Human Rights Abuses Against Prisoners

The number of people incarcerated in the United States reached two million in the year 2000, a staggering figure both in absolute terms and in terms of the incarceration rate it represented. But the U.S. is not alone in holding record numbers of inmates. Prisoner numbers continue to rise in countries all over the world, resulting in severe overcrowding of prisons and other detention facilities. Although overall figures are difficult to estimate due to some countries' refusal to disclose information about their penal facilities, even such basic facts as the number of inmates held, the world inmate population was roughly eight to ten million people.

In many countries, the high levels of official secrecy that made prisoner numbers impossible to determine are equally effective in cutting off information about even the most egregious prison abuses. By barring human rights groups, journalists, and other outside observers access to their penal facilities, prison officials seek to shield substandard conditions from critical scrutiny. In extreme cases, including China and Cuba, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is barred from providing basic humanitarian relief to prisoners.

While conditions of detention vary greatly from country to country and facility to facility, standards in most countries are shockingly low. Prisons and jails in even the richest and most developed countries are plagued by severe overcrowding, decaying physical infrastructure, a lack of medical care, guard abuse and corruption, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence. With the public primarily concerned about keeping prisoners locked up rather than about the conditions in which prisoners were confined, little progress has been made toward remedying these abuses.

Abusive Treatment of Prisoners

Unchecked outbursts of violence occur in many prisons, violating prisoners' right to life. On April 27, 2000, in what was described as the bloodiest prison conflict in Colombian history, at least twenty-five inmates were killed in Bogotá's Modelo prison. The incident, which pitted rival inmate groups against each other, was sparked by the discovery of a mutilated body stuffed in a sewer pipe.

While the body count from this incident was exceptional, the violence itself was not. As evidenced by a subsequent prison search that resulted in the discovery of two AK-47 assault rifles, eight grenades, dozens of firearms, and several thousand knives, Modelo prison was a mini-arsenal, and violence was frequent. Indeed, some 1,200 Colombian inmates were killed over the past decade, a disproportionate number of them in Modelo prison. "In the four years that I've been in the Modelo I've seen more blood and more death than in all my life of crime," said an inmate there. The combination of severe overcrowding--the prison housed some 4,700 inmates in space for 1,900--an extreme shortage of staff, and plentiful weapons made violence inevitable.

The Mata Grande Penitentiary in Rondonopolis, Brazil, was the scene of a similar killing spree in March 2000. Thirteen prisoners were murdered when a group of inmates overpowered the handful of guards that manned their cellblock, gaining entry to a neighboring area that housed their enemies. The killings were apparently part of an effort to gain control of the prison drug trade. Although violence was common at the prison, the police were reported to have been slow to respond to the crisis, taking three hours to enter the facility and regain control over the inmates.

Mass killings such as these may merit an occasional mention in the press, but the vast majority of inmate deaths go unnoticed. In some countries, including Brazil, Kenya, Venezuela, and Panama, prison homicides are so frequent as to seem routine. Inmates are usually killed by other inmates rather than by guards, but inmate-on-inmate violence is usually the predictable result of official negligence. By neglecting to supervise and control the inmates within their facilities, by failing to respond to incidents of violence, by corruptly allowing the entry of weapons into the prisons, and by generally abetting the tyranny of the strongest prisoners over the weakest, prison authorities are directly responsible for the violence of their charges.

Prisoner death rates are often far higher than corresponding rates among the populations outside prisons. While violence is a factor in some penal facilities, disease -- often the predictable result of overcrowding, malnutrition, unhygienic conditions, and lack of medical care -- remains the most common cause of death in prison. Food shortages in some prisons, combined with extreme overcrowding, create ideal conditions for the spread of communicable diseases.

Tuberculosis (TB) continues to ravage prison populations around the world. The spread of TB is especially worrisome in Russia, in light of the country's enormous inmate population -- over one million prisoners as of September 2000 -- and the increasing prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) strains of the disease. Approximately one of out every ten inmates is infected with tuberculosis, with more than 20 percent of sick inmates being affected by MDR strains, constituting a serious threat to public health. Nor is the tuberculosis epidemic confined to Russia; rather, it has swept through prisons all over the former Soviet Union. High rates of TB have also been reported in the prisons of Brazil and India, two countries with substantial inmate populations.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has ravaged prison populations, with penal facilities around the world reporting grossly disproportionate rates of HIV infection and of confirmed AIDS cases. In a positive development, Botswana's government introduced a bill in July 2000 to allow inmates in the late stages of AIDS and other terminal illnesses to return home to their families. But inmates around the world frequently die of AIDS while incarcerated, often deprived of even basic medical care.

Physical abuse of prisoners by guards remains another chronic problem. Some countries continue to permit corporal punishment and the routine use of leg irons, fetters, shackles, and chains. The heavy bar fetters used in Pakistani prisons, for example, turn simple movements such as walking into painful ordeals. In many prison systems, unwarranted beatings are so common as to be an integral part of prison life.

Women prisoners are particularly vulnerable to custodial sexual abuse. The problem is widespread in the United States, where male guards outnumber women guards in many women's prisons. In some countries, Haiti being a conspicuous example, female prisoners were even held together with male inmates, a situation that exposed them to rampant sexual abuse and violence.

In contravention of international standards, juvenile inmates are often held together with adults. Many of Pakistan's jails and police lockups mixed juvenile and adult prisoners, as did certain detention facilities in Nicaragua, Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. Children in such circumstances frequently fall victim to physical abuse, including rape, by adult inmates.

Extortion by prison staff, and its less aggressive corollary, guard corruption, is common in prisons around the world. Given the substantial power that guards exercise over inmates, these problems are predictable, but the low salaries that guards are generally paid severely aggravated them. In exchange for contraband or special treatment, inmates supplement guards' salaries with bribes. Powerful inmates in some facilities in Colombia, India, and Mexico, among others, enjoy cellular phones, rich diets, and comfortable lodgings, while their less fortunate brethren live in squalor. In Argentina, as part of an effort to combat rampant guard corruption, the government launched a purge of its prison service, dismissing numerous high-ranking officials in April 2000. The mass firing was sparked by revelations that guards had released inmates on robbing excursions and had even sent one inmate out to kill the judge investigating these schemes.

Overcrowding -- prevalent in almost every country for which information was available -- is at the root of many of the worst abuses. The problem is often most severe in smaller pretrial detention facilities, where, in many countries, inmates were packed together with no space to stretch or move around. In some Brazilian police lockups, where a large proportion of the country's detainees are held, overcrowding is so acute, and floor space is at such a premium, that inmates have to tie themselves to the cell bars to sleep. In Brazil, as in many other countries, inmates often suffer long stays in these dreadful conditions.

Another common problem is governments' continued reliance on old, antiquated, and physically decaying prison facilities. Nineteenth-century prisons needing constant upkeep remained in use in a number of countries, including the United States, Mexico, Russia, Italy, and the United Kingdom, although even many modern facilities are in severe disrepair due to lack of maintenance. Notably, some prisons lack a functional system of plumbing, leaving prisoners to "slop out" their cells, that is, to defecate in buckets that are periodically emptied.

A different set of concerns was raised by the spread of ultra-modern "super-maximum" security prisons. Originally prevalent in the United States, where politicians and state corrections authorities promoted them as part of a politically popular quest for more "austere" prison conditions, the supermax model was increasingly followed in other countries. Prisoners confined in such facilities spent an average of twenty-three hours a day in their cells, enduring extreme social isolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarily limited recreational and educational opportunities. While prison authorities defended the use of super-maximum security facilities by asserting that they held only the most dangerous, disruptive, or escape-prone inmates, few safeguards existed to prevent other prisoners from being arbitrarily or discriminatorily transferred to such facilities.

The small group isolation regime instituted at Turkey's Kartal Special-Type Prison was one example of this trend. Beginning in 1999, the Turkish authorities began holding prisoners charged under the country's Anti-Terror Law in a new cell-based system, by which inmates remained locked in shared cells for lengthy periods of time, deprived of other human contact and lacking opportunities for exercise, work, education, or other activities. In these conditions, one detainee wrote, "Your senses of taste, smell, hearing, feeling, and sight fade. You cannot laugh at anything and you cry at the smallest thing." Penal experts, including the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, have warned that such conditions may endanger prisoners' physical and mental health.

Fiscal constraints and competing budget priorities are to blame for prison deficiencies in some countries, but, as the supermax example suggests, harsh prison conditions were sometimes purposefully imposed. In Peru, notably, a punitive motive was evident in the decision to hold top-security prisoners in high-altitude Challapalca and Yanamayo prisons, whose remote locations and miserable conditions led the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to declare that they were "unfit" to serve as places of detention.

Conditions in many prisons are, in short, so deficient as to constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, violating article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Their specific failings could also be enumerated under the more detailed provisions of the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. A widely known set of prison standards, the Standard Minimum Rules describe "the minimum conditions which are accepted as suitable by the United Nations." Although the Standard Minimum Rules were formally integrated into the prison laws and regulations of many countries, few if any prison systems observe all of their prescriptions in practice.

With few means to draw public attention to violations of their rights, prisoners around the world frequently resort to hunger strikes, self-mutilation, rioting, and other forms of protest. The most dramatic recent such incident took place in Kazakhstan in July 2000, when forty-four prisoners at Arkalyk prison reportedly attempted mass suicide in protest of conditions. The inmates used razors and broken glass to slash their necks, stomachs, and wrists. Other recent outbreaks of prison unrest have been reported in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, England, Greece, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, and Venezuela.

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