About 40 U.S. ![]() Among the residents are about 2,500 inmates (including 168 women), and roughly 1,500 family members, almost all women and children, who reside quasi-permanently inside the prison walls. Here, in a teeming space meant for perhaps 600 prisoners, about 4,000 people live in a community that defies simple description and mocks generalization about prison life. If they tried a little bit of this system on the other side, they could learn so much.” “We never take a baby away from its mother. “Anyone would rather be in a place that was crowded and be close to the ones they love than be separated from them,” said Sister Antonia Brenner, an American nun who has lived among the inmates for 13 years and is widely respected here. (The Tijuana facility, like other Mexican jails, allows regular conjugal visits.) prisons, where inmates are usually closely scrutinized, restricted to sterile cells and permitted only fleeting contact with loved ones. ![]() Inside its walls is a kind of microcosm of modern-day Mexico, a place where injustice, corruption and economic inequities flourish but people’s ingenuity and indomitable will to survive seem somehow capable of surmounting whatever obstacles.Īnd, despite its obvious shortcomings-severe overcrowding, rampant corruption, a lack of facilities and the wide disparities in the treatment of the rich and poor-many familiar with life in the penal village say it is in some ways more humane than U.S. ![]() ![]() This two-block-square hamlet is the Baja California State Penitentiary in Tijuana, four acres of jumbled reality that is one of the world’s most singular penal institutions.
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