Sierra Leone prisons likened to tropical dickens
FREETOWN: A shaft of light penetrates the foul air through a fistsized vent.
It reveals naked, sweating bodies packed side-by-side like sardines, lying in darkness on a greasy concrete floor.
The stench of urine and excreta from a brimming plastic bucket – just one for a cell containing perhaps 20 people — claws at the throat. This was the scene at the Bo Correctional Facility in southern Sierra Leone.
It was one of eight prisons that this reporter visited last week to assess the state of penitentiaries that independent voices say are a national scandal.
The tableau that emerged was the tropical dickens — crammed, poorly-lit cells, whose inmates said they were suffering with disease, rotten food, cockroaches and super-sized bedbugs, and a climate of jungle-like violence.
“I was caught with two parcels of marijuana. I have spent three years on remand. It’s like living in Hell,” one inmate said.
“Blankets and mats are a luxury in our cell. Even some of the food we eat has an offensive smell,” added another prisoner.
A convict with crutches in a jail at Kenema, the West African country’s third largest city, said “violence for food, water and space is common”.
In 2016, Sierra Leone’s Human Rights Commission denounced the squalor and lack of rehabilitative programmes in the country’s prisons as “inhumane”.
“We treat people in detention as if they don’t exist,” said Ahmed Jalloh, an activist with a local watchdog group, Prison Watch.
Kenema Prison, a stone-walled jail built in 1826 during British colonial rule, has a regulation capacity of 75 inmates, but accommodates around 300.
The skin disease scabies is commonplace, but inmates often can only shower once a week because water is rationed.
Bo prisoners are tasked with trekking kilometres to polluted streams or wells to fill jerrycans and haul them back to the jail.
“Given the risk of escape, we assign many guards to escort inmates,” said prison guard Jimmy.
“But inmates are usually stigmatised by locals seeing detainees walking the streets in prison outfits.”
Still within this grim picture, chinks of light are starting to emerge. Sierra Leone’s Department of Justice has just completed a “From Prison to Corrections” programme to train 30 prisoner officers and promote higher welfare standards.
But appeals court Judge Nicholas Browne-Marke said help was also badly needed for Sierra Leone’s under-funded, chronically-clogged judicial system.
More than 85 per cent of the prisoners are aged between 15 and 35. The young inmates are being held for petty crimes,
“Majority of the inmates are in jail for loitering, snatching a phone, drugs or quarrels,” said Browne-Marke.
“We are trying to decongest the facilities by expediting trials. A mobile application for pending cases has been developed for all judges and magistrates to encourage a speedy trial and case conclusion.”