Jubilant scenes as 2 500 prisoners freed
From The Zimbabwe Times – 12th September 2009
A television documentary produced with hidden cameras in Beitbridge in March 2009 featured these emaciated prisoners.
By Our Correspondent
HARARE – There were scenes of jubilation and celebration at Harare Central Prison on Friday as relatives reunited with their loved ones as they were released freed from prison after serving terms of incarceration.Prison authorities began releasing hordes of inmates who are beneficiaries of a recent order of clemency extended to 2 500 convicts by President Robert Mugabe.
While the total number of beneficiaries of the presidential amnesty was first reported in the state media last week as 1 544, Zimbabwe Prison Service public relations officer, Elizabeth Banda, told journalists Friday the actual number of those to be freed was 2 513.
Among those granted amnesty were all women prisoners, inmates serving three-year terms who had completed a quarter of their sentence, as well as those in open prisons and life inmates who had served 20 or more years.
The amnesty excluded prisoners jailed for serious crimes including murder, rape and vehicle hijacking.
Officials say that while Zimbabwe’s prison have a holding capacity of 17 000 inmates, the current population is about 13 000.
Elated relatives said they had been living in fear of losing their loved ones to hunger and disease in Zimbabwe’s notorious jails.
Close to 1 000 prisoners are reported to have died in Zimbabwe’s jails between January and June this year.
The death rate is said to have since dropped from three per week to two.
“I cannot believe this. For the past two nights I have not had sleep trying to contain my happiness. I will never move near a jail again,” said a visibly elated Lovemore Bvuno (63), who was released from Harare Central prison after serving for 23 years.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1986 for murder.
Christopher Munyoro (64), who had served 25 years of a life sentence for the murder of his employer, said he felt born again.
Munyoro, whose entire family died of hunger and disease while he was in prison, said he was apologetic to both his victim and family.
Toendepi Mahaso, who volunteered to speak on behalf of a batch of 30 newly freed prisoners who were paraded for their final briefing by prison officers, said he was thankful to President Mugabe for the clemency.
“I say thank you very much to the President Robert Gabriel Mugabe,” he said, speaking in English. “I say thank you very much for the clemency.
“Sometimes justice has got to be tempered with mercy. Justice must have a human face and we have seen the human face of justice today by being released before our EDR (Expected Date of Release).
“We promise we are going to behave, to do very well out there. This is not the end of the world. Imprisonment is not the end of life, this is actually the beginning of a new life. Our old life has been destroyed and we are given a new lease of life.
“That is what we have received.”
The amnesty is an attempt by the current inclusive government to ease congestion in Zimbabwe’s 42 jails.
The jails are now viewed as death camps because of their poor sanitary conditions and a perennial shortage of food and medical drugs.
The country’s prisons did not survive the deadly cholera epidemic which broke out mid-last year killing 4 000 and living more than 80 000 hospitalised.
The epidemic was only contained after the intervention of humanitarian aid groups which brought medicine and other forms of assistance that helped suppress the continued spread of the dreaded disease.
Aid for starving Zimbabwe inmates
From BBC News – 5th June, 2009
The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has begun distributing food and other supplies to thousands of Zimbabwean prison inmates.
It did not comment on conditions, but previous reports have depicted ill, emaciated detainees living in squalor.
The ICRC said food shortages in prisons were closely linked to the economic crisis in the country as a whole.
It said it was working closely with authorities to improve the situation for “the most vulnerable detainees”.
Despite the ICRC’s policy of not commenting on conditions in the prisons it visits, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says the statement is in itself an indication of how bad things are.
The ICRC says it has begun feeding 6,300 prisoners, setting up therapeutic feeding programmes – a sign of severe malnutrition.
Maggots
A month ago, a secretly filmed South African TV documentary – called Hell Hole – exposed the appalling conditions inside Zimbabwean jails.
It showed sick and healthy prisoners living side by side in unhygienic and overcrowded cells.
 |
 There are people there who look worse than the photographs of prisoners in Dachau and Auschwitz  Roy Bennett
Imprisoned MDC politician, speaking on release in March |
Amid high death rates, makeshift mortuaries had been set up in prison grounds, housing prisoners’ bodies crawling with maggots.
The appalling conditions were confirmed by Roy Bennett, a leading politician with Zimbabwe’s erstwhile opposition MDC party – which now shares power with President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.
He was imprisoned for several weeks on charges including terrorism and banditry.
After being freed on bail in March, he said his time in jail had been a “harrowing experience” which “I don’t wish on my worst enemy”.
“There are people there who look worse than the photographs of prisoners in [Nazi concentration camps] Dachau and Auschwitz,” he said.
At one prison, Chikurubi, at least 700 of the 1,300 inmates died last year, Zimbabwe weekly The Standard reported in May.
Minister’s woes
Three days ago, the South Africa-based ZimOnline website carried an interview with Zimbabwe’s Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa.
He said his ministry had received only a fraction of the budget it had been promised for the year – $327,000 (£200,000) of $17.7m.
He said the money was going towards food and basic provisions for prisoners, but did not meet even those needs.
Mr Chinamasa said in the face of the prolonged budgetary freeze, his ministry had resorted to appealing for private donations.
Red Cross goals
The ICRC says that by the end of the year it expects to be feeding 10,000 prisoners – more than half the official figure of Zimbabwe’s prison population, though the real figure is thought to be much higher.
In addition to food, the ICRC said it was providing prisoners with basic provisions such as blankets and soap.
It also plans to renovate prison kitchens and water systems in a bid to prevent the spread of diseases such as cholera.
It said it was working with the Zimbabwean authorities to try to ensure the improvements are maintained – something our correspondent says will not be easy.
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.
Prison and Detention Center Conditions
US Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 2006
March 6, 2007
Prison and Detention Center Conditions
Prison conditions remained harsh and life threatening. The government’s 47 prisons were designed for a capacity of 16,000 prisoners but held approximately 25,000 according to media reports. In December 2004 the Law Society of Zimbabwe (LSZ) conducted a prison inspection at Khami Maximum Prison in Bulawayo. The inspection revealed that the prison, built to accommodate 650 prisoners, had 1,167 inmates. Poor sanitary conditions persisted, which aggravated outbreaks of cholera, diarrhea, measles, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS related illnesses. Human rights activists familiar with prison conditions reported constant shortages of food, water, electricity, clothing, and soap.
Harsh prison conditions and a high incidence of HIV/AIDS were widely acknowledged to have contributed to a large number of deaths in prison. The Institute of Correctional and Securities Studies, a local NGO, estimated that 52 percent of the country’s prisoners were HIV positive. One doctor who worked with former prisoners in the Harare area estimated that the prevalence figure was closer to 60 percent. In February Zimbabwe Prisons Service Commissioner General Paradzai Zimondi described the mortality rate in prisons as a “cause for concern.”
The LSZ also reported that 127 prisoners in Khami prison died in 2004; the deaths were attributed to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions resulting in the spread of diseases, including tuberculosis.
In August the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) reported that torture in prisons was common. IWPR quoted Roy Bennett, a former MDC parliamentary deputy jailed for eight months in Chikurubi prison beginning in 2005, as saying he saw other prisoners “crippled” from beating on the soles of their feet. Bennett added that “if you are too slow in sitting down or squatting – because you can’t talk to the guards standing up, you have to grovel on the floor to talk to them – you are beaten.”
The government did not make any efforts to improve prison conditions during the year.
Juveniles were not held separately from adults. The Prison Fellowship of Zimbabwe, a local Christian organization working with former inmates, estimated that more than 200 children were living in the country’s prison system with their detained mothers. Pretrial detainees generally were held in group cells until their bail hearings. Once charged, if detainees were refused bail, they were held in a separate remand prison.
The law provides that international human rights monitors have the right to visit prisons, but government procedures and requirements made it very difficult to do so. Permission was required from the commissioner of prisons and the minister of justice, which sometimes was not granted or took a month or longer to obtain. The government granted local NGOs access on a number of occasions during the year.
Prolonged pretrial detention remained a problem, and some detainees were incarcerated as long as nine years before trial or sentencing because of a critical shortage of magistrates and court interpreters. One prominent NGO estimated that in 2005 the courts would require at least two years to address the backlog of cases.
