Inside El Buen Pastor women’s prison
Bogota’s women’s jail is a long way from the Sainsbury family home in Adelaide, but it may not be the end of the world.
Cassie Sainsbury faces an uncertain future in Colombia’s El Buen Pastor women’s prison, after she was arrested leaving Bogota airport with more than 5kg of cocaine concealed in wrapped headphones she said were bought as gifts for her wedding party. Here are the conditions the 22-year-old from Adelaide is currently facing, plus background information about the notorious prison.
The entrance to Colombia’s El Buen Pastor women’s prison is shut tight with an imposing blue metal sliding gate at the end of a narrow laneway bounded by a military school on one side and a Catholic church on the other.
Behind the gate are prison staff dressed in blue camouflage uniforms and a cluster of buildings and “patios” that are a notorious breeding ground for damaged lives and lost hope.
The jail has a reputation for overcrowding and cramped conditions.
Prisoners must pay to supplement basics and anything but rudimentary medical care.
But authorities reject claims that El Buen Pastor is a prison without redemption.
It has a strong emphasis on education and arts programs for inmates and a well publicised annual beauty pageant.
El Buen Pastor is a long way from Adelaide but it is not as squalid or overcrowded as has been portrayed. Similarly, the European style and clean lines of Bogota, set in a mountain-ringed valley with fertile green surrounds, would surprise many who may have an image of a less ordered, more chaotic South American metropolis.
El Buen Pastor is certainly considered to be safer than many of Colombia’s prisons, particularly male institutions which are wracked with drugs, organised crime and violence.
Women prisoners can receive visitors every day, compared with male inmates who are allowed visitors once a week.
Authorities concede that overcrowding is a problem with some areas of the jail worse than others.
Foreign prisoners like Australian Cassie Sainsbury are separated from the general jail population.
Conditions for foreign prisoners are reportedly of a higher standard with less crowding.
But there is no distinction between the types of crimes punished at El Buen.
“If someone murdered 18 people or shoplifted fruit they are in there together because they are women,” Luis Arturo Paez, communications director for the national prosecution authority said.
Acting out tragedy
Tragedy comes easily to many if the inmates. And one group used their personal experience to perform at the second-annual Theatre Festival for Prisoners, in a rendition of Antigone.
The performance was carried on the TedX Youtube channel, which says the inmates ‘through dramatisation manage to show people what a powerful look at the life that is being held in a seclusion for women’.
One inmate, Lorena Ramirez, told the Washington Post: “Because we’re behind bars, this helps us to feel free.”
In Numbers
• The Buen Pastor prison in Bogotá is home to the largest number of women in-prison in Colombia
• In Colombia, six of the 141 jails are exclusively for women
• Sentences for drug offences represents 48.9% of all the interns in the Buen Pastor
• From 1990 to 2013 the number of women imprisoned in Colombia rose from 2000 to 8500, around 329 per cent
• In en el Buen Pastor prison there is a patio (wing) where pregnant women or women with children serve out their sentence. recent figures indicate there are 23 children under the age of three. Once the children are over three-years-old they must leave the prison to be with a guardian. The space is also adapted to the childrens’ needs
• There is a bakery, beauty salon, a church and a ranch (the kitchen) which serves all nine patios.
(Sourced by Isabel Trujillo)
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