Bringing Nonviolence to Colombian Jails

The following story was shared by one of the participants in our online nonviolence workshop. You can register for our upcoming course here.

In 2000, Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr. and Capt. Charles Alphin led a nonviolence training in Medellín. After we finished, we went to the Bellavista Jail to share what we learned and do a training there.

We began to train a critical mass of about 3% of the inmates. Bellavista, a jail built for 1700 people, was holding over 5500. Government authorities reported that about 70-80% of crimes in the Medellín area were ordered from Bellavista. There were regular thieves and murderers, but also gang, guerrilla, and paramilitary leaders among the inmates. Every week there were 3-4 homicides inside the prison, an average of 200 per year.

The training began with leaders of each of the pabillions. At the end of the first month, about 300 hundreds inmates were trained. 

The outcome of the training was so great that it was national news and several people came to Bellavista to see if that was really true: the homicide rate in Bellavista went from 200 per year to not one single killing in over 5 years. The success didn’t stop there. The recidivism rate is very high in Colombia, as it is in most countries in the world. But after our program, of the 2000 inmates that were trained in Bellavista during a 7-year process, only 200 have committed a crime again. With the help of the Antioquian Government and the private sector, inmates that were released from Bellavista joined the Dreams of Freedom Corporation and have continued helping former inmates and training youth in many schools and neighborhoods in Medellin.