Humberto Prado

Humberto Prado is rebuilding Venezuela’s deteriorated prison system and pulling it out of a severe crisis by reforming inmates, educating prison officials and involving the general public in the process. He is creating this dynamic rehabilitation program based on his own unique experience as a former prisoner, prison official, lawyer, and ombudsman.

Over the past decade, the level of violence in Venezuela’s prisons has reached a disaster level. With a population of 20,000 and growing, the system is at its breaking point and inmates are leaving prisons even more criminalized than when they entered. As a former inmate with an acute understanding of the issues, Humberto is restructuring the entire system from within. He is using his extensive personal knowledge to bring about reform: institutionalizing the training available to prisoners; involving citizen sector organizations and various outside institutions; and reshaping prison governance with a focus on decentralization and education for prison guards. Thanks to language Humberto was asked to draft, there is now a mandate in Venezuela’s 1999 Constitution in support of his vision.
Meanwhile he is preparing inmates and their families to reenter society as responsible citizens and is educating them about how to exercise their rights. In order to assist their transition out of a criminal mindset, Humberto is building ties between the inmate community and business people, citizen organizations, doctors, nurses, lawyers, universities, and churches. These connections provide important resources for rehabilitating inmates: health care, legal assistance, educational services, job training and improved alimentation. He is developing a consortium of observatories that includes four other Andean countries to share strategies for lowering rates of recidivism. His goal is to convert Venezuela’s dismal prison system into a world-class model; his growing network of allies reinforces his view that Venezuelan prisoners are a matter of concern for all of Venezuelan society—not just the prison system.

Prison reform in Venezuela is a dire need. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have investigated human rights abuses in prisons in nearly 60 countries around the world, and deemed Venezuela’s system one of the most violent and least capable of rehabilitating its prisoners. The situation was so bad by 1994 that the attorney general declared that prison violence was compromising the stability of Venezuela’s democracy.

But prisons generally have not figured prominently on the broader social agenda—a situation only now beginning to change. Recently, President Hugo Chavez has felt increasing pressure to scrutinize the system due to highly politicized arrests and imprisonment of individuals opposing his government. But movement is slow; while the new Constitution’s Article 72 calls for reforms—creating autonomous penitentiary entities, and decentralizing administration so each prison is administered by criminal justice professionals and trained staff—these haven’t taken place. Humberto’s believes current officials simply don’t know how to implement the directives. This situation is only aggravated by rapid government turnover: there have been seven ministers of the interior since 1999, each with a different plan.

Another roadblock to improving the Venezuelan prison system is its hierarchical structure. It is state-owned and governed by two ministries; one oversees prison directors and guards while the other is responsible for external security. Unfortunately, this set up is rife with power struggles: a call from a minister can force a prison director to bestow special favors he or she may not agree with, and state governors have no authority to deal with problems in their local prisons even though they often have a better understanding of the dynamics. Ultimately, the boss is the distant minister instead of the prison’s own director—a fact that undermines local authority over the prison guards and local police force when action is necessary.

Inside the prisons, one of the biggest challenges is a lack of humane treatment that might encourage prisoners to embrace reform. There is wide-spread systemic deterioration of buildings, harsh rules, substandard prisoner care, and almost no assistance upon release. The budget for food is about 50 cents per inmate per day—less than the cost of the bread eaten with meals. Thus internal crime rates skyrocket as inmates discover they must fight to stay alive and eat, as well as pay bribes for medical attention or transport to a judge. Though aware of these serious troubles, prison officials generally perceive them as chiefly about security and control rather than about rehabilitation—or they shirk responsibility by claiming that any change depends on the President’s initiative.

Humberto spent many years working inside the prison system, and he is now implementing a plan of action based on his first-hand knowledge. He began in 2002 by founding the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, which is both a think tank and ombudsman to protect human rights and bring abuses to light. The institution has a staff of seven lawyers, all specially trained in criminal justice and human rights issues, and coordinates a number of volunteers as well. Their primary efforts are directed toward the two categories of people whose behaviors Humberto is tenaciously working to change: prisoners and prison guards.

For prisoners he cites five areas of support necessary within the modern rehabilitation system: legal, social, psychological, educational, and religious. Given the wide array of problems, Humberto finds that creative thinking is solving many of them. For example, when the Observatory discovered six children born in prison being raised there illegally, he teamed up with private companies to build a childcare center next door to the prison so the children could still be near their mothers. While voicing his concern that prisoners didn’t have bread to eat, Humberto proposed to the minister in charge that inmates at a women’s prison bake bread for other prisons. That program now exists in two states; next, Humberto plans to bring in private consultants to figure out how to improve the prison food system and train inmates for food service jobs.

Humberto is emphatic that these rehabilitation measures are only temporary so long as prison guards are easily corruptible; thus his focus on them is unwavering. Currently, under-trained and poorly paid staff engage in widespread bribery and traffic in arms and drugs. To combat these behaviors, Humberto has identified a way to integrate a new curriculum into existing police training and produce prison guards who are specifically prepared to facilitate rehabilitation programs. With Observatory colleagues, Humberto has already written the handbook for training guards and they are ready to teach classes and help with the selection of candidates for the guard school. Prison officials are already starting to ask for Humberto’s input, and as he continues to lobby government officials, the decentralization process will move forward rapidly.

The Observatory’s high profile as a defender of human rights in prison is now opening many doors. Because the Observatory is in constant contact with prisoners, it is viewed as the best source of information about the nation’s prisons. It recruits students from Caracas’s elite Central University of Venezuela with specialties in law, medicine, nursing, dentistry, and psychology for volunteer programs. It educates prisoners about their rights and responsibilities and makes resources available to their families. Humberto often takes people from private corporations to prisons with him to see the situation firsthand; they always leave convinced to help in some way. These corporations are key to job training, and he works with them to develop businesses within the prisons and prepare inmates for jobs upon release. Current training programs include auto mechanics, carpentry, and electricity; Humberto is also developing a project with the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce to place ex-prisoners in affiliated companies.

Humberto’s program draws in citizen sector organizations as well to contribute their specific expertise. Venezuelan Fellow Feliciano Reyna’s Acción Solidaria has provided such unprecedented HIV/AIDS health services for prisoners that the Minister of Health was persuaded to pick up the program. Humberto and the Observatory often make the news, which helps get the word out about the dismal situation in Venezuela’s prisons. As a result, they sometimes receive unexpected support: one organization supplied air tickets to Observatory representatives so they could attend key meetings with the government in distant prisons, and they even received donations to buy an office space.

Political imprisonments are creating a new demand from society for improved conditions and respect for human rights. Humberto sees this heightened attention as an opportunity to influence social attitudes as people become more aware that no one is exempt from the possibility of imprisonment. He is taking steps to build his organization and create leadership opportunities by referring tasks and requests for interviews to the lawyers who work with him. With this heightened visibility, the National Bank Association may soon cover four of their salaries. The Observatory’s work is already extending to civil organizations in the other four Andean countries, where the prison conditions are quite serious. Given the growing interest in Venezuela’s model, Humberto believes an agricultural program he pioneered for prisoners would be well-suited to prisons in Peru and Colombia. He expects that within a year linked observatories will be underway in the five countries.

Humberto’s history with the criminal justice system dates back to when he was 18 years old, and was arrested for a property crime. He was imprisoned for seven years; while on the inside, he saw that inmates were practicing sports without any coaching. As a young boy in the Youth Christian Movement Association, he had excelled in baseball, basketball, and swimming—and had been a coach as well as sports reporter. So he took the initiative and started volunteering to develop the sports activities in prison, organizing internal championship games between prisoners and authorities.

Given his exemplary behavior, and with the advocacy of people on the outside, Humberto received a presidential pardon in 1985. The next month he presented himself to the National Institute of Sports, and suggested they make him coordinator of sports within prisons—which they agreed to. At the same time he went back to high school night classes and ultimately entered the university to study law. Meanwhile, he kept up his work in the jails, training the inmates to become referees and sports reporters—both job skills they could use when released.

Soon after Humberto finished his law studies, he was invited to be a prison director. The first former prisoner to receive this offer, he accepted the challenge and was soon directing two prisons, Yare 1 and 2. The first thing he did was a census of the inmates to find out what he was working with. He quickly identified a major problem: corrupt security personnel. With the backing of the regional governor, Humberto transferred the internal guards to the National Guard’s security force outside the walls and hand-picked a new group of guards for the inside. The governor agreed to four months of training for 40 guards in a program that Humberto designed. They overhauled the prison, cleaning out grenades and firearms from the old regime. They began to grow their own vegetables to sell at markets and to feed inmates. Soon, they had classes in computer training and furniture refinishing to give prisoners actual skills. The governor paid the guards a bonus over the federal salary and included insurance for their entire family. Thus, word spread about the new system, and it became a privilege to work in the Miranda jail.

At the same time, Humberto participated in a selection process for jail directors and was chosen to attend a training course in federal detention centers in the United States. In spite of these successes, he left his directing position in 1997 when a superior officer ordered him to give special considerations to a prisoner. Since then, he has returned to the prison to interview prisoners. Nothing remains of the programs he initiated during his tenure, but he nevertheless regards the experience as an important part of his training.

Soon after, Humberto was chosen to be one of the key people in the newly created Ombudsman government agency to ensure that human rights in Venezuela were protected according to the international treaties the country had signed. Humberto, as director of mediation and conciliation, worked in legal aid—but the agency was highly politicized and he resigned after the political events of April 11, 2002 for refusing to follow unacceptable orders.

Jobless and frustrated by the declining penitentiary system, Humberto once again started working for the prisons. In September of 2002 he teamed up with an enthusiastic group of people and created the Venezuelan Prison Observatory using his family’s savings. It has since become one of the most prominent defenders of human rights in Venezuela. Humberto is constantly doing television and newspaper interviews, and uses his visibility to involve numerous sectors of Venezuelan society in transforming the prison system.