Juan Carlos Octavio Pinto Quintanilla

An ex-prisoner himself, Juan Carlos Pinto is organizing prisoners to humanize the penal system in Bolivia, while building a coalition on the outside to sensitize the public and persuade authorities to reform the judiciary system.

Juan Carlos Pinto is addressing the gap in Bolivia between the statutes for protecting prisoners's rights and the failure to implement these laws. Juan Carlos uses his experiences during five years in jail as a political prisoner to educate and organize prisoners's groups. His program aims to heighten prisoners's awareness of their legal rights, help articulate their demands for change, and provide educational opportunities to improve their prospects for reintegration upon release. Beyond forming individual prisoner groups, Juan Carlos is opening avenues of communication between Bolivia's 34 penitentiaries to create a unified network of prison organizations which collectively can demand reform of the judicial system.
In order to bridge the gap between those "inside" and those "outside" of the prison system, Juan Carlos provides prisoners with a network of outside supporters. He engages ex-prisoners, family members, and civil society groups to help reintegrate prisoners into society and push for reforms in the criminal justice system. In addition, he uses media exposure and a multi-faceted coalition of church groups, politicians, and public figures committed to prison reform to increase the demand for change among the general population of Bolivia. Drawing on his deep-seated belief that the backbone of democracy is a functioning and responsive justice system, Juan Carlos strives to create change in the country's judicial and penitentiary systems by putting prisoners at the center of the struggle.

Bolivia's justice system suffers from serious deficiencies which deny the country's citizens their basic rights to a fair trial, freedom from inhumane treatment, discrimination before the law, and arbitrary detention, as set forth in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Bolivian system inherently discriminates against lower economic classes because they lack access to legal protection and education about their rights. Those suspected of either common or political crimes are often thrown into prison without the opportunity to defend themselves. In addition, the judicial system suffers from a lack of independence and transparency; judges are subjected to political and economic pressures in their decisions. Budgetary limitations and negligence routinely result in the suspension or postponement of hearings, which influences the duration of inmates's incarceration.
The punitive rather than rehabilitative approach of the Bolivian penitentiary system helps perpetuate a climate of abuse and poverty for prisoners and their families. Few institutional activities within the system focus on facilitating their productive entry back into society once their prison terms are completed. Prisoners who are deprived of alternatives to prison life are prone to despair. They worry about finding productive work opportunities upon release and lose their self-esteem and sense of purpose. As a result, even upon gaining their freedom, they often slide into a destructive cycle of recidivism. Though internal organizational structures exist in some prisons, there is no coordinated communication between prisoners's groups to determine the most effective strategies for implementing beneficial reforms. These reforms, such as sentence reduction for participation in vocational/educational training and good behavior through the first half of their sentence, exist on the books but have yet to be put in practice.
There are 5,500 prisoners in the Bolivian penitentiary system. However, the number of people effected by the abuses of the penal system is not limited to the prisoners themselves. Including their family members, who also suffer the consequences of severe penitentiary punishment, the abuses affect 25,000 people. In addition to the families outside of the prisons, there are a substantial number of children living in jail with their incarcerated parents. These children are denied access to basic education. Fifty-four children live with their parents in La Paz's all-male San Pedro Prison, 200 live in Obrajes Prison (in another section of La Paz), and 600 live in Cochabamba's prisons. More broadly, however, all Bolivians are threatened by an unfair justice system which does not guarantee due process to those accused of common or political crimes.

Juan Carlos is implementing a multi-faceted strategy to improve the penal and judicial systems of Bolivia. His first strategic focus is the internal organization of prisoners, since he sees them as the primary catalyst for change in the judicial system, because they personally know the injustices of the country's penitentiaries. Therefore, he helps prisoners to form groups for education and support. The goals of his program's educational component are to educate prisoners about their rights, prepare them for life on the outside, and humanize their experience in prison.
As a professor of religion, sociology, economics, and investigative research, Juan Carlos provides educational opportunities for prisoners by offering classes in all of these subjects. Courses in investigation and research provide incentives to the prisoners to analyze their situation and demand improvements. He teaches three times a week at San Pedro National Prison and twice weekly at a women's prison in Obrajes.
Juan Carlos directed such a prison group himself from 1992 to 1997 and now motivates other prisoners to do the same, linking internal prison organizations across the country in a unified network of prisoners. Through this education and organization, Juan Carlos heightens prisoners's awareness of the rights to which they are legally entitled, and offers them the necessary tools to demand due process of the law, access to education for themselves and their children, and rehabilitation programs. Through the Superior Institute for Commercial Education of Sucre and the Bolivian Institute on Theology, Juan Carlos continues to teach courses inside San Pedro Prison. He is a founding member of the Institute, whose mission is to take advantage of human resources for rehabilitating prisoners and to train them in accounting and computer skills. The humanities department of a national university has worked with him in a pilot sociology project in the same prison.
Juan Carlos also encourages spiritual reflection among prisoners by organizing reflection and Bible study groups that help build self-esteem and provide a venue for mutual support among inmates. From 1992 to 1997, Juan Carlos coordinated a program called Communities of Bible Reflection in the San Pedro Prison. He continues to support the formation of these groups from the outside. Once a week he attends the Bible reflection meetings. He assists the prisons in planning religious holidays and ceremonies such as Easter services, and puts the prisoners in contact with theological institutions which can support them.
Since his own release from prison, Juan Carlos has added a second front to his strategy by initiating a public campaign about the abuses of prisoners's rights. He conducts and disseminates studies that reveal the abuses of the penal system. His goal is to involve more people in the fight for change by showing them the conditions inside the country's prisons. He has written numerous articles about prison problems for various magazines and national newspapers. He continues to take advantage of the contacts that he made with journalists when he was the press officer of the prisoners's organization in San Pedro prison. He also began a magazine called Cry of Liberty to document prisoner experiences and feelings, which is currently run by San Pedro's inmates. As part of his degree in sociology, Juan Carlos wrote and defended his thesis, "San Pedro Prison: Analysis of Injustice," and later published two editions of a book by the same title. After his release from prison, he published the book Free Reflections of the Incarcerated. These publications have proved instrumental in bringing the abuses of the penitentiary system into the public consciousness.
To further this public campaign, Juan Carlos organizes other ex-prisoners and their families to support each other and continue the contemplation they began on the inside. They speak out against human rights violations on behalf of those still imprisoned. They gather weekly to reflect on their experiences and fight for the reform of the country's judicial system. This outside group supports the prison groups on the inside. The prisoners themselves, both on the inside and on the outside, will help to spread Juan Carlos' ideas and create change through their support groups.
In the short time since his release, Juan Carlos has replicated his model for educating and organizing prisoners in a women's penitentiary in Obrajes. He plans to extend his program to all the prisons in Cochabamba and in the long term, to the rest of the country, eventually linking his efforts with similar initiatives across the Andean region. He is creating a permanent national support committee made up politicians, ex-prisoners, law students, church organizations, academic institutions, and other sympathetic public figures to promote reform and pressure the government for protective legislation.
The National Social Pastoral Service of the Catholic Church, supports Juan Carlos in La Paz and the Center for Integrated Prison Support backs him in Cochabamba. He has worked as a consultant for the Institute for Legal Services and Juridical Investigation. At the international level, Juan Carlos participates in the Latin American Encounter on Penitentiary Pastorale. With these national and international contacts, Juan Carlos will spread his strategy of internal and external participation to reform the penal system in the region.

Throughout his youth and early adulthood, Juan Carlos was very active in church and social justice issues. He volunteered as a missionary for the Catholic Church and worked with peasants in isolated communities where he learned about the harshness of rural life in Bolivia, the miserable living conditions, and the lack of alternatives for large sectors of the population. This experience deepened his faith, and he volunteered for four additional years in Mexico with the Christian Support Committee for refugees fleeing the political situation in El Salvador. Juan Carlos was recognized for his commitment in the 1980s when he was chosen as the Bolivian delegate for a course on theology in Lima and a Latin American Encounter of the International Movement for Rural Catholic Youth.
The experience which most affected Juan Carlos came in 1992, when Bolivian police arrested and accused him of membership in a subversive organization, purely on the basis of his association with three friends who had been accused of involvement in clandestine anti-state violence. He consistently denies the allegations against him, which are commonly used throughout Latin America to discredit social activists. However, Juan Carlos was never given the chance to defend himself and was instead immediately imprisoned in San Pedro Prison, one of the country's worst jails, for five years of preventive custody. He became committed to the cause of justice when he witnessed first-hand the abuses of the Bolivian penitentiary system.