Inside Costa Rica’s cells were televisions left on, microwaves heating food, and cables plugged into the wall as if it were just another home.
That came to an abrupt end. President Laura Fernández Delgado and the Minister of Justice and Peace, Gabriel Aguilar, ordered an operation that removed 352 televisions, 238 microwave ovens, and ripped out every last electrical outlet from the cells. No electricity within reach, no screens, no comforts that seemed normal but had been there for years, so normalized that no one questioned them within the prison system.
The logic behind it is cold and calculated: without outlets, there is no way to operate devices that often served to coordinate illicit activities from inside. The Government frames it as a tough-on-crime policy inspired by El Salvador, with an objective stated by Aguilar: that the state, not the inmates, decides what happens behind those walls.