16 above when I mentioned the crucial role of the “guarantor” State in this field, is especially noteworthy and evident. We have only advanced a short distance from Howard’s complaints, which continue to be valid two centuries and many years after the English philanthropist documented them in a couple of admirable works. 71. In several rulings of the Inter-American Court -both provisional measures and judgments on the merits and reparations- the true state of the prisons has been shown quite clearly, together with absolutely abusive treatment of the inmates, the irrational nature of punishment inflicted inside the prison walls, lack of training and extreme cruelty of the guards, impunity of the guilty ones. This is proven. The respondent parties are found responsible. And nothing happens, or very little. This situation not only breaches the commitments undertaken by signing the respective international instruments and the obligations to suppress obstacles and to adopt domestic legal measures –normative ones, yes, but also practical and effective ones in accordance with the former-, pursuant to Articles 1(1) and 2 of the American Convention, but also constitutes a source of very grave problems. Prisons are “time bombs,” as has been said, and they can explode at any moment. These explosions are becoming more and more frequent or visible. 72. Those who study the criminal system and the jurisprudence of the InterAmerican Court, those who resort to it seeking to examine violations, prepare a diagnosis and undertake corrective measures, may take a complete census of prison wrongs based on 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