The Constitutional Court gave free rein to the bill that allows mothers who are heads of households to have differentiated criminal treatment And don’t go to jail for petty crimes.
The high court rejected the objections that the national government had presented to the norm, arguing that it could encourage some crimes such as micro-trafficking, but the Court did not admit them.
As a result of this, Senator Rodrigo Lara, who was the author of the proposal in Congress, asked President Iván Duque to speed up the sanction of this law, to help mothers who are heads of households.
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“With this law we basically seek that those women who have responsibility for the home can serve their sentence with an alternative to jail, for example doing public utility work, helping to fix a park, a road, or taking care of the elderly. Basically, what we are looking for is not to continue reproducing injustices and that the penalty fulfills a resocializing purpose, ”she said.
Laura explained that a woman who has committed a petty crime in order to feed her children, I shouldn’t go to prison because that has serious repercussions on his family.
“What about these women who are convicted of a better crime? For example, a woman who lives off a little house, who sells candy or chewing gum in an area where drugs are openly consumed, because the minimum dose is tolerated, and she even sells a ticket to improve her children’s diet or pay the rent, That woman can get four or five years in prison and her children end up being sentenced to be homeless or to have a mother because this is a country of mothers who are heads of households,” she said.
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“These children end up homeless, without a mother, if they are lucky they end up living with their grandparents or with their extended family and it is proven that these children must drop out of school or that they are sexually abused where they end up living or end up falling into drugs or alcohol,” he added.
The congressmen warned that this law will only apply to women who commit this kind of offense only once, there will be no benefits for recidivism. “With this law we are looking for criminal alternatives for those poor women who end up committing a minor crime without violence and for the first time,” said.
It is expected that in the next few hours the president will sign the law so that it can enter into force.
