Prison overcrowding highlights swamped justice in Central America

Central America's relentless struggle with gangs and street crime has created a worrying consequence: prisons so overcrowded they serve more as schools for felons than institutions for rehabilitation, according to experts. Together, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama have 103,993 convicts in around a hundred penitentiaries -- whose combined capacity is meant to be 48,218. "The overcrowding highlights the failure of the structure of the justice system in its entirety," said Laura Andrade, a Salvadoran expert on prison issues.

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