17 the items provided by the adjudicatory cases and the advisory opinions. These supplement the efforts made by the domestic constitutional courts, which belatedly sought to apply to prisons, prisoners and guards the constitutional review that should apply to all public functions and agents of the State; and the still isolated, fragmentary, and insufficient efforts of the enforcement courts, which incorporate the principle of lawfulness in this generally obscure field, in which those in charge of execution controlled lives and property, and those subject to that enforcement were “objects of the administration.” 73. Just regarding recent months, and even for the session in which the judgment on the Case of Tibi was issued, we should mention, as I did above, the provisional measures ordered in regards to the Urso Branco prison, where dozens of inmates have lost their lives under very violent circumstances, or study the situations in which children and youths lived and died in the “Juvenile Reeducation Institute”. The situations described by Howard and those in other accounts of prison conditions can hardly reveal more violent and censurable events than those in said “institutions,” nominally geared toward social adjustment –such is the motto- of the inmates. If that is the situation in the prisons –of course, I am not saying that this is the case in all prisons-, the time has come, or rather, it came long ago, to carry out the task that this demands: immediate, in-depth, constant, rigorous reform, until the time –seemingly distant- when prisons, once welcomed hopefully, yield to other more rational and fruitful measures. 74. We need not to go very far to collect evidence of the violations that occur more and more often in prisons. Obviously, it is not merely in certain prison in a given country. This happens, clearly, in various countries –obviously not only of our hemisphere- and in many jails, which have contributed to the disrepute of preventive detention, debatable in itself, as we have said, and of sentences involving deprivation of liberty, which is nevertheless the most frequently invoked, foreseen and applied penal reaction in some places. Too much is expected of the latter, with no grounds for said expectations. 75. Reality of prisons –we must insist on the abyss that separates that reality from the ideal embodied in domestic and international standards- is far from what it would be if the States rigorously fulfilled their role as set forth in the judgment of the European Court, for example, in the Kudla v. Poland case, quoted in the judgment to which I attach this Opinion: “the State must ensure that a person is detained in conditions which are compatible in regards for his human dignity, that the manner and method of the execution of the measure do not subject him to distress or hardship of an intensity exceeding the unavoidable level of suffering inherent in detention and that, given the practical demands of imprisonment, his health and well-being are adequately secured by, among other things, providing him with the requisite medical assistance.” 76. Growing acceptance of preventive detention, on the one hand, and excessive use of punitive incarceration, on the other, have led to overpopulation in the prisons which, in turn, is another source of violations. There, one of the basic, constantly proclaimed rules of prison classification flounders: the separation of indictees –“presumed innocent” and convicts –“found guilty”. This problem is evident in the case we are now discussing, as in some others there continues to be promiscuity between adults and minors, contrary to all recommendations and rules. An expert witness who reported to the Court on this case argued –in a description applicable to many prisons in more than a few countries of our continent- that “protracted criminalization prior to sentencing is currently the most serious problem of the criminal justice system” in the State.