Maravi

Prisoners are human too

Prisoners are human too
By The Post
Fri 05 Oct. 2012, 15:40 CAT

It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. It is also said that a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones. And Zambia treats its imprisoned citizens as if they were not full human beings, they were sub-human.

A great majority of our prisons are not fit to be used as detention centres for our remand and convicted prisoners.

Every visit to our prisons by court officials, human rights activists and even by representatives of religious organisations, has consistently revealed that our prisons are overcrowded. And this has been over many years. It is not a new complaint. But nothing so far has been done to seriously reduce congestion in our prisons.

We are constructing roads and all sorts of other infrastructure, but very little attention is being paid to the extension of our detention centres.
It is true that most of our prisons were built long before independence. And at independence, our population was slightly over three million.

Today, we have a population of 13 million. Prison facilities that were built for a population of about three million cannot be expected to cater to 13 million.

And some of our prisons were really built for second-class citizens and are not fit to be used by a nation in which every citizen has become first-class, equal.

We have people in the top leadership of our country who were incarcerated in these prisons before and after independence. They know very well the conditions that exist in these prisons. It is therefore difficult to understand why they are slow in reacting to these issues, in remedying the inadequacies of our prisons.

There may not be so many leaders in the present government who have been to prison. But the principal leader of this government has been a victim of unjustified politically-inspired prison detentions. And as such, he knows very well what needs to be done, and done urgently.

We know that there are many pressures on this government. There are children with very urgent health, nutritional and educational needs to be taken care of. There are also very urgent developmental projects to fund.

And every day, the government is being reminded of the need to deliver on its election promises. There are people making more and more noise every day about this and that.

And it's human nature to first clear off the noisemakers by addressing their concerns. Prisoners are in a very weak state with no voice of their own to be heard and very few people are there to speak for them. They are not there to be seen and heard. And in a situation of sangwapo, they lose out because they are locked away from the decision makers and society in general.

For them to get anything from this order, someone has to remember them and speak for them.

Yes, most of these prisoners are criminals. And some of them are very bad criminals who have killed, maimed and destroyed the lives of other human beings. In some cases, their conduct is close to that of animals. But they are not animals. They are human beings who have fallen short of the standards expected or required of them by society and indeed by their Creator.

But they are still human beings deserving our respect and compassion simply by the fact that they are human beings made in their Creator's own image. Whatever they have done or whatever they have failed to do that has landed them in prison does not remove from them their humanness. They are bad human beings. And just that - bad human beings.

But still human. Bad conduct does not turn them into something else other than human. Their behaviour puts them next to animals but they are still human beings deserving to be treated as human beings who have wronged society and probably their Creator. They are still very much entitled to the dignity of a human person.

Their incarceration, however, deprives them of the ability to fend for themselves or provide certain things for themselves. They are not in a position to feed and clothe themselves. The state, which has incarcerated them, owes them that duty.

It is the state's responsibility to ensure that every prisoner has reasonable access to good nutrition, clothing, sleeping and sanitation facilities. Everything that a human being needs to remain alive and in good health that a prisoner cannot provide for himself, the state should provide.

Prisoners deserve reasonable access to clean drinking water, adequate food and air. In overcrowded facilities with poor ventilation, prisoners have little access to clean air. And this opens them up to all sorts of airborne diseases like tuberculosis. Poor sanitation opens them up to all sorts of diseases like diarrhoea.

Let's turn our prisons into corrective centres and not into facilities for the destruction of everything in them that makes them human beings. For those who are willing and able to learn, to improve their education and literacy levels, let them be helped.

Let's give them adequate opportunities to improve themselves as human beings so that when they come out of prison, they are able to integrate themselves into the community in a more valuable way.

And for those who have to live the remaining parts of their lives as prisoners, let's help them through education to be better prisoners. We say this because even in prison, there is life to be lived, there is a community one is a member of.

If we don't change our attitude towards prisoners, we will be creating a bigger and bigger problem for ourselves because the people we are sending to prison will never come back as better people.

Prison will only succeed in making them hard-core criminals who will continue to be in and out of prison for the rest of their lives.
Let's punish wrongdoers, those who commit crimes, but let's not allow this to rob them of their humanity.

Prisoners are human persons who, despite their crime, deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. They need our care. With this in mind, we must strive to provide for the material and spiritual welfare of prisoners. We draw the attention of our nation's leaders to the need to make every effort to reform our penal system in a way that ensures respect for the prisoners' human dignity.

Labels: PRISONS

posted by MrK @ 3:30 PM