NEARLY two weeks after an outbreak of violence in a Venezuelan prison complex that has left more than 20 people dead, hundreds of prisoners remain in control of a section of the jail. Too heavily armed to be overwhelmed without heavy loss of life, they are surrounded by the national guard, in an operation that at its height has involved up to 4,000 troops. The inmates are refusing to surrender, despite pleas from Tarek el Aissami, the interior minister, and a group of evangelical pastors.

The Rodeo I and Rodeo II jails, just outside the capital, Caracas, were built to house around 1,300 inmates. But when the shooting broke out on June 19th, they held more than three times that many.

Yet such overcrowding is just one of the problems facing Venezuela's penitentiaries, which are by far the most violent in the western hemisphere. According to the most recent official figures, the homicide rate in Venezuela is 48 per 100,000. (That compares with under 1.5 in England and Wales.) But if you have the misfortune to be in the custody of the state, your chances of dying violently are far higher. Last year, 476 inmates were murdered in Venezuela's prisons—well over 1% of the prison population, and almost 24 times the rate outside.

It is not hard to see why. After the national guard took control of Rodeo I, they displayed the drugs and weapons they had seized. These included not only 9mm pistols and shotguns, but hand-grenades, assault rifles and submachine guns, along with 5,000 rounds of ammunition, 45 kilos of cocaine and 12 kilos of marijuana. The prison, like virtually every other penal establishment in Venezuela, was being run not by prison guards but by the inmates. For a price, they could obtain almost anything they wanted from their guards, short of release.

The Venezuelan prison system, already in dire shape when Hugo Chávez (himself a former prisoner, thanks to a coup attempt in 1992) came to power in 1999, is now an integral part of organised crime in the country. Prisoners use mobile phones to organise kidnapping and extortion, often with the help of corrupt cops.

Thanks to a dysfunctional court system and overworked prosecutors, many prisoners endure years of detention without trial. Around three-quarters of the prison population have not been sentenced, but little effort is made to keep them separate from convicted criminals. The government has been pledging to "humanise" the prisons for years. But you can't humanise what you don't control.

Following the crisis at El Rodeo, parliament is to investigate how prisoners get hold of guns. The prime suspect is the national guard, whose troops are responsible for perimeter security. But ever since Rodeo I was retaken, state-run television has been praising the guard for its efficiency and self-sacrifice. This casts doubt on the authorities' willingness to tackle what was in any case an open secret even before the latest crisis.

The government's main concern appears to be to control the political fall-out. It has accused the opposition, the media and prisoners' NGOs of exploiting the situation for partisan advantage. All had focused on the plight of the prisoners' relatives, who for over a week were kept in the dark as to who had been killed or injured. Trying to stop ambulances to find out who was on board, they were attacked with tear-gas and water cannon by the national guard.

The Inter American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) recently called on the Venezuelan government to "immediately adopt any necessary measures to bring detention conditions in Venezuelan prisons in line with international standards". The government will no doubt ignore this, as it has done half a dozen previous IAHRC exhortations. When the trouble at Rodeo fades from public memory, the prisons will simply go back to business as usual.