Jails in Mexico

Young Mexicans incarcerated for serious crimes live in a vicious circle of recidivism due to the family context and denounce the lack of support from the Government to get out of that environment

In the middle of a basketball court, Zeany laughs with her teammates like any other girl her age. The girls play, run and chat just like they would in a schoolyard while studying for high school. However, her group is under the watchful eye of several police officers, surrounded by barbed wire and a pit bull with a spiked collar guarding the perimeter of the Constituyentes teen detention community in Monterrey, Nuevo León. At just 18 years old, it is the fourth time that Zeany has entered the prison. She is one of more than 1,400 teenagers being held in prison for committing a serious crime, from kidnapping to rape to murder.

Like her peers, this young woman believes that things could have been different for her if her environment had been different. Her signature culminates a list of requests to the candidates for these elections in order to change the social reality that feeds the vicious circle of recidivism of many young people like her. “Since I am locked up here, I would like to use my testimony so that the boys and girls can listen to me, that they know my story and that I can help them lead a life free of violence,” is one of the demands included in the document.

Zeany perfectly remembers her last day in freedom. "It was raining a lot. I had gone out to steal so I could buy a tamale for my brother who was at home, but there was no one on the street, ”she narrates, dressed in a gray tracksuit uniform and her hair tied up in a strap and a perfect bun. She was then living in the Independencia neighborhood, as was her partner in the Heivy Prison. "There we are so high on the hill that not even the police go up," she adds about one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. Many of the boys in the prison, also born or raised in that neighborhood, second him and complain that at night there was hardly any light or that the school was too far away for them to go every day. “I would like for my neighborhood to recover a dignified life for all those who live there,” they have written in the joint petition. Specifically, they point out that in the most marginal and dangerous neighborhoods where they have grown up, quality facilities and public services, street safety and authorities that guarantee justice are lacking.

Like her mother, Zeany began working for one of the cartels that has frightened Monterrey since she was very young. “She was shot and killed in front of my house when she was 12 years old. It was a rival cartel, so I went to work to get revenge,” she recalls. Around that time she started using marijuana and later she switched to cocaine. The jobs she did for organized crime as a minor were various, from drug sales to murders. However, the police put her in prison for crimes against her health. “They tortured me to talk and groped me, but I didn't say anything. Not because I was brave, but because I didn't want them to go looking for my family, ”she details. Now, she says that when she gets out she wants to study to be a criminologist.

Alba Lerma, the center's psychologist, explains that the boys come from an environment torn apart by violence, which makes it more difficult for them to reintegrate into society or complete their studies. Many of them have been raised in a family that lives marginalized in peripheral neighborhoods with ties to organized crime. “When they leave here and get home everything is the same. The families continue to be gang members and they reoffend again”, she laments. Within the center, adolescents receive training, job orientation and some are on track to finish their studies and enter university. "We have many who want to study to be lawyers or psychologists," adds Lerma. However, the reality outside the prison hits the boys' dreams and once they have served their sentence of up to five years, many go back in for the same crimes. One of the requests of the inmates is that within the psychological support they receive once inside the center, family members can accompany them to work together.

Heivy is afraid to go back to her neighborhood. One of the memories she has of the Colonia de la Independencia is of a friend of hers who studied hard. “He was a comrade who came with our group, but he was not involved in the things that we did. One day he was out there and another gang saw him, they knew he was rubbing shoulders with the enemy and they turned him around,” she recounts. Heivy says that he started working for the cartel from a very young age for the money and because he was impressed by those "armed gentlemen." “They gave me security and protection,” she explains. He insists that as soon as he gets out of prison, he will be assaulted and he no longer trusts the police. He insists that when they arrested him they put drugs in his pockets to have a pretext to confine him. Among the proposals that he wants the candidates for governor to read, he has stressed that they need more support and scholarships for careers as elite athletes in his neighborhood. His truncated dream was to be a professional basketball player and he would like there to be more sports or artistic activities within the center.

There are only nine days left for the elections in which, for the first time, through a pilot program, people in jail without a sentence – more than 2,000 inmates in Mexico, according to the Electoral Central – will be allowed to exercise their right to vote by mail. . The Reinserta organization seeks to make adolescents in the center of Monterrey aware of their role as future voters and to believe in institutions again. Among the proposals that have been collected, there is the repeated demand for more support from the authorities to alert about the consequences of violence from schools. “I would like students in schools to hear about the prevention of violence, to recognize when they exercise it, as a class on how I can resolve a conflict peacefully or about what it means and how I can practice gender equality to have a home. without family violence”, reads the document. The boys have also asked for a mentoring and social entrepreneurship program while they are deprived of their liberty to learn how to start their own business and not commit crimes again.

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