El Salvador Is Imprisoning People at Triple the Rate of the US

Sep 12, 2023

Marcelo Rochabrun, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- El Salvador's prison population has tripled to 100,000 in less than two years under President Nayib Bukele's crackdown on gangs, his security minister said, disclosing for the first time how many people the government has jailed.

Since March 2022, Salvadoran authorities have arrested more than 72,600 people on suspicions of being gang members, Gustavo Villatoro, El Salvador’s Justice and Public Safety minister, said in an interview. While none of the detainees have been sentenced, the country’s prison population has tripled to a total of 100,000, “more or less,” Villatoro said.

This means El Salvador has imprisoned 1.6% of its 6.3 million citizens. That gives it an incarceration rate triple that of the US and more than double that of Cuba, the world’s runner up, according to data from the UK-based World Prison Brief.

The government of El Salvador hasn't formally disclosed information about its prison population since 2020, before Bukele invoked emergency powers to begin his unprecedented moves against the gangs. Human-rights groups have criticized the president's increasingly authoritarian actions and called out his anti-gang campaign. Yet the campaign has also made the country safer and boosted his popularity among Salvadorans.

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https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/el-salvador-is-imprisoning-people-at-triple-the-rate-of-the-us-1.1970153