Imprisoned
Yesterday we saw a video on CNN that was smuggled out of a prison in the US. The prison inmates talked about their fear of sitting in a corona death-trap. “We were not sentenced with the death penalty, but now it feels like we are.’
A New York Times article with the title “Jails are Petri dishes” dated 30-03-2020, describes how in several prisons, up to 60 prisoners are densely packed into one room. Several hundred prisoners have tested positive on Covid-19 and one inmate has already died. There seems to be a shortage of soap and sanitizers everywhere.
I wonder, if these are the conditions for prisoners in the world’s richest country, what about the conditions of prisoners in emerging countries?
Several kantharis are working with prisoners, so to find out more, I called them up
Bashiro Adamu, a 2013 kanthari from Nigeria, founded Dream Again Prison Academy. Its aim is to ensure that the very high recidivism rate is drastically reduced through qualitative education. His education program begins in prisons, and as soon as his students are released, he reintegrates them into the labor market.
“But at the moment no NGO is allowed into the prisons.” There does not yet appear to be a Covid-19 case among prisoners in Nigeria. But Bash says there is already panic here and there. Inmates fear that they can get infected by security guards who travel home in-between shifts. In some prisons, the cells are overcrowded and “social distancing” is simply impossible. Hygienic conditions are also poor. What is positive is that Bash has helped institute Prison libraries that benefit 80,000 prisoners. So even during these challenging times, respite and hope can be found in reading.
And what about prisons in India?
When I speak with Raja KR, a 2011 kanthari graduate, he tells me that the supreme court in India has ordered individual states, to release inmates who had been sentenced up to seven years
on bail. The online magazine businesstoday.in says the government in Maharashtra has already requested the release of 5,000 inmates.
Raja tells me that the circumstances in prisons vary from one state to another. While they are hopelessly overcrowded in Delhi, in Tamil Nadu, for example, prisons are only 62% occupied. And yet, the government in Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, has already dismissed thousands. Raja was in prison every day until the lockdown was imposed.
He is the founder of Global Network for Equality, an organization that advocates for the rights of long-term prisoners on the one hand, but also cares for the children and relatives of the inmates.
During his studies to become a social worker when Raja did an internship in a prison, he was particularly involved with long-term criminals. Many of them had murdered their wives, and Raja wondered what had happened to the children?
He went on the search and was shaken, many of the children were abandoned by their relatives and ended up in the street. Through prostitution and petty crime, they could barely keep themselves alive. After completing the one-year kanthari program, he first focused on persuading the children’s grandparents to acquit their grandchildren of the guilt of their fathers and to accept them again. And then he took care of the fathers. For this he was criticized by some of his former comrades-in-arms.
“We understand that you take care of the children, but how can you show compassion for the murderers?” Raja told us how he once met an inmate who seemed to sleep from morning to night. The security guards said that he could not be helped and was addicted to sleeping pills. Raja requested to wake the prisoner up. When he was responsive, Raja learned all about his fate. It was a student who was writing his Phd in philosophy. In an argument with his wife, which was about jealousy, he threw her down the stairs, the woman broke her neck and when he was charged with murder, he did not defend himself. Raja made sure that from now on his sleeping pills were taken away from him and for the rest of his captivity he was appointed as a philosophy teacher of the prison.
Like Bash in Nigeria, Raja is particularly concerned with resocialization. “This is only possible if they have a goal in mind, if they know that there is a family waiting for them out there and especially that they are needed by their children!”
In some prisons in Tamil Nadu, he ensured that family rooms were set up without bars. There, fathers and children can meet without barriers. They play games and the fathers help the children with their homework. These family rooms, however, are abandoned now during the Corona crisis.
“During the lockdown, the prisoners feel particularly isolated from the outside world. The already monotonous daily life is even harder to bear when no one can visit anymore.”
Raja has completed a law degree and became a criminal defense attorney. His clients are not all guilty. In some cases, he was able to prove that especially illiterate and poor uneducated people, who could not express themselves well, were innocent, yet ended up behind bars for alleged murder. In one case, he was able to prove that the actual rapists and murderers who cooperated with law enforcement, had falsified evidence. Raja’s intervention acquitted the falsely convicted day laborer who had already served three years of his long sentence. In the meantime, his wife and mother of his five children had disappeared. The children were being taken care of by the eldest daughter, who was just 13 years old.
There is a picture of the freed man taken by photographer Joseph Pisani. It shows the acquitted standing next to a birdcage. The door of the cage is wide open, but the bird doesn’t leave the cage.
“In times of Corona, we are all prisoners now.” Says Raja, “but our doors are open. We voluntarily go into isolation. But how must it be for those prisoners who are sentenced to be behind bars for decades?”
Raja and GNE are doing amazing work and I have seen him at close hand in the field. His passion for prison reform as well as for the children are remarkable and truly inspirational. He is a global role model and one day the work done by him will recieve the attention it requires and prison reform will become an area occupying the attention of decision makers across the world