Nairobi — Tanzania's congested prisons, horrible confines to thousands of inmates, may soon be decongested if a new system of parole works. Some 40 prisoners, as pioneer beneficiaries of the relief programme, will soon serve in the community under the national process to relieve the prisons of the misery. AANA Correspondent, Joel Lawi, reports about the harsh conditions that prisoners endure in Tanzanian.

T anzania's Tanga Region Parole Secretary, Agustino Katyega, who is also the region's Commissioner of Prisons, is optimistic about a new parole system that has just been effected. About 40 prisoners are lined up as pioneer beneficiaries of a system that was conceived years ago.

Established by the National Assembly under the Parole Boards Act in 1994, the parole system was formally launched by Prime Minister Frederic Sumaye in 1998, who said the government had adopted the parole system to reduce congestion in prisons and limit crime in the society by involving communities.

Indeed, prisons in Tanzania are congested and in poor state. When Deputy Minister for Home Affairs, John Chiligati visited Bangwe Prisons in Kigoma in the western part of country early this year, he was shocked at the enormity of the problem. Prison authorities there told him that the jail, which has a capacity of 67 inmates, was holding 500 prisoners.

Facilities to cater for prisoners in Tanzania are poor and in dire short supply. Prisons Department statistics show that the current prisons are meant to host 22,000 inmates. However, they host over 40,000 everyday.

Sumbawanga prison in the south-west of the country, has about 350 inmates against its capacity of 92. A human rights activist in Dar es Salaam says prisons designed to confine not more than 400 inmates, now has about 5,000 prisoners. Among these, are remand prisoners whose cases are kept pending for long.

In December last year, 120 remand prisoners were locked up in a room for 30 people at Rujewa Police Station in Mbarali District in the southern region of Mbeya. A number of them died. The catastrophe sparked off a bitter exchange between the police and the judiciary as to who caused the deaths. The five police officers on duty at the station were arrested and charged with murder.

The Rujewa deaths scared both remand prisoners and the authorities, prompting the government to appeal for assistance to expand prisons and improve the stuffy custody rooms at the courts.

Reasons for prisons overcrowding may be myriad, but chairman of Amnesty International, Tanzania Chapter, Israel Magesa, contends that laxity of the police is a major reason for prisons overcrowding, because they take too long investigating cases for prosecution in court.

The sorry state of the jails has triggered off outbreaks of cholera and the spread of TB. But home affairs minister, Mohamed Seif Khatib, discounts connection of the ailments with congestion. He argues that most of the inmates contract ailments before they are imprisoned.

Khatib, however, is denying the obvious. In a recent parliamentary debate, legislator Elizabeth Batenga, told the House that congestion in prisons compounded the squalid living conditions for prisoners, giving rise for explosions of killer diseases such as cholera, and making prisons akin to hell, or even a shade worse. "It takes plenty of luck for prisoners and even those detained in remand homes, to conclude their terms and walk back to freedom free from killer diseases," she charged.

A survey conducted by the press in three Dar es Salaam prisons of Keko, Ukonga and Segerea, found that there was gross violation of prisoners' rights. A tiny room for 52 prisoners housed 175 inmates, a fact, which meant that four people shared one square metre. Adult inmates are put together with underage offenders in the same remand rooms, subjecting the younger inmates to the risk of sexual abuse.

In a workshop for Child Law Reform earlier this year, Children Welfare and Human Relief (NOCHU) called upon the government to build remand prisons for children in all its 26 prisons in the country, because older inmates often abused children remanded with them, and go as far as forcing them into sodomy.

Aware of this, non-governmental organisations once called on the government to allow them distribute condoms in jails.

But caught in a catch 22 situation, the government rejected such calls.

Morogoro Region Prisons Assistant Commissioner, Ally Mgalla, responded by saying that despite the good intention of the organisations in efforts to control the spread of AIDS, supplying prisoners with condoms would suggest to the society that prisoners engaged in sex among themselves. "Doing so is equivalent to justifying things which do not exist in prisons," he observed.

But prisoners have proved Mgalla wrong. In 1998, a weeping, young remand prisoner in Dar es Salaam's Segerea Prison, asked the court to transfer him to another jail because his fellow inmates sodomised him every night.

"I ask the court to [accept bail] because if you take me back there, they will continue sodomising and even kill me," the young man told magistrate David Asajile, of Ilala District Court in the city. Despite his pleas, the magistrate sent him back to the same remand cell, to his alleged nasty fate.

In Musoma, another minor told the court that the foreman had once beat him up seriously, allegedly because he had refused to clean the floor.

"The truth is that he wanted to sleep with me, but I refused. They sleep with us by force, risking our lives with AIDS," said the boy.

Stories of misery and indignities of the penal institutions have touched the heart of Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Bakari Mwapachu. Saddened by the revelation that there are presently about five times as many convicts in jails as there were 39 years ago, Mwapachu says prisons should be considered as places for reforming rather than punishing prisoners.

But there are already doubts whether the parole system will ever improve the horrible situation in prisons.

Facilities for the system are insufficient and some observers say corruption will interfere with efficiency. A High Court judge, John Mkwawa, says there is already a wrong concept that the system was formed for the interest of remand prisoners. "Quite the contrary, it was started for the interest of convicted prisoners only," he corrects.

Never featuring in Tanzania's talk with its development partners, the issue of prisons' congestion is one of the things not considered directly relevant to poverty reduction efforts. In April this year, President Benjamin Mkapa observed that the squalid conditions in the country's prisons was made worse by "limited economic strength", alluding to the fact that this demoralised prison workers and hindered expansion of prisons.