42 regards implementation. These issues will be addressed extensively in the chapter of this report focusing on the Inter-American standards. 98. In any case, all these processes share the common denominator of tending to reduce the margins for the judge’s individualized assessment regarding the need for and applicability of pretrial detention in a specific case. This situation leads to the automatic imposition of pretrial detention and may be incompatible with the American Convention. 99. Moreover, as will be seen in the following section, these reform processes are generally accompanied by loud media, political, and institutional messages, originating from the highest spheres of government and which receive great popular backing. Thus, in a broad sense, justice operators “are highly pressured by the legislative changes but, above all, by the social control brought to bear on them by the media, and most of them ultimately act in accordance with those pressures, regardless 142 of their juridical convictions.” 100. At the same time, and regardless of the possible incompatibilities between these criminal justice policies, which are based on increased restrictions of the right to personal liberty, and the international obligations assumed by States vis-à-vis their citizens, the IACHR notes that there is no empirical evidence to show that they have any genuine impact on reducing crime and violence, nor that they serve to resolve, 143 in any broader sense, the problems of citizen security. 101. This has been repeatedly noted by international human rights mechanisms. For example, during his visit to El Salvador in 2010, the Rapporteur for Persons Deprived of their Liberty noted that the country’s prison population was in excess of 24,000 people (with an installed capacity for 8,110) and that the levels of criminal activity and violence continued to rise in spite of the massive use of 144 incarceration. Similarly, following its recent visit to El Salvador in 2012, the WGAD ratified the failure of the policies known as “Plan Mano Dura” (2003) and “Plan Mano Súper-Dura” (2005), which have chiefly focused on police repression and the generalized use of pretrial detention. In that context, the WGAD emphasized that the need to address the problem of public security was “a legitimate State concern,” but that this 142 CEJA, Judicial Systems – Pretrial Detention (Sistemas Judiciales – Prisión Preventiva), Year 7, No. 14: Cristian Riego, A New Agenda for Pretrial Detention in Latin America (Una nueva agenda para la prisión preventiva en América Latina), p. 8. 143 Similar comments have been made at various United Nations forums, including the Twelfth Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, which was held in Salvador, Brazil, on April 12 to 19, 2010. See Background paper on the Workshop on Strategies and Best Practices against Overcrowding in Correctional Facilities, A/CONF.213/16, published January 25, 2010, para. 14 144 IACHR, Press Release 104/10 – IACHR Office of the Rapporteur Attests to Structural Deficiencies in Prison System of El Salvador, Washington, D.C., October 20, 2010, Annex, available at: https://www.cidh.oas.org/Comunicados/English/2010/104-10eng.htm.