E/CN.4/1997/7/Add.3 page 20 some offence tend to wait in prison until their innocence or guilt has been established (...). Many of the accused spend more time in prison waiting for their case to come to trial than the maximum sentence they would have received 23 for the offence of which they are accused”. According to the report by the Attorney-General's Office, out of a total of 22,652 inmates at the end of 1995, only 7,130 had actually been convicted. 66. The President of the Supreme Court of Justice said that there was a lack of coordination between the administrative, judicial and prison services and a shifting of blame with regard to the cause of procedural delays; for the administrators, the judges were to blame because they took too long to pass judgement; the judges on the other hand argued that they could not judge cases because the detainees were not brought before them. Meanwhile the Prosecutor's Office said that it was hampered in its duties by the Ministry of Justice, which did not heed suggestions regarding how to deal with overcrowding in the prisons. Every day they could see how the Ministry ignored their proposals regarding the transfer of detainees to the courts when called to appear by the jurisdictional authorities, on the grounds that there were no means of transport or no staff available. The upshot, as the Office pointed out, was that the general overcrowding could be considered to be due largely to the inefficient operation of the Ministry of Justice. 67. In the midst of this situation, there were complaints of the corruption to which detainees and their relatives were exposed, having to pay illegally for any service which brought any kind of benefit whatever to individual detainees in the prison establishments, and even for transfer to the courts. It may be pointed out in this respect that under article 73 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, defendants may apply through the director of the prison or establishment where they are detained to be transferred to the court for their case to be examined in the company of a lawyer, or failing that, a person of trust. The Director of Prisons, on the other hand, suggested that for some procedures the judges should themselves visit the prisons, which would avoid many transfers of detainees, but that they did not do so out of lack of interest. 68. Generally speaking, not even the least criteria are used to classify the prison population. In most places of detention, there is no separation between convicted and unconvicted persons, nor any selection according to the seriousness of the offences committed or the dangerous nature of the individuals concerned, the inmates being distributed within a prison in accordance with their liking. There is, moreover, a high level of violence 24 between inmates, due to a large extent to a general state of idleness and to the large quantity of weapons held by detainees, partly supplied by the officials themselves through corrupt practices. In this respect, according to the Attorney-General's report, the latter dealt with 130 cases of homicide 25 and 799 cases of assault in prisons in 1995. In addition, ill-treatment is not infrequently inflicted by officials on detainees for reasons of discipline. 69. As a result of all the above factors, outbreaks of violence are liable to occur, as one did on 3 January 1994, when over 100 detainees were killed and dozens wounded at the National Prison of Maracaibo; on that occasion, one group of prisoners locked up another in one of the wings, setting fire to the