Beggars are often rounded up by police and thrown into jail without charges being filed against them for years. This adds to the overcrowding in Indian prisons already reeling under a lack of basic facilities. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Aug 9 2016 (IPS)

A media frenzy ensued in New Delhi last month when a popular television channel highlighted the horrific living conditions of women inmates in ward number six of Tihar Jail, South Asia’s largest prison.

The program – “Fear and Loathing in Tihar” — beamed into people’s homes the prisoners’ abysmal treatment by the administration: 600 of them packed like sardines into space meant for half that number, a lack of basic amenities, and a shocking state apathy towards detainees in the world’s largest democracy."Some [women inmates] even have kids who have to stay with them in those pathetic conditions till they are six years old." --Delhi-based human rights lawyer Maninder Singh

By highlighting the prisoners’ misery, the program also helped shine a light on a broken judicial system where thousands are subjected to prolonged periods of incarceration without ever seeing a judge, or whose perfunctory court appearances stretch for years thanks to a corrupt legal system clogged with too many cases, and too few judges to try them. The injustice of lengthy detention is compounded by the horrific conditions of the jail facilities.

As the world celebrates Prisoners Justice Day on Aug. 10, human rights advocates say the state of Indian detention centres needs to come into focus again. Most Indian jails fail to meet the minimum United Nations standards for such facilities, including inadequate amounts of food, poor nutrition, and unsanitary conditions. Torture and other forms of ill-treatment are also common. The cells are also often dilapidated, with poor ventilation and absence of natural light.

According to a 2015 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India on Tihar Jail, the prison complex is reeling under a prisoner population more than double its sanctioned strength and understaffed by 50 per cent of its required workforce. The key findings of the report suggest that the 10 jails in Tihar were grossly overcrowded with 14,209 prisoners against a capacity of 6,250.

Moreover, against government rules, 51 prisoners awaiting trial were found to have already served more than half the maximum term of punishment for the offences they were booked under, the report says.

Medical facilities, adds the damning report, are non-existent. There’s paucity of doctors, paramedical, ministerial, factory and Class IV staff by 18 to 63 per cent in the prison which despite an in-house 150-bed hospital and additional dispensaries in each of the 10 jails. The CAG found that “the hospital was not equipped to face any emergency situation”.

The subhuman conditions take a toll on human health — both mental and physical, a former inmate told IPS. “Women prisoners prefer to take care of each other when they are indisposed as there are only male doctors doing rounds most of the time,” she said. “I remember once a young woman had a miscarriage and bled for a few hours before she was taken to the hospital.”

In India, a country where U.N. figures indicate that 270 million people – or 21.9 percent of the population – live below the poverty line, justice for the poor is often delayed as well as denied. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

The fate of prisoners on death row is worse. Not only do they inhabit inhumane living conditions, they face unfair trials and horrific acts of police torture, according to a study by the Death Penalty Research Project at the National Law University in Delhi. The study, based on interviews with 373 of the 385 inmates believed to be on death row in India, offers a harrowing insight into the unbearable conditions the prisoners have to live in as they wait for judges to decide their fate.

The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) report 2015 says that poor budget allocation, the way accused are arrested and non-issuance of bail along with miserable conditions in prisons were leading factors attributed to the existing living conditions of the inmates. It added that the situation calls for a trained administration to bring reformation in prisoners’ lives.

Legal eagles say the biggest bottleneck is the country’s overburdened criminal justice system which has a cascading effect on prisoners’ lives. Overcrowding is the most common. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) records, in 2013, the total number of prisoners was 411,992, of which a startling 278,503 were prisoners awaiting trial. Delay in providing justice, inadequate court infrastructure, and inaccessibility of a large number of prisoners to legal help make matters worse.

As per records, currently over three million cases are pending in various Indian courts across the country. Erstwhile PM Manmohan Singh remarked that India had the world’s largest backlog of court cases. Bloomberg Business Week estimates if that all the Indian judges attacked their backlog without breaks for eating and sleeping, and closed 100 cases every hour, it would take more than 35 years to catch up.

“The severe delay in delivering justice is largely due to the fact that many courts share judges with each other, resulting in extremely slow trial procedures. There’s no effective legal redress mechanism for under trials,” explains Ajay Verma, Senior Fellow, International Bridges to Justice, a non-profit that supports justice and human rights. “These institutional pathologies result in unjust and prolonged detention.”

Delhi-based human rights lawyer Maninder Singh says that many detainees are forced to be in jail longer than the maximum sentence for the offense with which they were charged, with some people spending as long as two decades in detention before being convicted or released by the courts.

Women awaiting trial in particular, adds Singh, are made to suffer as they are too poor to afford justice. “Some even have kids who have to stay with them in those pathetic conditions till they are six years old. Many under trials languish for months without even charges being framed against them. There’s simply no legal recourse available to them.”

After studying the living conditions of jail inmates across India, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) made some key recommendations for prison reform. These include replacing the 1894 Prison Act with a new one, amending prison manuals keeping human rights in mind, reducing overcrowding, one of the biggest problems in most prisons, shifting foreign nationals to detention centres from prisons after their sentence is completed, till they are deported to their respective countries.

Despite the gloom, experts suggest that it’s not as if the situation is irretrievable. What is needed is political will and a more humanitarian approach to a very complex problem. Already, some measures in Indian jails — like rehabilitation and skilling prisoners for their gainful employment post jail term — have come in for accolades. Tihar boasts of a full-fledged cottage industry where training for carpentry, baking, tailoring, fabric painting and other crafts are imparted to empower inmates. The revenues generated from selling products made by the prisoners helps in the prison’s upkeep. Wage earning and gratuity schemes and incentives help reduce the psychological burden on the convicts.

But as Singh and Verma point out, while these measures should be amplified, the State needs to urgently focus on faster disposal of court cases, speedier justice and better conditions in jail to make life more bearable for the inmates.

Jannete Salvador and Doris Zabala plant chives on the Izalco prison farm for women in the western Salvadoran department of Sonsonate. The government is extending the use of farm work and other activities in prisons to keep inmates active and productive. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
IZALCO, El Salvador, Dec 29 2015 (IPS)

Doris Zabala squats down in the field to pull up radishes. She is working on a prison farm in El Salvador, where more and more penitentiaries are incorporating agricultural work and other activities to keep prisoners busy.

“The harvest has been good – nice, big red radishes,” Zabala told IPS. She is one of 210 inmates at the Centro Penitenciario para Mujeres Granja Izalco – a prison farm for women in the municipality of Izalco in the western department of Sonsonate.

This facility is only for minimum-security women prisoners who already have weekend leave to visit their families.

Of the 210 prisoners, 80 work in the fields, while the rest are active in other areas, such as cooking in the prison kitchen or taking care of the inmates’ children.

On the 26 hectares of land used by the prison farm, the women use agroecological methods to grow radishes, sesame, tomatoes, corn, papaya and other fruit and vegetables. A small chicken farm has also begun to operate, and a tilapia fish farm is on the cards.

“At my house there is land for growing things, so when I’m free I plan to continue gardening because I like it,” said 32-year-old Cecilia Méndez, who has spent six years in prison. She told IPS she is set to be released in eight months.

The farm was inaugurated in January 2011 as part of the government’s efforts to offer occupational alternatives in the country’s overpopulated prisons, to gradually ease the problems of idle prisoners, overcrowding, violence and crime that have reigned supreme in the penitentiaries for decades.

This Central American country’s 21 prisons were built for a combined total of 8,100 prisoners, but currently hold 32,300 – four times the capacity – according to official figures.

There is an “enormous humanitarian crisis in the penitentiary system” says the report “The Salvadoran Prison System and its Facilities”, published in November this year by the University Institute for Public Opinion (IUDOP) at the catholic José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA), under the auspices of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

The Izalco prison farm is part of the government programme Yo Cambio (I Change), which includes a number of measures aimed at boosting the reintegration of prisoners and reducing recidivism.

The programme offers skills training, activities and work to keep inmates busy and improve their reinsertion into society once they are released. Projects also include rebuilding, enlarging and refurbishing existing prisons and the construction of new facilities, to ease the serious problem of overcrowding.

“Everyone thinks we don’t do anything, that we sit around thinking abut things that we shouldn’t, but we actually keep busy,” said Méndez, walking between rows of chives (Allium schoenoprasum).

The use of environmentally-friendly farming techniques, such as organic fertiliser, is a key part of the process.

“The idea is to teach the inmates new practices,” Óscar Menéndez, the farm administrator, told IPS.

“Anyone who likes to work keeps busy here,” María Cristina Vásquez, 53, who is in charge of the papaya crop and the small chicken coop with 100 chicks that arrived recently, which she cares for with dedication.

The farm’s output is for internal prison consumption and the surplus is sent to other penitentiaries.

On Dec. 22, the government signed a 4.2 million dollar contract with a construction company to refurbish the facilities in Izalco, to improve conditions.

A similar prison farm is located outside the city of Santa Ana in the department of the same name in western El Salvador.

The programme is not limited to farms but also includes other employment activities, in other prisons, such as carpentry and shoe production and repair.

In the Centro Penal Apanteos prison, 72 km west of San Salvador, also in the department of Santa Ana, the inmates set up a novel laboratory where they produce 60,000 tilapia fish in the larval stage per month.

They also created a factory that produces bleach and disinfectant, based on the expertise passed along by a former prisoner.

“He knew how to do this, and our motto here is that whoever knows something teaches it to others who don’t know,” said Rolando Artiaga, 24, who is in charge of running the small factory. They produce 200 gallons of disinfectant and 150 gallons of bleach a month, which are sold inside the prison itself.

The programme also includes activities like sports, education, healthcare, religion, art and culture.

But not all the inmates have access to these benefits.

Of the 32,300 prisoners in the country, only one-third benefit from the project, in 12 prisons around the country, Orlando Elías Molina, assistant director of the government’s prison administration agency, the DGCP, told IPS.

In the biggest prison, La Esperanza, to the north of San Salvador, the authorities tried to launch some of the activities used by the programme, in mid-2015, but the efforts were frustrated because of the gangs that control the prison, he added.

“If we let the criminal structures run this, it’s not going to work,” Molina said.

Next year, he added, they will try to get activities going even in those prisons that specifically hold gang members, such as the one in Chalatenango, in the north of the country, which houses members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang. It is one of the most violent gangs along with Barrio 18.

“The prisons hide the miseries of this unjust society….” Relatives of the 81 inmates who died in a blaze in the San Miguel prison in Santiago, Chile are demanding justice for the victims. Credit: Courtesy of Desconcierto.cl

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Feb 2 2015 (IPS)

In Latin America’s prisons, notorious for extreme overcrowding and violence, inmates live in constant danger of being killed – a contradiction in a region where virtually every country has abolished the death penalty.

“In many Latin American countries, a prison sentence can become a death sentence in practice,” said Amerigo Incalcaterra, regional representative for South America of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

The abolition of capital punishment has a long tradition in this region. Venezuela was the first country in the world to do away with the death penalty, in 1863, and Costa Rica was the third country to do so, in 1882. Only two countries in the region still have the death penalty on their books: Cuba and Guatemala, where the last recorded executions were carried out in 2003 and 2000, respectively.

But the progress made on that front stands in sharp contrast with the appalling conditions in Latin America’s prisons, where human rights organisations and experts warn that the situation is grave.

High levels of violence, numerous murders and other crimes inside the prison walls, and serious human rights abuses are some of the problems in penitentiaries in the region, they report.

“In Latin America the prison systems face chronic problems which have not been adequately addressed, let alone resolved, by governments,” Incalcaterra said in an interview with IPS.

Olga Espinoza, the head of the area of penitentiary studies in the University of Chile’s Centre for Citizen Security Studies, also said the region’s prison systems are in a state of crisis.“States and society in general must become aware that the prison crisis in their countries not only affects people deprived of their liberty, but also their families and society as a whole.” -- Amerigo Incalcaterra

“The latest report by the United Nations Development Programme provides very concrete data on the conditions of overpopulation and overcrowding, disproportionate numbers of inmates in preventive custody, fragile institutions in many countries, and difficulties in the effective implementation of social reinsertion programmes,” Espinoza told IPS.

One of the worst cases is Venezuela, where prison violence is extreme, with clashes involving firearms, explosives and other weapons, experts note.

In Venezuela, with a total prison population of 53,000, the authorities reported to the OHCHR that 402 inmates were killed in the first 11 months of 2014. The U.N. agency reports that overpopulation in the country’s prisons stands at 231 percent, although the government argues that there is no overcrowding in 87 percent of the prisons.

In the case of Brazil, human rights groups report cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions in the prisons, and there are numerous reports of torture, such as practices like asphyxiation with plastic bags, beatings and electric shocks.

Members of the military police are involved in the majority of cases, they say.

“However, Venezuela and Brazil are not isolated cases, but form part of a generalised pattern in the region,” Incalcaterra said.

“Certainly, both countries are facing serious challenges of prison violence and lack of state control in certain cases, as reported by several independent United Nations mechanisms,” he said.

“But no country in the region is free of the problems of overcrowding, precarious detention conditions, lack of access to basic services, and cases of mistreatment and torture,” he added.

The chronic problems facing the region’s penitentiary systems include severe overcrowding due to the systematic use of prison sentencing rather than alternative measures, and a lack of adequate infrastructure, Incalcaterra said.

To that is added “the lack of access to basic health services and adequate food, and general prison conditions that do not meet minimal international standards,” the OHCHR representative said.

“This situation fuels prison violence, including cases of torture, and directly affects the integrity and dignity of people deprived of freedom,” he said.

According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, there were 943,000 people in prison in the region in 2013, 354,000 of whom were in preventive detention, awaiting trial or sentencing.

The most critical cases were those of Bolivia, where 84 percent of the prison population has not yet been sentenced, followed by Paraguay (73.1 percent), Panama and Uruguay (65 percent), Peru (58.8 percent), Venezuela (50.3 percent) and Guatemala (50.3 percent).

Tragedies

As a result, tragedies happen, such as the one that occurred on Dec. 8, 2010 in Chile, the worst in the history of the country’s prisons. In the fire, 81 inmates died, most of whom were first-time offenders in prison for minor crimes.

The San Miguel prison had at the time a population of 1,875 and a capacity for just 632 prisoners, which meant overpopulation of 197 percent.

Chile is the country with the highest incarceration rate in Latin America, with 318 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to the Latin American average of 100 to 150 prisoners per 100,000 population and a European average of 60 to 100.

In 2012 the government created the unit for the protection and promotion of human rights in the gendarmerie – the institution in charge of Chile’s penitentiaries – to reduce mistreatment and torture in the country’s prisons.

But according to the annual human rights report of the Diego Portales University, the advances seen in terms of prison policies are far from an integral public policy that would lead to meeting the basic needs of prisoners and to improving compliance with international human rights standards.

Incalcaterra said these situations arise from the fact that “the prison crisis is not a priority on the agendas and programmes of governments in the region.”

The OHCHR official said there is a lack of transparency and regular and independent oversight in prisons, as a fundamental tool to prevent torture and mistreatment and to bring about structural improvements in prison systems.

And although people deprived of their liberty are one of society’s most vulnerable groups, “they are also one of the most unpopular,” he added.

Espinoza said that in the last five years, reforms have been carried out in countries in the region, aimed mainly at providing stronger institutions for the prison systems.

But the crisis, she said, makes it necessary to consider measures that would help bring about definitive solutions in the medium to long term. For example, she mentioned the need to design public policies in the area of security containing social reinsertion components as a key to guaranteeing success in their implementation.

Incalcaterra added that “states and society in general must become aware that the prison crisis in their countries not only affects people deprived of their liberty, but also their families and society as a whole.”

“Prisons are the reflection of a society,” he concluded.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Senate Human Rights Commission during its restricted visit to Pedrinhas on Jan. 13. Credit: Courtesy of the Ana Rita Senator Office.

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 28 2014 (IPS)

Nearly every day, violence breaks out in a Brazilian prison. In January the focus has been on the northeastern state of Maranhão, where orders issued from behind bars wreaked havoc in the streets of its capital city, illustrating the scope of national prison anarchy.

Even though public opinion is hardened to crime reports from Brazil’s 1,478 prisons, where 218 inmates were killed in 2013, people are shocked by what is happening in the Pedrinhas Penitentiary Complex in the city of São Luis, the state capital.

Several riots and mutinies have broken out during January in this prison, with a death toll of three inmates so far, and another fatality Monday Jan. 27 in a nearby prison. All the episodes of violence have been expressions of rejection of the presence of military police within the prison and the transfer of certain prisoners to maximum security facilities since Jan. 20.

It all began on the night of Jan. 3, when imprisoned gang leaders ordered their followers on the outside to burn buses and attack police stations in the city, causing the death of a girl who sustained burns on 95 percent of her body, and injuring five other people.

On Jan. 7, a gruesome video filmed in Pedrinhas by inmates, showing the corpses of three rival gang members decapitated during another mutiny on Dec. 17, shocked the country when it was disseminated by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, and galvanised regional and national authorities into action.

The crisis in Pedrinhas reflects the fragility of the Brazilian prison system, Mário Macieira, the president of the Maranhão chapter of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB), told IPS. In his view the country’s prison crisis, far from improving, is becoming more acute.

“There is a constant repetition of the same picture in the Brazilian prison situation: overpopulation, appalling hygienic conditions and lack of food security. Unfortunately, the collapse of this system is no novelty. But the crisis has acquired the dimensions of a tragedy,” he said.

All the units in Pedrinha, except for the women’s prison, are overcrowded and are the scenes of violence between rival gangs, whose leaders provoke frequent riots. The prison was built for 1,700 prisoners but houses 2,500.

Brazil, the country with the fifth largest population in the world at nearly 200 million people, is the fourth country for the number of people deprived of liberty, 550,000, behind the United States, China and Russia. In terms of prison overcrowding it is placed 32nd, with an overpopulation of 172 percent, according to United Nations figures.

According to the OAB, 218 prisoners were killed in the country in 2013, 60 of them in Maranhão. Twenty-eight percent of the deaths occurred in Pedrinhas, Macieira said.

Since Jan. 3, the military police and national security forces have been regaining control of Pedrinhas, which is under de facto domination by bosses of criminal gangs on the inside, who use their mobile phones to direct many criminal activities on the outside as well.

The OAB’s human rights commission has not been able to enter the prison, for security reasons, they were told. The Senate Human Rights Commission was allowed in on Jan. 13, but has not been able to visit several sectors for the same reasons.

In late 2013 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) asked the Brazilian government to take immediate measures to prevent persistent abuses and unsanitary conditions in Pedrinhas and another prison in the south of the country.

The IACHR request was in response to the complaint lodged in October by the OAB and the Maranhão Human Rights Association about human rights violations in Pedrinhas and other prisons in the state.

Maranhão is a small state, and one of the poorest in the country. Its incarceration rate is 100.6 prisoners per 100,000 population, which is lower than the national average of 401.7 prisoners per 100,000 population.

Nationwide there is a shortage of 211,000 prison places, but in Maranhão the deficit is only 2,000 beds, in a scenario in which Pedrinhas has the worst overcrowding problem.

According to the Brazil’s 2013 Annual Report on Public Security, the states which most need to expand their prisons are São Paulo (which needs 88,500 additional prison places), Minas Gerais (18,500) and Pernambuco (17,900).

In Macieira’s view, the pacification of prisons in Maranhão requires new prisons to be opened urgently, but the regional authorities have said new units will only become available at the end of 2014.

Rodrigo de Azevedo, a sociologist, told IPS that the prisons crisis has worsened in the last 20 years because of increased institutional violence, overpopulation and criminal gangs operating within prison facilities.

“Brazil’s penal system targets the poor and the working classes,” he complained. Moreover, the prison system culture “encourages violent situations like those that have occurred in Maranhão or other states at other times,” he said.

Azevedo coordinates a research group on public policies for security and the administration of criminal justice at the Pontificia Universidade Católica in Rio Grande do Sul.

According to his analysis, the war on drugs and excessive use of provisional internment on remand, while criminal suspects are awaiting trial, contribute to increasing incarceration rates in Brazil.

Around 40 percent of Brazilian prisoners have not been sentenced, and in some states, like Maranhão, 70 percent of the prison population is interned on remand.

Another problem, Azevedo said, is that a large part of Brazilian society feels that criminals – or suspected criminals if they have not yet been tried – deserve to suffer vindictive torments over and above the punishment imposed by law. Consequently, abuses of prisoners’ human rights arouse few outcries.

Azevedo pointed out that aggression between inmates is frequent in Brazilian prisons and may also involve relatives, who are victims of extorsion and physical violence.

“There are denunciations that women (visitors) have been forced to have sex with leaders (of prisoners’ gangs) under threat of violence against their imprisoned relatives. This goes far beyond any legal punishment,” he said.

Azevedo is convinced that only a thorough reform of the Brazilian prison system will bring about positive changes in prison policy.

“If we want to prevent crime in Brazil and reduce violence, the issue of prisons must be addressed. What is happening in the prisons is reflected in urban violence,” he said.

But in spite of recurring alarms about mutinies and massacres among inmates, experts say that political will and social sensibility are lacking to tackle the drama of prisons in this emerging power.

U.S. officials on Wednesday issued strict new guidelines on the use of solitary confinement for detainees being held on immigration charges, the first federal policy decision following a strengthened public debate on the country’s unprecedented dependence on “segregated housing”.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture says solitary confinement can have detrimental and irreversible effects on individuals’ mental health. Credit: Bigstock

In a stark turnaround, immigration detainees will only be allowed to be held in solitary confinement for two weeks, with extensions requiring the consent of upper-level officials. Detention facilities will also need to engage in regular reporting on instances in which detainees were held in isolation.

“Placement of detainees in segregated housing is a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives,” the policy directive, released Wednesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), states.

“ICE shall take additional steps to ensure appropriate review and oversight of decisions to retain detainees in segregated housing for over 14 days, or placements in segregation for any length of time in the case of detainees for whom heightened concerns exists based on known special vulnerabilities and other factors related to the detainee’s health or the risk of victimization.”

The guidance is being widely applauded by rights groups and appears to offer a strong new – and federally mandated – model.

“This is huge news and sets a wonderful federal precedent,” Rich Killmer, the executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“The fact that ICE is saying that immigration detainees can only be held in solitary confinement for 14 days – that underlines such a significant contrast with prisoners in some U.S. states being held in solitary for decades. We will certainly be using this in our advocacy work, as an example of what can be done.”

Still, some are expressing apprehension that ICE did not go far enough.

“We are concerned that the new directive does not eliminate the use of extended solitary confinement,” Mary Meg McCarthy, the executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Centre, said Thursday, “and that the reporting period exceeds the 15 days which the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has observed can have detrimental and irreversible effects on individuals’ mental health.”

300+ per day

With some 80,000 people in solitary confinement throughout the various U.S. penal systems (as of the last available estimate, in 2005), the United States is a clear global outlier in terms of its active integration of segregated housing into its prison system, particularly since the late 1980s.

Why these numbers have climbed so high is unclear, but many experts feel that isolation is in part being used to deal with the overcrowding that has stretched federal prisons beyond their margins of safety. In such a situation, prison wardens may be choosing to put some vulnerable prisoners – those with mental health problems or even those who are underage – in segregated housing on the view that they will be safer.

While the new guidance is applicable only to those detained on immigration charges, it specifically disallows such use of solitary for a prisoner’s “own good”.

“In particular, placement in administrative segregation due to a special vulnerability should be used only as a last resort and when no other viable housing options exist,” the directive states.

“A detainee’s age, physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, or religion may not provide the sole basis for a decision to place the detainee in involuntary segregation.”

ICE runs or oversees some 250 detention centres. As part of President Barack Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on immigration-related crimes, last year the agency detained nearly 430,000 people, the highest ever.

Earlier this year, a major U.S. newspaper studied the 50 largest of these centres and concluded that an average of 300 people per day were being kept in solitary confinement just in those prisons. According to official data, half of those detainees were being kept for longer than 15 days, while some were being segregated for longer than 75 days.

Analysts estimated that around two-thirds of these detainees were being segregated due to minor infractions, while the rest were seen as either a threat or vulnerable, including due to sexuality or mental illness.

The subsequent political and public response led Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to order a review of ICE policies on segregated housing, resulting in Wednesday’s revised policies.

An ICE spokesperson told IPS that the review “included collecting quantitative and qualitative data on the use of segregation throughout ICE’s detention facilities; consultation with field office management and detention site managers; extra inspections of segregation facilities; discussions with a variety of stakeholders; and collaboration among many ICE and DHS offices on process improvements.”

Strengthened monitoring

Yet the ICE decision deals with only one part of the United States’ penal system. It does not directly affect the much-larger federal Bureau of Prisons or U.S. Marshals Service (the judicial system’s enforcement arm), both of which run parallel prison systems.

In June, the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Congress’s independent watchdog, released an excoriating report on the Bureau of Prison’s failure to conduct adequate monitoring of isolation in its jails or its impact on prisoners.

“At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons really hasn’t done more than begin to look at its use of solitary confinement, while the U.S. Marshals Service has neither been externally reviewed nor conducted an internal assessment,” Carl Takei, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, told IPS.

“The most praiseworthy aspects of the new ICE directive are its monitoring requirements – previously, the agency had very little idea of who was in solitary on a daily basis, how long or why. This move represents a significant step forward, and we’re hoping that these guidelines will be used as an example of the monitoring that the Bureau of Prisons should be doing.”

Other models have also recently arisen within the state prison systems, several of which are already drastically cutting down their use of solitary confinement.

Part of the motivation is financial, with squeezed coffers forcing state governments to figure out how to save money. Building and operating a solitary confinement unit costs 200 to 300 percent more than otherwise, while a 2007 state estimate found that it costs twice as much per year to keep a confined prisoner.

Part of this calculation also has to do with the effect of solitary confinement on the rest of society. Researchers have found, for instance, that prisoners who have been in segregated housing have higher recidivism rates than do other prisoners.

In a sign that the issue is gaining traction, a mass hunger strike in California’s prison system to protest against what inmates describe as the inhumane use of long-term solitary confinement ended Thursday after nearly two months, when two state lawmakers promised to hold hearings on the solitary confinement policy.

Countries in nearly every region of the world are continuing to turn to a U.S.-led model of prison privatisation despite mounting evidence that such systems are often neither cost-efficient nor able to provide adequate services.

The Corrections Corporation of America says it currently houses some 80,000 inmates in 60 facilities, 40 of which are solely company-owned. Credit: Bigstock

New data released Tuesday notes that nearly a dozen countries – in North and South America, Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific – are today integrating private, for-profit prisons into their penal systems. Yet the country where that model was pioneered, the United States, is currently beginning a nationwide push to decrease its incarcerated population, leading to a growth industry in exporting corporate prison knowhow.

Increased interest internationally has “helped private U.S. prison companies diversify their investments at a time when America’s prison population growth has stalled,” a new report, released by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, states.

“For example, 14 percent of the revenue for America’s second largest private prison company, the Geo Group, came from international services in fiscal year 2012.”

The growth in global interest in prison privatisation has also been a boon for British companies, particularly G4S and Serco.

All of these companies “have thrived off of the expanded privatization of prisons, immigration detention systems, and other governmental services,” the report states, “while often failing to deliver on the services that were promised.”

Indeed, critics have long accused for-profit prison companies, with explicit requirements to cut costs, of poorer services and conditions than publically run penal systems (see here and here). An attempt by the Israeli government to open a private prison in 2009 was blocked by that country’s Supreme Court, which warned that such a transfer of responsibility would lead to “harsh and grave damage to the basic human rights of prisoners”.

Private prison companies tend to explain the rationale for their operations in terms of efficiency of service. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a founder of the sector in the early 1980s and still the United States’ largest operator of private prisons, says it “combine[s] the efficiency and effectiveness of business with the standards, regulation and oversight of government … at less than it costs public agencies to operate.”

The CCA says it currently houses some 80,000 inmates in 60 facilities, 40 of which are solely company-owned.

Yet increasingly, watchdog groups and governments have called into question this issue of cost-effectiveness. In 2010, for instance, a government oversight office for the state of Arizona found that for-profit prisons were costing the state some 16 percent more than public facilities.

Last month, an unusual report by the hacker-activist group Anonymous warned that CCA was no longer a good investment.

Success stories

Countries currently using private prisons or in the process of implementing such plans include Brazil, Chile, Greece, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Thailand. Yet the sector remains dominated by developed countries, the new Sentencing Project report notes, particularly English-speaking nations.

While the United States continues to hold the largest number of prisoners in private facilities (around 131,000 in 2011), this is largely because the country also detains by far the largest number of people (1.5 million) – some quarter of the world’s incarcerated population.

Still, several other countries have given over a far larger portion of their penal systems to private corporations. According to the most recent data, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom each holds between 10 and 20 percent of their prisoners in private prisons.

These figures are far higher for immigrant detention, an area in which prison corporations have particularly excelled. The United Kingdom, for instance, houses roughly three-quarters of those suspected of immigration-related infractions in privately run detention centres, while Australia has entirely privatised its immigrant-detention system.

Meanwhile, these numbers appear to be having something of a cyclical effect, with greater penetration by private detention companies leading to further interest by other countries.

“Because there are these large, developed countries that have taken this step, that naturally creates interest in other countries,” Cody Mason, author of the new report and a consultant to the Sentencing Project, told IPS.

“These companies, in the United States and in other countries, will regularly travel around and bring members of Congress and Parliament into their facilities, suggesting that their approach will solve their problems. They promote themselves as a great way to deal with overcrowding, substandard services and rising prison costs.”

He continues: “Any country that sees privatisation being adopted by other countries and hears these stories – it’s pretty natural they’ll turn to that approach.”

New markets

Here in the United States, prison overcrowding has become a massive problem over the course of a three-decade “tough on crime” push by legislators. Some U.S. prison systems are currently overbooked by 40 percent, leading to accusations of mass rights infringements.

Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made what many are seeing as a historic announcement, directing the federal Department of Justice to begin taking multiple steps to bring down the incarcerated population. Additional moves are afoot in the U.S. Congress to put in place broader, permanent changes to the way the country’s criminal justice system functions.

Such steps may be bringing about a bipartisan end to the “tough on crime” era, but they are undoubtedly rattling the private prison companies based in the United States. While it is not yet clear how these companies’ lobbying efforts may strengthen amidst the new push, Cody Mason writes that for-profit prison companies here have spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions.

Those lobbying efforts have focused particularly on a pending overhaul of the country’s immigration system. Mason’s report notes that private prison companies have “a history of contributing to supporters of harsh immigration detention laws”.

According to official estimates, the federal government will detain some 400,000 people on immigration charges this year, at a cost of around two billion dollars. Yet new legislation that has passed the Senate but is currently in limbo in the House of Representatives would almost certainly bring about significant changes to this approach.

“There is sure to be a lobbying response to these issues, especially depending on what happens with the immigration bill – these companies will have a lot of interest in what happens with that,” Mason says.

“Alongside any lobbying, however, they are also looking at new areas of business, and part of that is other countries into which they can expand.”

By AJ Correspondents
QATAR, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

A manhunt is under way for hundreds of inmates, including several high-ranking Al Qaeda members, who escaped two Iraqi prisons following deadly attacks.

Fifty-six people were killed in Sunday’s attacks on Taji prison, north of Baghdad, and the Abu Ghraib facility, west of the Iraqi capital.

The dead include 26 members of the security forces and 20 inmates. Ten of the attackers also died.

Gunmen fired mortar rounds at the prisons.

Four car bombs were also detonated near the entrances to the jails, while three suicide bombers attacked Taji prison, a police colonel said. Several roadside bombs also exploded near the prison in Taji.

Fighting continued throughout the night as the military deployed aircraft and sent in reinforcements around the two facilities.

“The number of escaped inmates has reached 500, most of them were convicted senior members of Al Qaeda and had received death sentences,” Hakim al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defence committee in parliament, told Reuters.

‘Pursuing terrorists’

The situation was eventually brought under control on Monday morning, according to the colonel.

Most of them were convicted senior members of Al Qaeda and had received death sentences.

“The security forces in the Baghdad Operations Command, with the assistance of military aircraft, managed to foil an armed attack launched by unknown gunmen against the… two prisons of Taji and Abu Ghraib,” the interior ministry said in a statement late on Sunday night. "Most of them were convicted senior members of Al Qaeda and had received death sentences."- Hakim al-Zamili, Senior member of the security and defence committee

“The security forces forced the attackers to flee, and these forces are still pursuing the terrorist forces and exerting full control over the two regions,” it said.

The attacks on the prisons came a year after Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate announced it would target the justice system.

“The first priority in this is releasing Muslim prisoners everywhere, and chasing and eliminating judges and investigators and their guards,” said an audio message attributed to the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in July last year.

Prisons in Iraq are periodically hit by escape attempts, uprisings and other unrest.

Abu Ghraib became notorious after photographs showing Iraqi detainees being humiliated and abused by their US guards were published in 2004. It also served as a torture centre under Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime.

Deadly violence also hit security forces in northern Iraq on Monday. A suicide car bomber attacked an army patrol in the city of Mosul, killing 12 people and wounding 16, while a roadside bomb wounded a soldier and a civilian near the city.

Published under agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

Inmates of Villa Devoto prison at the founding meeting of SUTPLA, the prisoners' union, in July 2012. Credit: CTA

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 7 2013 (IPS)

The first prisoners’ union in Argentina, a country with a strong organised labour tradition, fights for the rights of inmates.

“No one had never fought before for anything like this in here,” 33-year-old inmate Gustavo Moreno, serving a 22-year sentence in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal in Buenos Aires, better known as the Villa Devoto prison, told IPS.

Moreno, who has been in prison for three years, works on the cleaning detail. He is also the coordinator of the foundation course at the university education centre there, and is studying Business Administration.

Moreno is the social action secretary for the new prisoners’ union, the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Privados de la Libertad Ambulatoria (SUTPLA), created in July 2012, which is recognised under an agreement with the Federal Penitentiary Service (SPF).

SUTPLA belongs to the centre-left Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA) trade union federation, whose leaders said the prisoners’ union is being closely watched by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as an example that could be followed in other countries.

“We have 700 male and 100 female members, and the basic idea is to defend the rights of people who are in a defenceless and vulnerable state,” Rodrigo Díaz, the secretary-general of SUTPLA, who has been out of prison on early release since April, told IPS.

At present they are seeking legal union status with the help of CTA lawyers. Once this is achieved, they will have to begin collecting union dues, but this is not an important concern for the organisation.

The growing strength of the union fills Díaz with enthusiasm. He has been in prison a number of times – “a total of 12 years in different prisons,” he said. He started studying law behind bars and is now continuing his studies on the outside. He has only one year to go to graduate.

Through his studies and the time he spent in different prison facilities, he has learned about the labour rights of inmates, which are not always respected. “The prison service does not see it as a question of rights but of benefits,” he said.

At present 64 percent of the nearly 10,000 prisoners in the SPF are working. Another 49,000 prisoners are inmates in facilities dependent on provincial governments, where the proportion of inmates doing remunerated work varies.

Argentina’s prison law, which was reformed in 2012, stipulates that prisoners have the right to work and study, as part of their rehabilitation. It also states that their work “must be remunerated.”

The Justice Ministry established that all prisoners who worked would receive the national minimum wage, equivalent to 553 dollars a month, regardless of their actual working hours.

But in practice, most working inmates are paid much less, because the SPF makes a number of controversial deductions. “Someone is keeping the difference, very probably ENCOPE,” Díaz complained.

ENCOPE (Ente de Cooperación Técnica y Financiera del Servicio Penitenciario), an agency for technical and financial cooperation with the prison service, “does not fulfil the functions for which it was created…and actually oversees itself,” the trade unionist said.

Víctor Hortel, the head of SPF, has admitted that in the past there were irregularities in the deductions that were made, which were supposed to be credited to a reserve fund for prisoners when they were released. But he denied that these practices continued, now that anti-corruption bodies are exerting greater control.

With the help of CTA lawyers, the new union lodged various appeals against deductions from imprisoned workers’ pay, except for contributions toward their future pensions.

This year, the fight against deductions and other labour demands led to the first strike by SUTPLA workers, lasting 72 hours.

The union is also demanding that proper clothing and footwear be issued to workers for safety and health reasons, especially when they handle waste or other contaminating materials.

Díaz has met with social security authorities to negotiate payment of six months unemployment benefit for newly released prisoners, just like any other person dismissed from a job.

He himself received wages until April for his work in the Villa Devoto prison, but was left without an income as soon as he was freed, six months before completing his full sentence.

He said the worst situations were found in prisons run by the provincial governments. “In Unit No. 1 in Olmos (in the province of Buenos Aires), inmates are ‘paid’ with just two telephone cards a month,” he said.

In some prisons, inmates work in exchange for benefits such as visitors’ permits on weekdays. But work is not seen as part of rehabilitation, or a right, or something that should be remunerated, Díaz said.

“The idea is not instilled in prisoners that they can learn a trade through working, and also help their families. That is why the recidivism rate is so high,” he said.

Against this backdrop, SUTPLA wants to strengthen trade union activity in the Villa Devoto prison, where the organisation was founded, and then extend the same rights to other men’s and women’s prisons.

The work done in prisons is varied and includes agricultural production – vegetable gardens, nurseries, growing fodder, dairy production – and industrial workshops – printing, sportswear, bicycles, bags and furniture.

Maintenance work is another option, like the cleaning work done by Moreno, the social action secretary of SUTPLA, for which his net monthly income is 385 dollars.

“I’m working for my kids,” he said. He has four children, aged 13, 11, seven and one. “What I do for myself is study. That will give me a tool when I get out,” said Moreno, who is waiting to hear whether his sentence has been reduced.

“Studying is my way of detaching myself from life inside,” he said. He has been in prison before, and managed to finish his secondary schooling. “I had no opportunity of doing that on the outside,” he said.

The U.S. federal prison system’s use of solitary confinement and other forms of “segregated housing” has increased substantially over the past five years, according to new data released by the U.S. Congress’s official independent watchdog.

Inmates are held in solitary confinement for around 23 hours a day, often for months or even years at a time. Credit: Bigstock

Inmates are held in solitary confinement for around 23 hours a day, often for months or even years at a time, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is warning in a major new report. More damningly, the country’s federal prisons authorities have failed to carry out studies on the effects of this practice.

“[The Bureau of Prisons] has not assessed the impact of segregated housing on institutional safety or the impacts of long-term segregation on inmates,” the report, released Friday, states.

“…[W]ithout an assessment of the impact of segregation on institutional safety or study of the long-term impact of segregated housing on inmates, [the bureau] cannot determine the extent to which segregated housing achieves its stated purpose to protect inmates, staff and the general public.”

From 2008 through February this year, the total number of U.S. inmates in segregated housing rose by around 17 percent, to nearly 12,500 people, the GAO states. During the same period, the number of inmates under the federal Bureau of Prisons increased by just six percent.

Critics say the lack of assessment is potentially dangerous for society at large. After all, a broad body of global research – stretching back centuries – has been resounding in its findings on the deleterious impact of social seclusion on the human psyche.

“For almost all people, sustained social isolation is very damaging, causing extreme suffering that can lead to permanent psychiatric damage,” David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“Solitary confinement is clearly very damaging and counter-productive. But we also know that people who have been in solitary confinement have higher recidivism rates than comparable prisoners, particularly those that have been released directly after their solitary confinement.”

There’s an argument to be made, Fathi says, that solitary confinement has direct negative ramifications for the rest of society.

Historically unprecedented

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons operates with relatively little public oversight, with journalists typically not allowed into its most sensitive installations. It is answerable to Congress, however, and the new GAO report, compiled at the request of three members of Congress, thus offers unique insight into some of the functioning of this massive system.

The U.S. prison system is by far the world’s largest. In a January report by the official Congressional Research Service (CRS), the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was found to have grown by almost 800 percent over the past three decades, to around 219,000.

That’s 716 out of every 100,000 people, indicative of a growth rate the CRS said was “historically unprecedented”.

According to the new GAO report, around seven percent of those inmates are kept in segregated housing, which Fathi says makes the United States an “egregious global outlier in this area – there is no other country of any description that has made long-term solitary confinement such an integral part of its prison system.”

Still, the question of why this practice has become so integrated – which the new report doesn’t delve into – is harder to discern.

“A lot of corrections people think that solitary confinement promotes prison safety, and overall I think it just reflects an unthinking response,” Fathi says.

“Solitary confinement is where prisoners who are problematic or difficult to manage or just plain different tend to end up. In addition, this tends to be a one-way ratchet – it’s relatively easy to get in but difficult to get out.”

Others point to how overstretched the crowded U.S. prison system has become, noting that solitary confinement has become an important if questionable method of dealing with inmates with special needs.

“Problems with overcrowded prisons force officials to be more strategic with how they deal with vulnerable populations, particularly those who are mentally ill – there are just not enough resources,” Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“We don’t accept that as good correctional policy, of course, but these are pressures that correctional officers have to deal with. Isolating prisoners becomes one way to address inmates with particular vulnerabilities.”

This approach came in for some high-profile criticism late last week. On Friday, a federal investigation found that a state prison in Pennsylvania was misusing solitary confinement, keeping prisoners with serious mental problems segregated for upwards of 23 hours a day, often for years.

According to Justice Department officials, the practice violated the inmates’ constitutional rights, and a probe has now been expanded to the entire state.

States leading

Each of the GAO’s four recommendations deals with strengthening the Bureau of Prisons’s monitoring and assessment on these issues, including specifically studying the impact of long-term segregation.

Porter says it is unsurprising that the Bureau of Prisons has failed to undertake any long-term studies on the effects of solitary confinement, as “Doing so would open them up to having to actually do something about it.”

According to the GAO, however, the bureau has “agreed with these recommendations and reported it would take actions to address them”. Further, in January prisons officials authorised a study on segregated housing and at the time was also considering “conducting mental health case reviews for inmates held in [segregated housing] for more than 12 continuous months”.

While observers are welcoming these steps, it remains to be seen how independent and rigorous those assessments are.

At the same time, however, significant changes are already taking place in the state-level prison systems, the recent Pennsylvania findings notwithstanding. Three states – Colorado, Maine and Mississippi – have recently cut down dramatically on their use of solitary confinement, and other states are reportedly taking keen notice.

“In the last few years, we’re seeing a sea change at the state level,” the ACLU’s Fathi says.

“This is partly a result of concern about the effects of solitary, but also partly about cost, as solitary confinement costs two to three times as much per prisoner even as an ordinary maximum security prison. So far, none of these three states have reported any adverse impact on prison safety.”

While the Bureau of Prisons was long seen as a leader and innovator, Fathi says it is now “very much on the wrong side of history” on this issue.

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Apr 11 2013 (IPS)

The life histories of Cuban women in prison for murdering their violent husbands or boyfriends show the need for reforms of the criminal code to take account of gender reasons as mitigating factors in sentencing.

Most (63 percent) of the nearly 4,000 Cuban women in prison are serving sentences for embezzlement and theft.

But “we have inmates who committed very serious acts related to domestic violence. For instance, most of the women who committed homicides did so against husbands who abused them or fathers who raped them as children. These cases should be given different legal treatment,” said the director of the Havana Women’s Prison, Lieutenant Colonel Sara Rubio.

“The criminal code does not differentiate between these kinds of situations,” Rubio told IPS during a tour of four penitentiary centres for local and foreign correspondents on Tuesday Apr. 10. This is the first time since 2004 that the authorities have opened the doors of prisons to the international press.

Prison sentences for crimes like embezzlement, theft and homicide can range from eight to 30 years.

Rubio, who is in charge of the largest women’s prison in the country, insisted that “special treatment is needed for cases associated with gender violence,” a problem for which Cuban civil society is calling for a gender perspective to be applied more fully in the country’s laws.

In fact, civil society organisations and state agencies have been carrying out a campaign since 2007 calling for specific legislation on domestic violence. In 2012 it reached eight of the country’s 15 provinces.

In addition, the short prison sentences incurred by offences such as prostitution should be replaced by non-custodial sentences, Rubio said. Cuba prohibits the sex trade in all its forms.

Better known as El Guatao because of the Havana neighbourhood where it is located, this is one of two closed prisons for women. The other is in Camagüey, 534 kilometres east of Havana. In addition, there are 16 open facilities in the country.

On May 1 the government must present a report on its prisons policy to the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which will hold sessions Apr. 22-May 3 this year in Geneva.

International human rights organisations and domestic dissident groups have criticised Cuba’s prisons policy.

The prison population of this Caribbean country is over 50,000 people, according to Colonel Osmani Leyva, deputy chief of the National Directorate of Prisons. The total population of Cuba is 11.2 million.

This figure is lower than in May 2012, when there were 57,337 inmates, Leyva told IPS.

“Every day, prisoners are granted early release” from Cuba’s 200 penitentiaries, he said. Inmates are given time off for good behaviour, and “alternatives to custodial sentences, such as extramural correctional employment (work release),” also reduce prisoner numbers, he said.

But an anti-corruption campaign launched in 2009 may have led to an increase in the prison population.

According to Rubio, 63 percent of women prisoners in Cuba are serving sentences for embezzlement, theft, fraud, burglary and aggravated robbery. Many of these are economic or corruption-related crimes, a problem that “has hit us hard,” she said.

Rubio directs a non-conventionally structured prison with some 400 women inmates, aged mostly between 31 and 59. Women tend to commit crimes “at a mature age,” when they are over 30, and recidivism is “only 15 percent,” she said.

Here, the women are not locked up in cells, but live in dormitories with eight bunk beds each which have doors, rather than bars. The facility has a theatre, sports areas, televisions, dining hall, kitchen and classrooms.

Inmates have access to public phones. They are allowed family visits once a week, and conjugal visits every 21 days.

Lázara López is a single mother with a 15-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. She has served one of the six years of her sentence for theft in El Guatao.

“I did it for them. Now I regret it because they really need me at home with them,” she told IPS. “My daughter has to look after the little one,” the 33-year-old Havana resident said.

Women, who are generally responsible for raising the children and looking after the family, find it hard to delegate that responsibility to relatives or leave their charges unattended while they are in prison.

“They are women, just like us,” prison educator Minisleidy Calderón told IPS. “Sometimes we chat with them to persuade them to calm down and behave,” said this young woman who teaches 80 inmates. As part of their re-education, most of the women choose to work in state institutions outside the prison.

The government of former president Fidel Castro promoted the idea of “turning prisons into schools,” so that prisoners can continue their formal education, learn a trade or work in state institutions. Thirty-eight percent of the women at El Guatao are enrolled in educational courses. They also have access to sporting and cultural activities and involvement in the community.

There are few women inmates between the ages of 16 – the age of criminal responsibility in Cuba – and 30: in El Guatao they represent only three percent.

One of them is 19-year-old primary school teacher Damayantis Reyes, who is five months pregnant. She is serving a one-and-a-half year sentence for causing bodily harm.

Pregnant women in prison receive the same health care they would get outside of jail, and they receive a special diet. They are allowed to keep their babies with them until the child’s first birthday.

“The conditions are good and we are well treated, but we’re never OK. No one wants to be here,” Reyes told IPS. The father of her unborn baby broke off their relationship when she went to prison. “I’m going to go back to teaching when I get out of here,” she said.

When Claudio was detained in a prison in the northeastern Italian city of Vicenza, he had to share a 7.6 square-metre cell with two other people. “Once you excluded the space taken up by beds and drawers, each inmate was left with 90 centimetres to himself. We had to take it in turns to stand up,” he told IPS.

But cramped living conditions were not the only problem. Forced into that room for 21 hours each day, “there was no possibility for (inmates) to engage in any activity”, Claudio added.

In a prison in Busto Arsizio, a city in the northern Italian region of Lombardy, “there was only one educator for 420 inmates, and the only psychologist could dedicate just six minutes of his time to each of them every year,” Claudio recalled.

In short, the real problem lay not in each individual case but in “the systematic violation of human rights” in prisons across Italy, he concluded.

Indeed, a recent decision by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirmed the level of dysfunction inherent in Italy’s prison system.

The Strasbourg Court’s January ruling declared that the crowded conditions seven inmates had been forced to endure in two Italian prisons constituted a violation of their basic rights.

As the official sentence reads, “Their conditions of detention had subjected them to hardship of an intensity exceeding the unavoidable level of suffering inherent in detention”, and violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The court also ordered the state to pay the applicants 100,000 euros (about 131,000 dollars) in damages.

Now, people like Claudio who feel their rights have been similarly violated, are queuing up at the ECHR.

“The aim is to denounce the general violation of people’s dignity: we were not allowed to touch our relatives’ hands during (visits), and there was no space dedicated to (visits) with children, who had to go through searches and a hostile environment,” Claudio added.

Ornella Favero, director of the non-profit organisation Ristretti Orizzonti (Narrow Horizons) who has been “denouncing the conditions in Italy’s prisons for years”, told IPS the ruling is just the tip of the iceberg.

With an occupancy rate ranging from 142 to 268 percent of maximum capacity, Italy holds the dubious distinction of having the most overcrowded prisons in the European Union, according to a report published by the Rome-based Prison Observatory of Antigone.

But the rate of overcrowding should not be used to justify “building new prisons, which is absolutely not what our country needs”, Favero stressed.

Quoting the Council of Europe, Alessio Scandurra, coordinator of the Prison Observatory, stressed that the “solution to overcrowding is not building new structures, because that is a system that creates its own demand: the more prisons you build, the more they will get filled”.

Following visits to prisons across Italy, the 2010 report by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) states, “(A)dditional accommodation is not likely, in itself, to provide a lasting solution to the problem of overcrowding. Addressing this problem calls for a coherent strategy, covering both admission to and release from prison, to ensure that imprisonment really is the measure of last resort.

“This implies, in the first place, an emphasis on non-custodial measures in the period before the imposition of a sentence and, in the second place, the adoption of measures that facilitate reintegration into free society of persons who have been deprived of their liberty.”

According to various studies, incarceration rates increased in Italy from 47,316 in 1992 to 67,961 in 2010.

Favero believes this is because “in the last decade, there has been no ability or (political) will to reform the Penal Code.”

According to the Prison Observatory of Antigone’s report, more than 20,000 people are serving terms of less than three years and approximately 25 percent of the inmates are drug addicts.

Italy has one of the highest percentages of drug-related crimes in the region: 38.4 percent of all prisoners compared to 14 percent in Germany and France and roughly 15 percent in England and Wales.

While the European average for pre-trial detainees is just 28.5 percent, in Italy they account for 42 percent of the prison population, Scandurra said.

The number of immigrants in Italian prisons is also well above the European average, comprising 35.6 percent of all prison inmates.

“All these people should have access to non-custodial sanctions,” Favero argued.

But in 2012 less than 20,000 people incarcerated in Italy were serving their sentence outside a prison, far less than the EU average: in 2009 Spain, Germany and France could boast 111,000, 120,000 and 123,000 people respectively taking advantage of alternatives such as pecuniary fines, community service and house arrest for lesser crimes, as well as medical treatment for drug addiction. In England and Wales the number was closer to 200,000.

“These are definitely the countries we should look at when it comes to non-custodial sanctions,” Scandurra said.

A robust body of evidence supports the civil society push towards alternatives to imprisonment. According to the Justice Ministry’s Observatory on Alternative Measures, non-custodial sanctions and gradual reintroduction into society show an 81 percent success rate, while 69 percent of those people who serve their entire sentence in prison tend to repeat their offenses.

“Keeping inmates in jail for longer does not make our society safer. But while this seems to be clear in many EU countries, in Italy the idea is that prison is the universal panacea,” Favero lamented.

Despite the grave outlook, Scandurra said the government has begun to pay more attention to the issue than it has in the past, and a consensus about what needs to be done is gradually developing among social workers.

“Elections are a delicate phase — bringing up these topics during a campaign is almost impossible, because it doesn’t get votes. But the hope, now that elections are over, is that politicians will finally have the courage to enforce the required measures,” Scandurra said.

Turning a slightly more cynical eye to the problem, Favero believes that what is more likely to promote a change is the threat of high monetary sanctions coming from Strasbourg. More than 500 similar cases are currently queuing up at the ECHR – if they result in a similar ruling to the one passed down in January, the government will be hard-pressed to cough up the necessary compensation, experts say.

(END)

Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 2013 (IPS)

The research wing of the U.S. Congress is warning that three decades of “historically unprecedented” build-up in the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States have led to a level of overcrowding that is now “taking a toll on the infrastructure” of the federal prison system.

Over the past 30 years, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the federal prison population has jumped from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates, an increase of nearly 790 percent. Swollen by such figures, for years the United States has incarcerated far more people than any other country, today imprisoning some 716 people out of every 100,000. (Although CRS reports are not made public, a copy can be found here.)

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,” Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,”
Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch
In recent years, as a consequence of the imposition of very harsh sentencing policies, McFarland’s office has seen new patterns emerging of juveniles and very elderly people being put in prison.

“Last year, some 95,000 juveniles under 18 years of age were put in prison, and that doesn’t count those in juvenile facilities,” she noted.

“And between 2007 and 2011, the population of those over 64 grew by 94 times the rate of the regular population. Prisons clearly aren’t equipped to take care of these aging people, and you have to question what threat they pose to society – and the justification for imprisoning them.”

According to the new CRS report, a growing number of these prisoners are being put away for charges related to immigration violations and weapons possession. But the largest number is for relatively paltry drug offences – an approach that report author Nathan James, a CRS analyst in crime policy, warns may not be useful in bringing down crime statistics.

“Research suggests that while incarceration did contribute to lower violent crime rates in the 1990s, there are declining marginal returns associated with ever increasing levels of incarceration,” James notes. He suggests that one potential explanation for this could be that people have been increasingly incarcerated for crimes in which there is a “high level of replacement”.

For instance, he says, if a serial rapist is incarcerated, the judicial system has the power to prevent further sexual assaults by that offender, and it is likely that no one will take the offender’s place. “However, if a drug dealer is incarcerated, it is possible that someone will step in to take that person’s place,” James writes. “Therefore, no further crimes may be averted by incarcerating the individual.”

Smarter on crime

Of course, the U.S. prison population’s blooming needs to be traced back to changes within the federal criminal justice system. Recent decades have seen an expanding “get tough” approach on crime here, under which even nonviolent offenders are facing stiff prison sentences.

In turn, overcrowding has become a massive issue, with the federal prison system as a whole operating at 39 percent over capacity in 2011, according to CRS. The result has also been significant price overruns, with the Bureau of Prisons budget doubling to nearly 6.4 billion dollars even while hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unaddressed infrastructure problems continue to mount.

Yet the problems being experienced by the federal prison system actually stand in contrast to certain trends at the state level. While some states have dealt with even more worrisome problems of prison overcrowding – including California, which in 2011 was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take steps to reduce the pressure – recent years have seen movement at the state level to counter overincarceration.

Some of this action may have come from serious state budget crises. Currently, after all, it costs between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars to house a prisoner in the United States.

According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group working on prison reform, prisoner populations in the United States overall declined by around 1.5 percent in 2011. Furthermore, last year lawmakers in 24 states adopted policies that “may contribute to downscaling prison populations”.

“There has been a marked change in the amount of activity at the state level to end our addiction to incarceration,” Vineeta Gupta, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS.

“Some states are currently having many discussions they would not have had 10 years ago – getting smarter on crime rather than tougher on crime. None of these moves are comprehensive enough to address the large scope of the problem, but they’re very important starting points.”

She continued: “Unfortunately, the federal government has been going in the opposite direction.”

Mandatory minimum

Arguably, the single most important element in explaining the record incarceration numbers both at the federal and state levels could be “mandatory minimum” sentencing requirements, under which federal and state law over the past two decades has automatically required certain prison sentences for certain crimes, particularly for drug offences.

Such polices have eliminated the ability of judges to tailor judicial responses to individual circumstance. Over the years, sitting judges have resigned over mandatory minimum policies, while others have waged high-visibility campaigns for their rollback.

“Particular attention should be given to reforming mandatory minimums and parole release mechanisms as policies that can work to reduce state prison populations,” the Sentencing Project suggests, noting also that “Mandatory minimums do not reduce crime but result in lengthy prison terms that contribute to overcrowding.”

Such analysis echoes parts of the CRS conclusions while also undergirding growing momentum on the issue. According to the Sentencing Project, seven states last year weakened or repealed certain mandatory minimum regulations.

More dramatically, in mid-January, Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, told a Washington audience that he would support doing away entirely with federal mandatory minimums, which he called “a great mistake”.

“Senator Leahy’s comments are a very big step towards starting a conversation to address a major driver of the federal growth,” the ACLU’s Gupta says. “The hope is that some of the stuff that’s brewing in the states, where crime in some places is still at an all-time low, can now serve as an example for the federal system.”

Edgar Torres Castillo, 21, has spent two years in the prison of Gómez Palacio, in the Lagunera district between the northern Mexican states of Durango and Coahuila – an arid zone known as one of the most dangerous parts of the country.

Amparo Castillo, the mother of Edgar, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing a cell-phone, last saw him during a Dec. 18 visit to the prison. “I thought he was acting strange, he seemed really sad and as if he had been hurt,” she told IPS by phone. “We spent just an hour together before they started to shoo us out – things were really tense,” she said with anguish in her voice.

In the wee hours of the morning on Dec. 17, the police transferred 137 prisoners from the Gómez Palacio prison to federal penitentiaries.

The next day, at the end of the visiting hours, people living in nearby homes heard loud bursts of gunfire and cries inside the prison. The authorities reported that 25 prisoners and six unarmed guards had been killed during an escape attempt.

In a communique, the Durango police said the prisoners had opened fire on the guards when they were thwarted in their attempt to escape.

Later, the federal government emptied out the prison, where 78 people have been killed in the past three years and several major prison escapes have been staged. At the time it was emptied, there were 500 inmates left in the prison.

Like other family members, Castillo went to the prison after the reports of gunfire, to find out what happened. When little information was offered, the prisoners’ relatives held protests and set up roadblocks. “We didn’t even know if they were alive or not,” she said.

The bloody clash between prisoners and guards was one more illustration of the crisis plaguing Mexico’s prison system, which experts say is on the verge of total collapse.

There are 429 prisons in Mexico, according to the latest report by the ministry of federal public security. Of that total, 15 are run by the national government, 10 by the authorities in Mexico City’s Federal District, 91 by municipal governments, and the rest by the states.

Studies indicate that the prison population is 22 percent (around 40,000 prisoners) over capacity. In addition, four out of 10 inmates are still pending sentencing. But prisoners awaiting trial are held in the same cells as convicted inmates.

Those charged with or convicted of federal crimes, generally for involvement in organised crime like drug trafficking, make up just one-fifth of the prison population.

After a visit to 24 prisons around the country in 2009, a report by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture warned about structural flaws in Mexico’s penal system, which encourage abuses of all kinds committed with the aim of obtaining confessions or self-incriminating statements.

The already heavy use of preventive detention became even more excessive during the crusade against the drug cartels waged by President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) in his six years in office.

The “Diagnóstico Nacional de Supervisión Penitenciaria”, an assessment of the prison system presented by the governmental National Human Rights Commission in September, found that six out of 10 prisons in the country were co-governed to some extent by criminal groups.

The report warns of prison hotspots in 10 of Mexico’s 31 states. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, a total of 521 prisoners escaped in 14 prison escapes, and 350 people were killed in two riots and 75 fights.

The prison of Gómez Palacio, which went through six different directors in less than three years, has been the site of high-profile escapes and acts of corruption.

In March 2009, a group of armed men wearing federal police uniforms walked into the prison in broad daylight and took five prisoners away with them. In July 2010, the then director of the prison, Margarita Rojas, was arrested and accused by the attorney general’s office of allowing inmates who later took part in a mass killing of 17 people on a nearby farm to leave the prison.
According to the federal government, the guards allowed a group of inmates to leave the prison at night, using the guards’ weapons and official vehicles, to carry out reprisals against rival criminal groups.

But that was not the only case. Jorge Carvallo, president of the bar association of the state of Mexico, next to the capital, reported in November 2010 that prisoners, with the complicity of the state police, were allowed to leave the Barrientos prison at night to commit armed robberies.

The government of Durango announced on Dec. 21 the definitive closure of the Gómez Palacio prison, which will be converted into a police station.

Meanwhile, the families are still desperately seeking information about what happened to the inmates.

“We are trying to help a group of women who came to us in a terrible state, in despair and full of fear for their loved ondes,” activist Verónica Villarreal of the Popular Workers Coordinating Council told IPS. Her group provided shelter to a group of women who came to the capital of the state, four hours from Gómez Palacio, in search of information.

Since Dec. 19, Amparo Castillo has been on a vigil outside the Durango prison, hoping to see her son. “They haven’t told us anything, we don’t know how they are. We only know that they took some to prisons in other states and that others are here, but they told us we’ll only be able to see them in four weeks.

“There’s no law here, people have been tried and convicted without evidence. And now it’s easy for them just to shut down the place; they don’t think of the expenses that represents for us. My son didn’t steal the cell-phone, but in any case, I have already paid it off. What do they want? It wasn’t something that deserved eight years in prison, or to have to go through all of this,” she said.

Representatives of the Argentine state and of non- governmental organisations will be visiting prisons without prior warning, beginning next year, to prevent inmates from being tortured and abused – a problem that persists three decades after the end of the dictatorship, often with fatal results.

Under a new law that created the National Mechanism for Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a team will be set up to make regular surprise visits to prisons as well as police stations, psychiatric hospitals and juvenile institutions.

Members of the team can demand information about inmates, meet their families, interview prison officials and keep a record of habeas corpus writs filed in order to ensure the safety of prisoners and adequate prison conditions.

The law, approved in late November, brings the country in line with the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT), an international treaty ratified by Argentina in 2004.

OPCAT, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2002 as an addition to the 1984 U.N. Convention against Torture, and came into force in 2006, established an international inspection system for prisons. This includes an international subcommittee to monitor that the states parties establish national mechanisms for visits to prisons.

The treaty set a deadline for states to comply with the provision, which in the case of Argentina was 2007. But the law creating the mechanism was delayed for five years because of disagreements over the composition of the oversight body.

In an interview with IPS, lawyer Eva Asprella, coordinator of the Working Group on Persons Deprived of Liberty at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a prominent local human rights group, explained that the difficulties were due to the fact that the provinces in this federal country enjoy considerable autonomy.

The debate was solved by designing a 13-member National Committee and a Federal Council made up of the local (regional or provincial) mechanisms. The two bodies will operate in a coordinated manner, and there will also be representatives of the local mechanisms on the National Committee.

The Committee will be made up of the national prison ombudsman, a delegate from the central government’s Human Rights Secretariat, six representatives chosen by Congress, who cannot be legislators, two representatives of the local mechanisms and three civil society experts.

“This was a necessary, but not sufficient, step towards ensuring prevention,” Asprella said. “It’s a way of setting foot inside the prisons, getting past the walls, establishing dialogue, seeing what goes on inside, making recommendations and resorting to the justice system with writs of habeas corpus.”

The legislation will also give protection to many small organisations that are working under great difficulties in the provinces, she said. “CELS is well known and has had no problems, but some groups have been denied permission to enter the prisons, quite arbitrarily,” she said.

This was the case with the Human Rights Network in the northeastern province of Corrientes, which has been banned from entering the prisons, and the Zainuco Association in the southern province of Neuquén, she said.

Angie Acosta, one of the Zainuco Association’s lawyers, told IPS that in the view of her organisation, “the creation of the mechanism is essential for monitoring prisons.

“As soon as we started denouncing torture cases, they banned us from entering” Unit Number 11 in Neuquén, the capital of the province, said Acosta. “They said it was for security reasons, but they let the churches in,” she added.

Acosta pointed out that in 2004 there was a riot in that prison that was put down with brutal force, lasting four days and resulting in the trial of 27 police agents for torture. But only six were convicted, for lesser crimes.

The crisis broke out because of the officers’ abusive treatment of the mother of Cristian Ibazeta, a 34-year-old blind inmate with multiple sclerosis.

Ibazeta, who had filed numerous complaints about torture, was stabbed to death inside the prison in May, when he was only a month away from being eligible for furlough.

An investigation published by CELS in the book “Derechos Humanos en Argentina: Informe 2012” (2012 Report on Human Rights in Argentina) details tortures, beatings, arbitrary transfers, excessive punishment and lack of hygiene, which it says are common currency in many of the country’s prisons.

In the eastern province of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous, which accounts for 50 percent of all prisoners, there is also severe overcrowding, with inmates sleeping on the floor without access to toilets and subjected to freezing showers and beatings, while their family members have to submit to humiliating gropings when they visit.

Asprella described how in January, 26-year-old Patricio Barros Cisneros, an inmate in a Buenos Aires prison, was beaten to death by prison guards after asking for a private place to meet with his wife, who was eight months pregnant.

“If a 26-year-old man was beaten to death by a gang in the street, it would be a media scandal for days. But when it happens in a prison, society ignores it, so it goes on happening,” she said.

Amnesty International has found evidence of horrific abuses inside Mongolia’s prisons, such as torturing and starving detainees to death. Credit: Ranmali Bandarage/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
ULAANBAATAR, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

Tucked away from the scrutiny of civil society, Mongolia’s jails epitomise the limits of democracy in this county of 2.8 million people, where marginalised members of society often bear the brunt of a corrupt and under-resourced justice system.

“Mongolia is a democratic country and has been for 22 years,” Geleg Baasan, a human rights activist who heads the Centre for Protection of Breaches on Human Rights (CPBHR), told IPS, referring to the country’s development following nearly seven decades as a Soviet satellite state from 1921 until 1990.

“But this democratic transition has not yet (extended) to the jails,” she said. Having been arrested five times during the course of her decades-long career as an activist, she speaks from firsthand experience of a discriminatory and corrupt legal apparatus.

According to Baasan, the most marginalised in Mongolian society tend to slip through the cracks and get lost in the country’s many ‘detention centers’ – pre-trial chambers that are even more dangerous than post-conviction facilities.

The famous activist became especially interested in the country’s prison system when, four years ago, “a child was locked up for seven years for stealing wine and a box of chocolates”.

“People who have committed a horrible crime can pay (to avoid detention) but people who have committed a petty crime go to jail because they don’t have any connections,” said Baasan.

Though Mongolian law states that citizens cannot be arrested without due process, the United States embassy’s human rights report for 2011 found “arbitrary arrest and detention” to be common.

The embassy also cited a United Nations report, which found that two-thirds of detainees in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar who were accused of criminal offenses had been arrested without court authorisation.

On the other hand, some groups were found to be above the law.

The U.S. embassy report noted, “Ultranationalist groups enjoyed impunity due to police complacency and unwillingness to apprehend the offenders. Ultranationalists targeted LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) persons, Chinese, and Koreans with threats, violence, and the extraction of protection money.”

Otgonbaatar Tsedendemberel, director of the LGBT Centre of Mongolia, told IPS that exact statistics, such as the number of LGBT persons who have died as a result of violent attacks, are very difficult to verify since authorities and even family members are keen to cover up the issue.

His organisation currently documents cases of imprisonment and abuses of members of the LGBT community using the U.N. human rights framework on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Baasan agreed that tampering with death records is a common practice within the police force, courts and prison system. “A murder can be made to look like suicide – it happens all the time,” she said.

Conditions on the inside

In 2002, Amnesty International released a report detailing horrific abuses inside Mongolia’s prisons, such as torturing and starving detainees to death.

“Those with no connections usually starve because they can’t get as much food as other people and can’t get out of the prison as fast,” said Baasan.

Holding back food is also used as a way to force pre-trial detainees to “confess” to crimes they may or may not have committed, though this practice has been on the decline in recent years.

A lack of state funding for prisons also means some inmates go without food for longer periods of time.

Civil society and human rights activists have challenged the Mongolian government on these poor conditions and in 2003 a group of organisations and activists demanded that special representatives and social workers be assigned to look after prisoners’ needs.

In response the government assigned 70 staff members from the prison administration as social workers, with nothing more than 30 hours of training.

“They might as well have had no training at all,” Cyril Jaurena, from the Czech NGO ‘Caritas’, told IPS.

In 2011, one of those original social workers, Orosoo Purevsuren, lieutenant martialist of the Court Decision Enforcement Agency (CDEA) working in one of the pre-trial detention centres, came to Caritas in search of proper training.  

Since 2003 Purevsuren has struggled to meet the legal and emotional needs of the prisoners, a gargantuan task given his lack of training and extremely scarce resources.

He told IPS that there are just 78 social workers and 26 psychologists for an inmate population of 5,899 prisoners in 24 prisons. “Counseling has been limited and we are working to address this,” he said.

According to Jaurena, “It can take up to six months for a prisoner to meet a social worker who often does not have answers to their questions.

“Some will say ‘I want to see my children,’ or ‘My wife is trying to sell my house – what can I do?’” Jaurena said, adding that most social workers are powerless to act on these grievances.

In an attempt to tackle this problem, Jaurena began a partnership with the Prosecutor’s Office of Mongolia, which has thus far been unsuccessful in compiling a comprehensive record of prisoners’ grievances.

Other than lamenting the quality of the food, prisoners seldom bring more serious complaints – such as reports of abuse at the hands of prison guards – to the Prosecutor’s Office, making it difficult for prison officials to verify and document human rights violations.

Now, with information supplied by NGOs and other non-state actors, “the prosecutor’s office is preparing to conduct a comprehensive survey, publish the results and hold a conference (about the findings)”, explained Jaurena.

“We are trying to establish international standards,” T. Munkhbayar, of the Prosecutor’s Office of Mongolia, told IPS at the project’s official launch on Oct. 30. “This is the first time civil society has worked with the government in the prison system.”

Caritas will oversee the project, while the CPBHR will mobilise its own pool of lawyers to provide legal training to social workers appointed by the Court Decision Enforcement Agency, assisted by licensed social work experts from the Prison Fellowship of Mongolia, an Australian NGO.

Though she has witnessed a great deal of corruption as an activist, Baasan feels hopeful.

“Mongolia looks very much like a democracy (from the outside) because the government has signed so many international conventions.  I have ten volumes of books about these conventions but they are not enforced and the lawyers that use them are extremely rare.”

She is confident that the election of the Democratic Party on Jun. 28, 2012, represents a turning of this tide. “We have a completely new government and I see it as a new era of democracy,” Baasan said.

(END)

Emmanuel Biandjui Diffi, 40, stands outside Abidjan's main prison, where he was held for six months earlier this year. Credit: Robbie Corey-Boulet/IPS

By Robbie Corey-Boulet
ABIDJAN, Jul 26 2012 (IPS)

Eliane Negui knew just what to do when she got word that a group of inmates had escaped from Abidjan’s main prison, MACA, earlier this month. After all, the 24-year-old, who has lived across a dirt road from the facility for nine years, had witnessed the same scenario just two months before. 

“Whenever there is an escape we are always running into our rooms and closing the doors,” she said in a recent interview with IPS from her stand outside the prison’s main entrance where she sells fried bananas. “Whenever there is an escape the guards are shooting, so we enter our rooms so as not to be hurt or killed.

Twelve inmates escaped from the prison that day, eight of whom were soon caught. The total paled in comparison to the earlier escape, on May 4, when about 50 inmates broke free from the facility, prompting a statement of concern from Côte d’Ivoire’s United Nations mission.

This West African nation is still rebuilding after six months of post-election violence sparked by the November 2010 election, when former President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after losing to current President Alassane Ouattara. During the violence, the country’s 33 prisons were emptied, and infrastructure and equipment was largely destroyed.

Prisons began re-opening in August 2011, and 31 are now operational. But the recovery has been marred by a rash of prison breaks. Since August, there have been 17 separate escapes involving about 250 prisoners, according to Francoise Simard, chief of the U.N.’s rule of law section.

The problems dogging the country’s prisons mirror larger problems with the security sector — especially when it comes to personnel. Complaints about prison conditions also highlight room for improvement in the country’s post-conflict recovery.

Prior to the violence, which claimed some 3,000 lives, prison guards alone provided security at the country’s penitentiaries. These guards were armed, but there was a shortage of weapons and not all were functional, Simard told IPS.

When prisons began reopening in August, the Republican Forces of Côte d’Ivoire (FRCI), the national army, was the only security force allowed to have weapons. Soldiers began to work alongside prison guards.

More than one year after the conflict ended, prison guards are still unarmed. “The current government is very reluctant to give weapons to prison guards,” Simard said.

This reluctance underscores the lack of trust among the different security forces. Because the number of prison guards nationwide nearly doubled during Gbagbo’s 10-year tenure, there is a perception — whether accurate or not — that most guards are loyal to the old regime.

“There is a suspicious atmosphere in the prison,” said Stephane Boko, a supervisor at MACA Prision in Abidjan, told IPS. “The power no longer rests with the prison guards because they are considered to be pro-Gbagbo.”

A similar division has been evident in the broader security sector. The FRCI is largely composed of forces loyal to Ouattara, including leaders of the Forces Nouvelles rebel group, which controlled northern Côte d’Ivoire when the country was partitioned from 2002 to 2010. The government has long been wary of police and gendarmes, and in some parts of the country — notably the volatile western region — the FRCI remains the only security force with access to weapons, meaning it has taken the lead on general policing.

Recently, though, police and gendarmes have been re-armed in some places, and they now have a permanent presence in the prisons. Under a policy established after the May escape, five police officers and five gendarmes are supposed to be posted in each facility, Simard told IPS.

The presence of multiple security forces in each facility can sometimes lead to a lack of coordination. Earlier this year, for instance, some 93 prisoners were able to escape from a facility in Agboville, a town located roughly 80 kilometres north of Abidjan. In the three days leading up to the escape, Simard said, no security forces showed up to guard the prison.

Boko and other staff at MACA said they believe responsibility for protecting Côte d’Ivoire’s prisons should be returned to the guards. But Serges Kouame, head of communications for the Justice Ministry, said after the prison break earlier this month that a central command center was being established to respond to prison escapes, and that it would involve the FRCI, guards, gendarmes and the police.

Conditions

Meanwhile, concerns persist about conditions facing Côte d’Ivoire’s inmates. The national prison system was dramatically overcrowded prior to the post-election violence, with more than 12,000 prisoners crammed into facilities that have a total capacity of about 5,500, according to the U.N.

The current prison population is much lower – 5,945 as of Jul. 20 — but it recently surpassed the total capacity and is rising by the week. Though Simard noted that “the situation is not as dramatic as it was before with overcrowding,” she said that certain aspects of detention conditions — among them access to food — remain problematic.

The U.S. State Department addressed poor prison conditions in its most recent Human Rights Report for Côte d’Ivoire. Though the report took note of some improvements under Ouattara, it said food provision remained “inadequate.”

This was the main complaint of Emmanuel Biandjui Diffi, a 40-year-old who was held in MACA for six months since January after he sold a plot of land to two different people.

“The conditions were OK, but the quality of the food was very poor,” he told IPS. “There was nothing in the soup – no meat and no fish.”

Diffi also complained about the prison’s policy of feeding inmates just once a day at around 2pm, something Simard said that the U.N. was pushing the government to remedy.

Diffi said the general atmosphere inside the prison was tolerable. “We were living normally,” he said. “We could play football. Some of us were working as tailors. Most of us were spending a lot of our time praying.”

But he singled out one problem that highlights just how far Côte d’Ivoire has yet to go in getting its institutions back on track: prolonged pretrial detention, something the Ouattara government has previously blamed on “a lack of judicial capacity,” according to the U.S. State Department.

More than anything, Diffi said, this issue, and the impression it left of a system that was broken, was fueling desperation within MACA’s walls.

“Most of the people in there have not been prosecuted,” he told IPS. “Some are charged, but many are not. They want to go out. They want to be released. And so they are asking for judgment.”

Nearly 29 years after the demise of the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, successive democratic governments have failed to find a humane way of running the prison system. Preventable deaths, torture and appalling conditions for inmates continue to be reported.

“Practices rooted in the dictatorship are still going on in prisons, such as torture, abuse and other mistreatment which must be eradicated,” Paula Litvachky, a lawyer for the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), told IPS.

Of course, there is no real “continuity” with the seven-year regime that kidnapped, tortured and forcibly disappeared thousands of people, but abuses persist in prisons due to complicity, indifference and lack of accountability and oversight, she said.

Litvachky, head of the justice and security department of CELS, is a co-author of the chapter on prisons in the report titled “Derechos Humanos en Argentina Informe 2012” (Human Rights in Argentina: 2012 Report), presented this month by the NGO.

The chapter, “El modelo de la prisión-depósito. Medidas urgentes en los lugares de detención en la Argentina” (The Prison as Warehouse: Urgent steps for detention centres in Argentina), describes cases of humiliating treatment, torture, beatings, arbitrary transfers, excessive punishment, lack of hygiene and lack of access to healthcare.

In this scenario, CELS censures political and judicial authorities for denying the problem and turning a blind eye, and criticises “public indifference” to the serious violations of human rights that occur behind bars.

There is structural deprivation of detainees’ rights, not only because of the high level of violence and preventable deaths in prison but also because of deficiencies in healthcare, nutrition and hygiene, as well as overcrowding, the report says.

CELS has long complained that some of the worst human rights violations in the country take place in the Argentine prison system, and especially in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, which holds 50 percent of the total prison population.

In Buenos Aires, the most populous province, there were over 29,000 people in late 2011 incarcerated in facilities designed to accommodate only 18,640 inmates. According to the CELS report, overcrowding in some prisons is so severe that there is only one bed for every three detainees, who have to sleep in shifts.

And in even more extreme cases, convicts sleep on filthy floors, amid nauseating odours, with no water in their cells. In addition, they have no access to healthcare or medicines, and are fed inadequate rations of nutritionally deficient food.

In addition to these structural failings, arbitrary treatment and abuse is handed out to prisoners as well as their visiting relatives, to the point that visitors may be forced to strip and undergo body searches. Because of this humiliating treatment, some inmates forgo visits from family members.

Some of the torture methods are the same as those formerly used by the dictatorship on political prisoners, like the “submarine”, the practice of submerging the victim’s head in water to produce a near-death experience.

Prisoners have also reported being forced to take ice-cold showers, receiving beatings with batons or hoses, and being forced to run through the yard naked. Others have testified to being tortured with electric prods on the genitals and other parts of the body.

In Litvachky’s view, the Argentine Senate should urgently ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which has already been approved by the lower house of Congress.

The Provincial Commission for Memory, a body of the provincial government of Buenos Aires, has received 235 complaints of torture in prisons, but only 21 of the victims have testified in court due to fear of reprisals, the report says.

In Unit 51 “Magdalena”, a women’s prison in the city of Mercedes in Buenos Aires province, an inmate suffered a miscarriage after a brutal beating meted out as punishment by a prison guard, according to a complaint in the CELS report.

There have been cases of people being confined in isolation for weeks, although the rules only allow a maximum of 23 hours solitary confinement. “Violent and invasive” body searches are carried out, in which men and women prisoners are required to strip naked and spread their buttocks apart for inspection.

The CELS study draws attention to “the extraordinarily high frequency” of fires in prisons leading to fatalities among prisoners, as well as the large number of suicides and violent deaths attributed to fights between inmates.

“The prison staff decides whether inmates can have visits or make phone calls,” the report says. The guards “destroy inmates’ personal property,” deny them transport to hospital, and arbitrarily transfer them between prison facilities, it adds.

There are also reports of corruption and theft on the part of prison staff, drug trafficking within the prison, arms being smuggled in to inmates, and even cases of prisoners being forced by the guards to make armed sorties to commit crimes.

The denunciations in the CELS study are consistent with the findings of the Report on Human Rights of Persons Deprived of Liberty in the Americas, presented this month by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The IACHR, which is part of the human rights system of the Organisation of American States, documents “the high incidence of prison violence” in the region’s detention centres, which it describes as “areas that go unmonitored and lack oversight, in which arbitrariness and corruption have prevailed,” as well as the practice of torture.

Livatchky said that in Argentina, concern is primarily focused on the conditions faced by inmates in the province of Buenos Aires, where high levels of violence persist amidst a lack of oversight and controls.

“We need a sustained policy to reform and oversee the prison system,” said the CELS lawyer. “This is a huge shortcoming of the democratic system.”

In CELS’ view, the prison service should be demilitarised, and a serious debate should be held on the real purpose of the prison system.

So far, some officials and judges committed to change have raised their voices, but only as isolated individuals, Livatchky said.

“Overall, the response is inadequate, and reports of torture are not declining. Serious investigations are needed, to send a strong signal that such practices are no longer tolerated,” she said. (END)

The government of Honduras hopes to reach friendly settlements with the families of inmates killed in the Comayagua prison fire, to avoid international lawsuits.

Meanwhile, a team of U.S. investigators concluded that the blaze, the world’s deadliest prison fire in a century, was accidental but could have been avoided if certain problems had been addressed earlier.

Honduras’s minister of justice and human rights, Ana Pineda, told IPS that “we are preparing for a visit” by an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights mission “to address these aspects, because we are aware that the Honduran state is exposed to legal action and we want to reach friendly settlements.”

The authorities reported that 360 of the 852 inmates in the prison in the central region of Comayagua died in the Feb. 15 fire.

The team of investigators from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said the fire was not premeditated, but could have been avoided if safety issues had been addressed in time, such as overcrowding, the presence of flammable materials, shortage of prison staff and lack of an evacuation plan,

The ATF team, who began to investigate two days after the fire at the request of the government of right-wing President Porfirio Lobo, said the cause was believed to be an open flame, such as a cigarette or lit match, but clarified that “the actual ignition source was not recovered.”

“The fire is believed to have begun in the area of the top two bunk beds in the fourth column along the western side of the prison’s module six, which ignited nearby flammable materials,” said a statement released Tuesday Feb. 21 by the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.

The team, which used cutting-edge equipment and trained dogs, “was able to rule out other possible causes of the fire, such as a lightning strike, electrical causes, or the use of a flammable or combustible liquid.”

Honduras’s attorney general, Luis Rubí, said the ATF report would be followed by an investigation into the presumed negligence of the country’s prison authority, for which “our staff has interviewed more than 80 survivors and other people to investigate this aspect and determine responsibilities.”

But the ATF report met with some scepticism among families of the victims, who have expressed despair over the delay in handing over the bodies of their loved ones.

To explain the delay, prosecutors say many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, no fingerprints are available, and only a few have been identified by DNA testing.

Media reports that the bodies would be buried in a common grave prompted a group of victims’ relatives to storm the city morgue on Monday Feb. 20 and open several body bags, in a scene that shook the public.

“The (ATF) report is a first step forward,” said Gloria Redondo, the widow of one of the inmates who died in the fire. “But other things are lacking, so I can’t say I believe it is 100 percent accurate. We have set up a victims committee and until we find out the whole truth, we are not going to give our support to anything.

“We want a thorough report, because it wasn’t clothes or shoes that were lost in this fire, but human beings like our husbands, brothers and friends. This can’t go unpunished,” the 35-year-old woman told IPS, unable to contain her tears.

Redondo’s husband Marcio Arturo Sánchez, a former youth gang member, was still in prison even though he completed his sentence in September 2011, due to the slow-moving prison bureaucracy.

He was 32 years old and had written several essays describing life in the youth gangs or “maras” like the Salvatrucha gang, which he had joined when he was just 10 years old.

On Tuesday, President Lobo visited the shelter where relatives of the inmates are temporarily staying while they wait for the government to hand over the remains of the victims.

At the shelter, where there is a wall full of messages of grief and pain written by the relatives, the president said he hoped to reach a friendly agreement to avoid “the longer and more tortuous path” of international legal action.

The Honduran state does not deny its responsibility, which is why “I offer you reparations through the route of a friendly settlement; I am making the necessary consultations,” Lobo told the families.

Honduras’s 24 prisons are designed to hold 8,250 prisoners, but the human rights commissioner reported last year that they housed nearly 13,000 inmates.

Given the overcrowding and other severe problems noted by the ATF experts, it is hardly surprising that a series of tragic episodes have occurred in this country’s prisons.

One of these was the 2003 massacre in the El Porvenir prison in the northern port city of La Ceiba, where 69 people were killed. Although nine people were convicted in 2008 in connection with the massacre, no in-depth investigation of who was ultimately responsible was conducted.

Another tragedy in which no one has been found responsible was the 2004 fire in the prison in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, where 107 inmates died.

Next week, a hearing on the San Pedro Sula prison fire will be held before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica.

According to a press release, the Inter-American Commission concluded that the deaths were “the direct result of a series of structural deficiencies, which were known by the competent authorities, but were neither attended nor corrected in a timely manner.”

“We are going to seek viable settlements, without evading responsibilities, and in the case of Comayagua we will be transparent, nothing will be hidden,” foreign minister Arturo Corrales responded to a question from IPS.

The U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth was the country's largest maximum security federal prison from 1903 until 2005, when it became medium security. Credit: Americasroof/CC By 3.0

By Aprille Muscara
ATLANTA, Georgia, Feb 21 2012 (IPS)

Budget constraints combined with exploding prison populations are prompting a number of U.S. states, including some of in the politically conservative south, to rethink their criminal codes.

About 15 states have already enacted changes, while others, such as Georgia, are considering them, Alison Lawrence, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, told IPS.

Changes include reduction or elimination of prison time for certain property crimes and drug crimes, and in some cases, emphasis on drug treatment instead of prison for drug addicts.

A recent report by the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) outlines some of the changes already taken by some states.

For example, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have reduced or eliminated jail or prison time for parole and probation violations, opting instead for stricter supervision and alternative sentences like community service, according to SCHR.

Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee have all created alternative sentencing options for low-level, low-risk offenders, such as parole and probation.

Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas have attempted to reduce recidivism, that is, people returning to prison, by stronger emphasis on reentry planning that is tailored to meet individuals’ needs.

In addition, South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee have removed minimum sentencing requirements for certain drug-related violations.

Skyrocketing prison populations are largely the result of the failed “war on drugs” in the U.S., coupled with the “get tough on crime” policies advocated by many Republicans and some Democrats at the state and federal levels, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, an estimated two million people are behind bars in the U.S. – making up a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners – with the majority of the increase since the 1980s comprising low-level offenders, particularly drug offenders.

But even Republicans are beginning to reverse course, with former speaker of the U.S. house Newt Gingrich, now a candidate for president, and right-wing lobbyist Grover Norquist joining with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to call for substantial reforms.

According to a 2011 NAACP report, spending by states on prisons has increased at a rate six times higher than that of spending on higher education. This amount is over 50 billion dollars annually, according to a 2009 report by the Pew Center on the States.

In Georgia, Governor Nathan Deal, a Republican, used his first State of the State speech to call for prison policy reforms to reduce the strain on the state’s budget. He created a Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform, which released a report with numerous recommendations in November 2011.

Sara Totonchi, executive director of SCHR, is pleased with the report, which incorporates many, but not all, of SCHR’s recommendations, and expects Georgia’s General Assembly to begin considering related legislation this week.

“I would say this is highly needed, highly anticipated, a step in the right direction. The reforms proposed by the Council are the beginning of the process Georgia must take to recover from its addiction to incarceration,” Totonchi told IPS.

“We’ve turned to prisons as a solution for any problem that plagues our community and it’s been an inappropriate solution. I’m hopeful that if the reforms are adopted, we will take an initial step towards curbing one of the biggest problems our state is facing,” she said.

SCHR also recommends that Georgia fully fund its public defender system, revisit its mandatory minimum sentencing laws for all crimes, and fully fund and implement comprehensive reentry services in the community, three actions not recommended by the Special Council.

In a May 2011 op-ed in the New York Times, Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, said Republican leaders are pursuing prison reforms for the wrong reasons, that is, saving money instead of addressing racial disparities in incarceration.

But Totonchi is not as troubled by this. “We all come to the issues we care about for different reasons. We have reached the level of crisis in Georgia with our prison system. If the financial arguments are what’s winning with our conservative partners in this reform effort, I might even share some of their concern.”

“It’s the sort of thing I’m grateful for conservatives for coming to the table, given the power structure in Georgia, having them at the table is the only way we can get it,” Totonchi said.

“I would mention, take a look at what South Carolina and what Texas have done. These are states that are definitely our contemporaries, our peers. They have improved public safety,” she said.

Indeed, Texas led the way in prison reforms beginning in 2005, by changing sentencing for nonviolent, nonsexual, and nonserious offenders – the “triple nons” – and expanding resources for drug treatment and probation. This saved the state two billion dollars and even led to a drop in violent crimes by 12.3 percent since 2003, according to a 2010 report by Right on Crime.

Lawrence explained the connection. “Looking at recidivism rates, states have started to think we can do something better. Keep those dangerous criminals locked out, but maybe there’s less serious criminals, if we treat them in the community with substance abuse (treatment), they’ll commit less crime.”

In California, the problem of prison overcrowding became so bad that the federal courts had to step in, ordering the state to reduce its state prison populations to 137.5 percent of its prison capacity within two years, a reduction of 45,000 people.

In May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upheld the ruling, five to four.

In response, California moved many inmates out of state prisons and into county prisons, but it has not yet changed the sentencing laws, except to the extent that former governor Arnold Schwarzenneger, during his last days in office, removed the possibility of jail time for marijuana possession.

Indeed, some states like California, Colorado, Maine, Nevada and Oregon have enacted both medical marijuana laws and eliminated the possibility of jail time for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

However, the movement to end marijuana prohibition has not been part of the conversation around Justice Reinvestment, Lawrence said.

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