The Minister for the Penitentiary Service, Mirelys Contreras, confirmed the arrest of four officials allegedly involved in charging prisoners for services, as reported by Últimas Noticias last Friday.
Contreras issued a statement informing that he slowly began the Iron Hand operation “in order to combat and avoid this scourge within the Penitentiary System, this after learning that four corrupt officials who were dedicated to to the falsification of psychosocial tests”.
At the time, it was reported that prisoners were charged between 100 and 200 dollars for including them on lists to carry out psychosocial tests, which is one of the requirements demanded by the Organic Code of Criminal Procedure, in its article 488, to opt for one of the Alternative Formulas for Serving the Sentence, as explained in the Ministry’s statement.
The arrests of the four officials were carried out between last Thursday and Friday by agents of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (Dgcim) in the facilities of the Min-Penitentiary. Minister Contreras said that “the investigations will continue, with the purpose of determining if there are other officials involved.”
In the statement sent by the Min-Penitentiary there is a paragraph where a statement by the Vice Minister for the Attention of Prisoners, Gil Yajure, who clarified that “all the procedures carried out by the Ministry for the Penitentiary Service… are absolutely free, For this reason, he urged the population to file complaints if they detect an official charging for managing the procedures that he reiterated, they are free.”
