El Salvador opened the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in January 2023, spear-headed by its president, Nayib Bukele, in an effort to end years of rampant gang crime in the small Central American nation. A massive complex with a capacity of up to 40,000 inmates. Police and military forces have operated under a “state of exception,” suspending various laws and rights, freeing them to round up suspected gang members and criminals.
There has been no shortage of criticism of Bukele’s approach to his country’s endemic crime problem. Foreign media, NGOs, and others have howled over alleged abuses by police and the suspension of rights. Bukele has ignored most of the noise, noting after CECOT opened last year that “El Salvador has managed to go from being the most insecure country in the world to the safest country in the Americas. How did we do it? Putting criminals in jail. Is there space? Now yes. Will they be able to give orders from inside? No. Can they escape? No. A work of common sense.” Historically, gangsters and criminals in El Salvador’s prisons managed to run their criminal empires from within its walls, facilitated by corruption and lack of resources. Not anymore.
While I join the critiques in condemning any abuse of authority, human rights violations, and regret any extra-constitutional measures or suspensions of rights as prima facie suspect, I write here to make one simple point: El Salvador has attacked crime through incarceration — “mass incarceration” — with extraordinary results.
The homicide rate fell nearly 70% in 2023, compared to 2022, giving what was once one of the most dangerous countries in the world, the second lowest homicide rate in the Americas at 2.4 per every 100,000. Only Canada has a lower homicide rate. In 2019, El Salvador’s homicide rate was 38 per 100,000. In short — incarceration works. The law-abiding public in El Salvador knows it first-hand. They have been liberated from the vicious grip of its gangs, namely MS-13 and Barrio 18, and now can live in relative peace, without fear.
Even the New York Times, in a guest essay, concedes that:
“[w]alking the streets of the capital, San Salvador, in the days before the election [Bukele’s reelection on February 4, 2024], we saw firsthand how families with children have returned to parks. People can now cross formerly impassable gang-controlled borders between neighborhoods. The city center, which for many years was largely empty by sunset, is now lively late into the night.”
We often hear from “mass incarceration” activists that prisons don’t work and are ineffective in deterring crime. True, it is currently fashionable in academia to criticize incarceration, often pointing to studies that show a minimal effect on deterring future crime. To be sure, deterring future crime is an altogether different issue from incapacitating crime today. The CECOT is about the latter, and not necessarily the former. Let’s look at the evidence before our eyes. To wit, an entire nation, formerly one of the most dangerous in the world, built a massive prison, and filled it with tens of thousands of criminals. The result? Crime rates fell — dramatically — and a nation has been transformed for the better.
Although I believe prisons do, in fact, deter crime, deterrence requires more than just incarceration. Bukele seems to understand the difference as he noted in his reelection speech that “if we have already overcome our cancer, with metastases that were the gangs, now we only have to recover and be the person we always wanted to be.” A nod to the fact that there is more to be done to sustain the success that incarceration has produced. Bukele plans to build a new prison, similar to CECOT, to house white-collar criminals, in his push against corruption. Is this Bukele’s plan to “recover” from the “cancer” that has eaten away at the soul of his country — to hit at the roots of crime in El Salvador and deter its resurgence? Time will tell.
It is undeniable that incarcerating criminals has incapacitated them, and thus, they are incapable of committing crime. Who wins? The people of El Salvador. President Bukele was reelected in February with over 85% of the vote — and with a mandate from the people of El Salvador — he will likely continue to fight crime with the tools we know work.
John Q. Prosecutor