Report paints horrifying picture of conditions in prisons

Saturday, 24 January 2009 – BY JOHN MARIMO

HARARE – The government has established a cemetery at one of its biggest jails to bury hundreds of prisoners dying from disease and hunger, according to a confidential report shown to The Zimbabwean on Sunday. The report prepared by prison officials for Commissioner of Prisons Paradzai Zimondi paints a horrifying picture of conditions in Zimbabwe’s overcrowded jails, long neglected by a government hard pressed for cash and resources after nearly a decade of acute recession.

At one time, last month, prison officials had to contact a mass burial of decomposing bodies of prisoners that had been kept in a room at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for six moths because a mortuary at Harare Central Prison was full, the report said in horrifying illustration of grim conditions in jails.

Last year saw the highest number of deaths of inmates ever recorded since Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence from Britain, said the report titled “End of year 2008 brief to the Commissioner of Prisons”.

The report was handed to Zimondi on Monday this week, according to our sources in the prison service.

Efforts to get comment on the report from either Zimondi or Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa were fruitless.

According to the report, 2008 was “the most horrific and traumatic year” for both inmates and prison wardens.

Prisoners went for days without a meal and were occasionally supplied with food “only meant to keep a person alive” such as the staple sadza (a thick porridge made from maize meal) and salted, unclean water, according to the eight-page report.

“The death impact of prisoners saw the opening of a cemetery at Chikurubi Prison Farm. The main causes of prisoners’ deaths included reduced meals, shortage of drugs and poor health environment in our prisons,” it said.

“Sir, we want to believe that 2008 had the highest number of prisoners’ deaths in the history of the ZPS (Zimbabwe Prisons Service). In Mashonaland Region alone in 2008 we witnessed a total number of 900 prisoners deaths,” according to the report.

A cholera epidemic that has killed close to 3 000 Zimbabweans since August has apparently also spread to jails, killing 234 prisoners between 23 December 2008 and 10 January 2009, according to the report.

“The most challenge we faced was living with dead bodies outside mortuaries,” the grim document said. “The situation was even very bad at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison where bodies have been kept in a room since July 2008 up to 31 December 2008 mainly because the mortuary at Harare Central Prison could not accommodate them.”

With Mugabe’s government preoccupied with trying to find money to buy food, essential medicines, fuel, electricity and for salaries for hundreds of thousands of its workers, prisoners are a forgotten lot.

More often than not, inmates in many of the country’s jails have to survive on a single meal per day of sadza and cabbage boiled in salted water because there is no money to buy adequate supplies.

An outbreak of pellagra disease in 2007 killed at least 23 inmates at the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease caused by shortage of vitamin B3 and protein.

Overcrowding has only helped worsen the situation with the country’s 55 jails said to be holding anything above 35 000 inmates at any given time which is more than double their designed carrying capacity of 17 000 inmates.

A parliamentary committee that toured Chikurubi and other prisons in 2006 was shocked to find inmates clad in torn, dirty uniforms and crammed into overcrowded cells with filthy; overflowing toilets that had not been flushed for weeks as water had been cut off due to unpaid bills.

The committee said in a report that the conditions in prisons were inhuman. However, nothing much has been done to date to improve conditions due to a lack of resources.