The Peruvian president, Pedro Castillo, announced this Friday that he will present a bill to Congress so that prisoners work and assume their expenses in prison with the aim of reducing crime.
"We will present a bill so that the criminals who rip out their wallets and keep the population in anxiety, support themselves and eat with the sweat of their brow, start working"Castillo stressed when speaking at a meeting of the Council of Ministers in the city of Pasco, in the center of the country.
For this regulatory change, the government official emphasized that joint work with Parliament is necessary, for which he called on Congress to prioritize the more than 30 bills presented by the Executive.
"I am sure that the Pasco congressmen are going to raise their voices so that they schedule"he asserted.
According to official figures released in May 2021, in the 69 prisons that exist nationwide there were 86,825 people detained in April 2021, when the shelter capacity is 41,211.
This represents an overcrowding of 111%, which affects, in greater proportion, the prisons of Lima, which have a prison population of 41,651 inmates and only 17,695 shelter units.
For this reason, in 2021 the authorities launched several infrastructure projects to expand the shelter capacity by 7,157 places in the Pucallpa, Arequipa, Puno, Chincha, Cajamarca, Mujeres Trujillo, Lampa and Chimbote prisons.
