Africa-Press – Angola. Seventy percent of the 25,000 inmates across the country are young people who need to be included in social work so that, when they are released, they can be useful to society, defended the director general of the Penitentiary Service in Luena.
Bernardo Gourgel, who was speaking on Monday in Luena, where he evaluated the functioning of the sector, said that there were contacts with the Ministry of Education in order to allow inmates with no education or a low level to complete their secondary education in prison.
He referred that the 25,000 inmates are between 16 and 35 years old and are distributed in 40 prisons in the country. He informed, however, that the construction of 11 new penitentiary establishments is under way.
When referring to the social work of inmates, he said that there are around 31,000 hectares of unexplored land in the country that need to be organized in the best possible way to be used for agricultural and arts and crafts projects. The idea is to contribute to the improvement of the inmates’ diet and to their professionalization.
Regarding the visit to Luena, the director general of the Penitentiary Service was impressed by the level of organization of the bodies involved in the administration of justice, the hygiene in the disciplinary cells, as well as the inexistence of cases of excessive preventive detention.
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