The data was released by the deputy director for the Administrative Area of the Penitentiary Service, Cristóvão dos Anjos, when he was opening the seminar on "Criminal Procedural Law: Alternative Measures to Prison and Rehabilitation", co-organized with the Ufolo Study Center.
According to Cristóvão dos Anjos, currently the penitentiary services, with an installed capacity of 22,554 places, control 24,068 inmates across the country, of which 12,404 are convicts.
Cristóvão dos Anjos said that there is an overcrowding of 1514 inmates, representing 2 percent of the Angolan penal population, calling for greater procedural speed by the bodies that administer justice.
The deputy director for the Administrative Area of the Penitentiary Service noted that there are currently 2,664 inmates in prisons in excess of pre-trial detention in the preparatory instruction phase and 889 in the judicial phase, making a total of 3,553 inmates in this condition, corresponding to 14 percent of the total criminal population.
The seminar, he considered, allowed "reflection on the numerous problems" that hinder the management of the 43 penitentiary establishments in the country, which highlighted overcrowding, excessive preventive detention, the situation of expired sentences, the lack of delivery of judgments and copy of sentence settlement, as well as slowness in the procedural process.
In turn, the national director of Penal Control, Emílio Mendes, said that the 43 existing prisons in Angola receive mostly men, and four are for women, housing 590 inmates.
Emílio Mendes proposed the application of additional penalties, because the number of hospitalizations in penitentiary establishments "is high", also complaining about the delay in the processing of cases and suggesting that public prosecutors' visits to prison establishments be periodic, in order to speed up the Law Suit.
According to Emílio Mendes, several inmates with excessive pre-trial detention, whether in the preparatory or judicial instruction phase, have been in this situation for more than a year.
"Unfortunately, we have inmates in pre-trial detention for more than one, two or three [years], without being judged in the first instance, we have this data", highlighted the person in charge, adding that there are still inmates taken to jail by the Public Prosecutor's Office, before the guarantee judge came into operation a year ago.
One of the consequences of overcrowding, continued the national director of Penal Control, is the rehandling of inmates, explaining that those in pre-trial detention cannot be transferred from one place to another.
