After becoming president of El Salvador in 2019, Nayib Bukele established the “Zero Leisure” prison work program, providing savings to the government while rehabilitating inmates. Under the program, the country’s large prison population engages in agricultural work, producing the food they consume. Inmates grow their own vegetables and tend to animals, gaining valuable skills that could lead to legal occupations upon release.
Nayib Bukele keeps hitting home runs.
He launched the Zero Leisure Plan, where prisoners repair the damage they have done to society and gain new skills.pic.twitter.com/Vl9mlKOYjc
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 29, 2024
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El Salvador’s director of Penitentiary Centers, Osiris Luna Meza, explained: “This is the transformation of the penitentiary system with the Government of President Nayib Bukele, where people with the will to change their lives learn different skills while serving their sentence.”
The cost savings from the program allow for additional inmate education opportunities, including workshops for creating serigraphy, printing, hammocks, and other manufactured goods. In the US, most prisons have work programs in conjunction with private businesses. Unlike El Salvador’s program, US businesses benefit from prison labor charged at rates well below minimum wage, between $1 and $4 per hour, with a captive labor pool that has no other employment options.
In 2021, the program in El Salvador helped renovate 96 schools, 84 police headquarters, and 162 healthcare buildings. Inmates staffed crews of stonemasons, electricians, mechanics, and carpenters, providing critical skilled labor. These inmates could benefit from valuable skills in El Salvador’s rapidly expanding construction industry, which grew by 13.5 percent in 2023 and comprised 12.5 percent of the national GDP when combined with the complementary real estate industry.
Following the ascendancy of tough-on-crime President Nayib Bukele, who was elected on a promise to end gang violence, the country of El Salvador has seen a precipitous drop in murder rates after arresting one percent of its population. Bukele was inaugurated for his second term on Saturday, June 1st.
Since Bukele took office in July 2019, the number of homicides fell from 2,398 in 2019 to just 154 in 2023. Bukele was elected for his second term with 84.7 percent of the vote, and his party (which he founded) gained a supermajority in Congress, according to an AP report.
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