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Creating Criminals

Prisons and People in a Market Society

Zed Books Ltd

Behind the Bars: the Injustice of Prison

Glendairy on Fire (March, 2005)

Who would have thought that on March 29th, 2005 the prisoners at the Glendairy Prison in Station Hill, St Michael, would have set fire to the island's lone adult correctional institution? For days the fire at this 150 year old penal institution made headlines not only in Barbados but across the region. While many Barbadians never saw it coming many others are of the opinion that rioting at the prison was inevitable especially since this institution which was built to hold only 300 was holding up to 997 inmates at the time. The incident allegedly occurred following a homosexual act. The interesting thing is that for a long time now several calls have been made to do something about the perturbing situation of homosexuality in the prison including suggestions to put condoms in the prison. Although the details about how and why the fire was set remain obscure at this point in time, one thing remains evident; the prisoners were discontented with their surroundings.

... Although not completely demolished, it seems that the 150 year old Glendairy Prison is no longer going to be used as a prison. Hopefully they will turn it into a museum or keep it as a historic landmark.

A Bad Day in Quito Prison

Crime, justice and punishment are always in the news. They are hot topics in most countries, usually in the form of an outcry about rising crime, fear and insecurity, the resulting need for more police powers and a call for harsher punishments. At the same time the prisons of the world get fuller, infectious diseases spread within them, judges pass more severe sentences and technology is increasingly called into service to provide surveillance of convicted people. Rich countries spend more money each year on crime control and detection. Poor countries try to run complex, Western-style criminal justice systems without the requisite resources.

In this chapter we look at penal justice in the twenty-first century, as expressed by sending people to prison. Prison is the backstop of the whole process. People are held in prison after they have been arrested and before they have been convicted of a crime. Prison is the destination for convicted people who are being punished or locked up to protect society from further crimes they might carry out. Prison is the place where countries that still use the death penalty hold condemned prisoners, in a grim block called Death Row, to await the announcement of the date for their execution or to live for years whilst they submit appeals to higher courts. Every country in the world has or uses prisons.

The prisons of the world are often in the news, and rarely because the news is good. For example, an event took place in Ecuador in February 2004 that would have caused no surprise in Latin America because such things happen regularly in that region. In a prison in the capital, Quito, on a Sunday, which is family visiting day, prisoners took more than 300 of the visitors hostage. The prisoners took this action to protest at overcrowding and poor conditions. The 33 prisons in Ecuador were built to house 6,000 prisoners, but actually held 12,600 at that time. The prisoners were also protesting at the slowness of the judicial system. More than one thousand of them, not yet found guilty of any crime, had been in prison for over a year waiting for their trial to start.

The government began negotiations with the prisoners. They promised to release those who had waited more than a year for their trial and to build three new prisons to ease the overcrowding. But their promises were not believed. The action spread and in March a similar hostage taking took place at the women's prison. Journalists were among the hostages. The situation was complicated further when the prison guards added their protest by going on strike for better pay and improved working conditions. The affair ended when the police stormed the prisons and restored order. Some prisoners escaped in the turmoil. The Ecuadorian Interior Minister Raul Baca said, 'I don't know how many [inmates] have fled or were killed or wounded. We won't know this until the operation is over.'

The story of the Quito prison illustrates many of the problems of prison systems around the world. Most prisoners, men and women, live in bad, unhealthy and overcrowded conditions. Prison guards suffer the same poor working conditions and are badly paid and inadequately trained. Many of the prisons of the world are always overcrowded. Disturbances are frequent and often put down with lethal force. Violent death is an ever-present possibility in the prisons of many countries. Security can be very tight but sometimes prisoners manage to escape. Governments often struggle to run humane prison systems but have insufficient resources to do so.

Improvements are promised but rarely materialize. They were not very successful in Ecuador. In June 2005 hundreds of prisoners again protested. One man was nailed to a wooden cross by other prisoners and two women sewed their lips shut to illustrate their support for a prison hunger strike. Other women cut themselves and used their blood to write placards calling for reforms. Their main demands were for electricity, running water and early release for good behaviour.

Prisons and the Rule of Law

In this chapter we look in some detail at the injustice of prison. This is not to overlook the acts committed by those who end up in prison, nor the plight of those whom they have harmed. The next chapter will focus on crime, and the effectiveness of imprisonment as a response to it. Prisons are meant to be part of a justice system and what happens in them should affirm and strengthen justice, not deny it. Albie Sachs spent some time in prison in South Africa for opposing the apartheid system. When he was in exile in Mozambique in 1988 he opened a letter bomb addressed to him and lost an eye and a hand. South Africa became democratic in 1994 and he was appointed by the South African President, Nelson Mandela, as a judge in the country's first Constitutional Court. When asked to rule on the question of whether prisoners should be able to vote, Judge Sachs said:

[p]risoners are entitled to all their personal rights and personal dignity not temporarily taken away by law, or necessarily inconsistent with the circumstances in which they have been placed. Of course, the inroads which incarceration necessarily makes upon prisoners' personal rights and their liberties are very considerable. Nevertheless, there is substantial residue of basic rights which they may not be denied; and if they are denied them, they are entitled to legal redress.

Judge Louise Arbour was a member of the Supreme Court of Canada. In February 2004 she became the High Commissioner for Human Rights for the United Nations. She had a similar view to that of Judge Sachs. While she was a judge in the Toronto Appeal Court she carried out an investigation into an event at the Federal Women's prison in Kingston, Ontario. The event involved an emergency response team consisting entirely of men going into the prison after an incident, stripping a group of women naked, placing them in restraints and moving them from their cells. In the conclusions to her investigation she said that 'the legal order must serve as both the justification and the code of conduct for correctional authorities'. In other words, prisons must be run according to the law and that is the only basis on which it is acceptable to take away people's liberty.

Too Many Prisoners: Not Enough Space

For most prisoners around the world the experience of prison will not be like the experience of prisoners in Denmark or Sweden, who are likely to spend their days in a workshop or education room and their nights in a single cell like a small hotel room with a radio, television and sanitary facilities. Most prison systems of the world are overcrowded, so prisoners will be living very close to each other and struggling for access to space and the basics of life.

The US State Department reported in 2003 that Luanda prison in Angola, built for 800, held 1,750 prisoners. Warehouses in Bengo, Malange and Lunda Norte provinces were used as prisons during the year. In 2004 a Bangladesh newspaper reported that the oldest prison in Bangladesh, Dhaka Central, built to hold 2,650, was holding over 11,000 people, including 250 women. The US federal prison system is 40 per cent overcrowded. The Council of Europe, an intergovernmental human rights body with 46 member countries stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, has an official committee which visits places where people are detained and reports on what it finds. In 2001, in Oporto prison in Portugal, this committee, called the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, found cells of seven square metres built for one person but holding three people.

Overcrowding can be dramatic with, at the extreme, prisoners with no room to lie down pressed up against the window bars and tying themselves to them so that they sleep standing up. It can mean sleeping in shifts because there are more prisoners than beds. It can mean that the weaker prisoners never get a bed to lie on, or are assigned a small space right by the cell toilet. Sometimes they are even struggling for enough air to breathe. In Russia in the mid-1990s the head of the prison service told a parliamentary committee that sometimes prisoners died in Russian prisons of suffocation because of a shortage of air.

Even in rich countries prison overcrowding leads to treating prisoners as commodities rather than people. One of the directors of a prison in Vermont, USA, asked investigators looking into the deaths of seven prisoners within two years, 'Do you think I know who they [the prisoners] are, let alone [am able to] tell you that I provide them correctional and rehabilitative services? I stash them until they are moved.' The Director-General of the Prison Service in England and Wales said that with overcrowding:

We are greatly at risk of individuals in the prison being completely dehumanised — it's a very big machine that is churning away — as individuals, they are not very important to it and they feel the weight of imprisonment at that point and it looks like a very scary world they are entering....

In several prisons in Scotland the prisoners share a small cell with one other person and have to use a chamberpot in the cell because there are no better sanitary arrangements.

Official figures that measure overcrowding in prisons reflect each country's own decision as to when the amount of space is not enough. There is no world standard for enough space. How much is enough will depend on how many people are in the cell, how many hours they spend in it, how much time they have in the fresh air, how much natural light and air enters the cells. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has suggested an absolute minimum of four square metres per person for countries struggling to reform their systems and reach minimum standards. But even though countries can define overcrowding for themselves and do not have to conform to an international standard, they admit to perilous levels.

The effects of overcrowding are severe. At the worst, prisoners can contract a deadly disease or suffer lethal violence. At best, life is lived under great pressure and a struggle for access to resources. Often governments try to deal with prison overcrowding by building more prisons at great expense. Somehow prison building never manages to keep up with the growth in the number of prisoners and a few months after the new prisons are opened they are overcrowded again. The prisons of England and Wales have been overcrowded every year for the last 20 years. Yet in the ten years 1992–2002, 20 new prisons were opened. Levels of overcrowding fall when the new prisons open. Then, after a few months, overcrowding starts again and is soon back to the level it was at before the new prisons were built.

Waiting for Trial

The prisoners in Ecuador protested because some had waited more than a year for their case to come to trial. In some countries a year would be regarded as a short time to wait. Many prisoners wait years for their case to come before a judge, some spending longer in prison than they would serve if they had been sentenced for their crime.

In all countries some of those in prison will be waiting for their trial. There are countries, however, where the majority of the prisoners locked up in prison are in that situation.

Prisons and Violence

Brazil — a bleak history

1992 111 inmates die after police storm Carandiru prison in Sao Paulo

2001 In a simultaneous state-wide rebellion, prisoners revolt at 29 different facilities

2002 10 people die and 60 prisoners escape during violence at the Embu das Artes jail in Sao Paulo

2003 84 prisoners tunnel their way out of Silvio Porto prison in Paraiba, in the biggest breakout in Brazil's history

April 2004 14 inmates are killed, some mutilated, during an uprising at Urso Branco prison in Rondonia

June 2004 An uprising at Benfica facility in Rio de Janeiro leaves at least 34 inmates dead.

Prison is the place where those who break the law are sent, ostensibly to be reformed, but prisons are places that contain great contradictions. One such contradiction is that prison is part of the justice system of any country but, as the above extract about Brazil shows, prisons are often themselves places of great lawlessness, where many crimes are committed within the walls and there is no access to justice for those thus harmed. The violence in Brazil continued. In June 2005 there was a riot at a prison in Sao Paulo State and five prisoners were decapitated. Two prisoners were shot by military police in a prison in Recife and a prisoner was decapitated in a riot at a detention centre in Juiz de Fora in the state of Minas Gerais.

In April 2003 in Honduras 69 people were killed when clashes broke out between regular prisoners and gang members at the overcrowded El Porvenir prison near the Caribbean port of La Ceiba. It was first thought that the deaths were caused by prisoners fighting each other but an inquiry held into the deaths came up with another explanation. The inquiry found that in fact the police called to deal with the disturbance had caused many of the deaths by opening fire without warning and shooting prisoners. Ana Machado, whose son was killed, said, 'Some prisoners were still alive after the shooting and the police executed them. Others were able to save themselves by pretending to be dead.'

In May another serious incident occurred in Honduras when 103 prisoners died in a fire in a prison in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. The fire broke out in a cellblock built for 50 but holding 186 prisoners. Apparently many of the prisoners could have been saved but the guards refused to open the cells in time. 'We screamed at them to let us out,' one prisoner said. 'They wanted to leave us to die,' survivors told the Honduran newspaper La Prensa. 'We heard them say "Let's leave these pieces of garbage to die."' The victims, many of them members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang, either suffocated or were burned alive.

The situation in the prisons in Central America and the Caribbean has been worsened by a new factor, the more determined US policy of repatriation of gang members and other convicted people to their countries of origin after they have served a sentence in a US prison. These repatriations occur with seemingly no thought as to how the poor recipient countries are going to cope with the extra demands on their social services and creaking criminal justice systems.

Honduras is a poor country with an annual per capita income of US$947. It could be argued that it cannot afford to follow the finer points of justice and keep its prisons safe. The United States is the richest country in the world. Yet in the prisons of the United States gross abuses are also to be found. In early March 2004 an inquiry was launched into an incident in a prison in California to determine whether the guards there were guilty of criminal negligence. Ronald Herrera was a prisoner who because of his conviction for rape was held away from other prisoners in a segregation unit in Corcoran prison. He had hepatitis and kidney disease, so needed to be connected regularly to a dialysis machine. He was also seeing a psychiatrist for mental illness. One night prison officers who were at the time watching an important sports event on the television (the Super Bowl) heard howls coming from his cell. When they looked they saw that his cell window was covered with a curtain of toilet paper soaked in blood but they took no action. 'Just keep an eye on him,' the guard in charge said.

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Excerpted from Creating Criminals by Vivien Stern. Copyright © 2006 Vivien Stern. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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