Giles Clarke | Caged in El Salvador

I traveled to a rough suburb 20 miles outside San Salvador and spent some time with a police captain and units charged with patrolling this particularly troubled area where both the M18 gang and MS-13 gang live and operate.
On my last day with the captain, I was chatting with him in the police station when he mentioned the severe overcrowding in the Salvadoran prison system. When I pressed him for more information, he offered to show me what he called the “gang cages” and escorted me to the back of the station flanked by four armed guards.
In a rancid, sweltering prison yard ringed by a high wall topped with barbed wire sat three cages. They stood about 12 feet wide and 15 feet tall—each crammed full of more than 30 human bodies. M18 and MS-13 each had their own cage, with the third reserved for “common criminals.” They were initially constructed to serve as 72-hour holding cells, but I was told that many of the inmates had been imprisoned in these pens for over a year. Most of their days are spent pulling apart their clothes and using the thread to sew together hammocks, where they sleep stacked on top of one another like cords of wood. (...)

http://www.privatephotoreview.com/2013/08/caged-in-el-salvador/