Prison Bound

The group in our prison red

This week, our group was lucky enough to visit a prison in another town very close to Cuernavaca. The building itself was finished in the year 2000 and holds about 2400 male inmates and about 300 female inmates. The justice system here is very different than in the United States. For example here, the inmates aren’t provided a uniform and for this reason when we visited, we all had to wear red to show that we were part of a group and not prisoners. The prison itself was actually quite nice, it had a school for people who wanted to take classes, they offered elementary school to college and even English classes, they had a computer lab and some small factories for people who wanted to work and make some money. The prisoners who would work earn about 100 pesos a week or less that 10 USD but it still gave them the opportunity to save and have some money for when they were released. Another interesting fact was that the female inmates were able to have their children with them in the prison up to 5 years of age. It was interesting to see how our justices systems have some similarities but are also different in many ways.