On June 16, the "Day of Prison Resistance" is celebrated, a date that claims educational emancipation in contexts deprived of liberty
By Malena Fernandez*
Abel Díaz is a Sociology student and vice president of the San Martín University Center (CUSAM), an educational space with university autonomy in which people deprived of their liberty learn trades, hold workshops and study university degrees. He tells us that this date arose in June 2011, when people from the Ezeiza Student Center and the Devoto Student Center began to come together in the framework of a fight over the recognition of educational activities, which was later the “ Educational incentive”, article 140 of the National Law on the Execution of Sentences (24.660).
"Resistance is a very important word," says Abel Díaz. But resist what? “The person who studies in detention resists all the obstacles that the prison service puts where he is in order to access education. Education here is considered a benefit for people who apply prison treatment, when it really is a right enshrined by law.” And he adds, "here not everyone has access to education, since today in the province of Buenos Aires there is a prison overpopulation close to 108% and the reality is that the prison structure is not already prepared for this number of people, and, on the other hand, there is so much bureaucracy that it is very difficult for a person deprived of their liberty to obtain the documentation to be able to access education”.
In this sense, taking up the statistical data prepared by the National System of Statistics on the Execution of Penalties (SNEEP) in its Annual Report of the province of Buenos Aires for the year 2014 as an example, it can be asserted that: 68% of the population prisoner is young (between 18 and 34 years old), 94% of the total prison population does not have a complete secondary education, and, at the time of admission to the penitentiary unit, 49% were unemployed, while 36 % were part-time workers and only 15% were full-time workers. Based on these data, it can be affirmed that the basic rights to education and work were not guaranteed to persons deprived of their liberty at the time of arrest.
For this reason, Abel Díaz points out, it must be taken into account that there are not university centers in all prisons that help promote and defend the right to education, which is why it is essential to claim and make them visible as a tool for transformation.
And he adds: “besides, one wonders… what are we training for? If when he leaves the prison all the effects of the law will expire only within ten years; I will not be allowed to enroll in any degree, I will not be able to access a professional registry, I will not be able to be hired by the State...", and he stresses that this is where the importance of the community lies, of the cooperatives, since which asserts that it is very difficult for the labor market to be able to return to accommodate people who were deprived of their liberty.
It also states that the prison treatment that currently exists raises certain legal issues that are not respected in actual reality. It is for this that there are spaces in which it is constantly re-thinking how it should be: “we believe that first in prison there must be control of the fundamental guarantees of persons deprived of their liberty; we must control robberies, torture, ill-treatment, and all that issue that is structural to the penitentiary system, and, on the other hand, use devices that have to do with training”.
“It is from the time we set foot in places like CUSAM that we have a different perspective on what prison and society are. One begins to break with certain logics that work here, and then to get out of that you have to start deconstructing a lot of things; to form a critical conscience that questions and transforms the prison reality. And that is done by stepping on a university center”, concludes Abel Díaz.
*Student of Social Communication, who is doing a pre-professional practice in the Area.