Human Rights behind bars. Paying a debt that keeps on growing

• Autores: Pablo Sartorio
• Localización: Current Issues On Human Rights / coord. por Alexander Sungurov, Carlos R. Fernández Liesa, María del Carmen Barranco Avilés, María Cruz Llamazares Calzadilla, Óscar Pérez de la Fuente, 2020, ISBN 978-84-1324-552-2, págs. 159-170
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • “Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members -- the last, the least, the littlest.”1 It is undisputed that among the weakest members of any society are those behind bars. Although the most common argument to justify their situation is that those who break the law deserve to face the harshest punishment and to be behind bars, such affirmation is myopic at best.

    As a criminal defense attorney for the last nine years, I recognize my bias towards those I have represented as in my opinion, they are not defined by their mistakes. However, biases aside for the most part, I have been able to see that wrongdoers and victims are not neatly divided as initially thought. Instead, those roles can be interchangeable making the boundaries as blurry as good and evil. Does keeping individuals behind bars actually keeping us safer? Can we incarcerate massive amount of individuals and continue to call ourselves, the beacon of freedom? Is the way we deal with those behind bars so morally wrong as to amount to a human rights violation? I continue to ponder over these questions.

    This paper discusses the relationship between the United Nations (UN) Declaration of Human Rights, specifically, the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (dubbed the Nelson Mandela Rules in the revised 2015 version) and the current state of the penitentiary system in the United States. Next, it briefly analyzes the Mandela Rules discussing what are the protections provided against Human Rights for prisoners and evaluate it against what occurs in practice. To this end, we discuss the case of Marcus who faced years behind bars for assaulting another man and whose humanity and background was the key to unlocking his own shackles.

    Marcus’s case exemplifies why the criminal justice system is not designed to rehabilitate in its current function often estranged from human rights even in the most developed countries, such as the United States, but gives us hope that even in the most egregious circumstances, we can give someone a second chance at redemption.