Escaping Indonesian jail woes
THE recent escape of four foreign inmates who tunnelled their way out of Kerobokan Prison, a high-security facility on the Indonesian island of Bali, could have been a scene from a Hollywood movie.
But there is plenty of other drama within the walls of the prison and in many of Indonesia’s hundreds of other penitentiaries.
Prisons are overcrowded and have far too few guards. Corrupt staff provide wealthier inmates with drugs, outings and even prostitutes, say analysts who have studied the corrections system. And guards have been accused of complicity in some escapes and incompetence in others, including the one at Kerobokan, which has become the latest symbol of the system’s many woes.
“It, sadly, does reflect the dysfunction,” said Leopold Sudaryono, an Indonesian doctoral scholar in criminology at Australian National University.
In the Kerobokan breakout, which was discovered on the morning of June 19, four men dug a 15-metre tunnel under the prison’s walls in an open courtyard and fled into the tropical night.
Two of the prisoners – Dimitar Nikolov Iliev, 43, of Bulgaria, who was convicted last year of data theft, and Sayed Mohammed Said, 31, of India, who was serving a sentence for drug smuggling – were captured less than a week later in East Timor, which borders Indonesia.
But despite an extensive manhunt, the two others are still at large: Tee Kok King, 50, a Malaysian drug convict, and Shaun Edward Davidson, a 33-year-old Australian. Davidson had already made headlines in his home country last Sep- tember, when he was sentenced to a year in prison for using a false passport and visa documents on Bali, a popular destination for Australians.
Officials say the two men probably had help, both inside and outside the prison. Sudaryono said the escape was further evidence that Indonesia’s prison system is ill-equipped for its most basic tasks.
“The corrections service has three main functions: security to keep those detained in a secure environment, rehabilitation and inmate services,” Sudaryono said. “The recent prison break reconfirms that the corrections department is incapacitated to perform those functions, particularly the first one.”
Indonesia’s top prison official, I Wayan K Dusak, head of the Directorate General of Corrections, acknowledged that the Kerobokan guards had failed in their duties, calling them “weak watchers”.
But he also noted that the prison’s resources, like that of the system nationwide, are stretched well beyond normal capacity. Built to house 323 prisoners, Kerobokan holds nearly 1,400. And on the night of the breakout, only five guards were on duty at the complex, he said.
Indonesia’s prisons have an official capacity of 130,000 prisoners, but house more than 228,000, Dusak said. Nationally, there is supposed to be 1 guard for every 20 inmates, but in reality, it is 1 for every 65, he added.
“We have issues of quality and quantity” where guards are concerned, Dusak said. “There’s no training for them when they are hired. Some carry guns but don’t know how to use them.”
Indonesia has seen many prison escapes and riots over the years. In May, hundreds of inmates broke out of an overcrowded prison on the island of Sumatra. In June, flooding caused a wall to collapse at another Sumatra prison, allowing dozens to escape.
Dusak blames Indonesia’s judicial system for overcrowding, and many analysts agree. In 2009, the government introduced mandatory three-year prison sentences for using narcotics. About half the country’s inmates are drug offenders, Dusak said.
In addition, nearly 29,000 Indonesians are serving long prison terms for nonviolent crimes like pickpocketing and gambling, according to data from the Directorate General of Corrections.
“The punitive attitude among Indonesian society is high, and judges follow that,” said Adrianus Meliala, an Indonesian criminologist.
Gatot Goei, programme director of the Jakarta-based Center for Detention Studies, said nearly 90 percent of Indonesians convicted of felony offences are sent to prison, as opposed to being given suspended sentences or fines. The prison population has grown by 15,000 to 20,000 per year since 2007, Goei said.
Some experts are lobbying the government to revoke the mandatory minimum sentences for drug users, giving judges the option of sentencing them to rehabilitation. Dusak, who is to retire this month, agreed the system would improve if drug users and others convicted of minor crimes were spared jail.
“There really are no ‘medium-security inmates’ in Indonesia,” he said. “So murderers and drug dealers are placed in with drug users and petty thieves.”