A photo arrived in a Twitter summary in my email this week: it showed women waiting outside the Brazilian prison where inmates had just rioted, asphyxiating and beheading each other in a gang war. The women stood, some with children, to see if their sons, partners and fathers were among the dead.
According to the news, riots are common in Brazilian jails, with its high prison population and extreme overcrowding. The prison where inmates this week killed 57 of their own was built to house 200 prisoners, but had 309.
Yet this isn’t crowded by Kenyan standards. Two years ago, our Chief Justice issued a report revealing a prison system in a shockingly bad state. Meru, also built for 200 prisoners, was holding 802 – making Brazil’s overcrowding look like fresh air and space.
Crammed into dilapidated and filthy cells, Kenyan prisoners were literally in death traps. Tuberculosis was found to be a serious problem in eight of the country’s prisons – no isolation for the infectious behind bars.
Yet there is something especially unique about Kenya’s prison population, for almost half of the 54,000 Kenyans in cells are pre-trial and not yet convicted.
Some, one must assume, will be found innocent, and their weeks, months, or years sharing squalid cells with TB carriers will have all been some horrible mistake they are supposed to get over.
Indeed, according to the reports, the police cells and cells at the courts are some of the worst of all, sometimes without any source of clean water or any proper toilets. It doesn’t help to relate the experiences of some who have been arrested - on every kind of pretext - of sharing cells as one of them gets sick and is forced to use a bucket in front of everyone, over and over.
The sum is simply degrading and humiliating to a level that is unjustifiable by any premise.
Fortunately, the system is now winding along some long route to change, with a criminal justice reform process underway. Some privatisation of some of the services to prisons is also being considered.
Yet, it, once again, surprises me how little is in the media about the state of our prisons and the reforms being discussed.
For it is the nature of Kenya and the disputes that arise in business, in politics, in homes, on roads, in public transport, everywhere, that almost everyone gets arrested at some point. High or low, rich or poor, our criminal justice system can be deployed against any of us by the ruthless, and is.
I am a middle class, middle-aged, mother and professional writer and I got arrested twice, at the behest of a CEO in Kenya who wanted me to sign away the notice rights under my employment contract. If only I would sign, I would be released. The experience was traumatic.
Yet even if we don’t end up in a cell over a bucket with 23 other people around us, as a politician, a blogger, a spokesperson, or a business leader, we should care about being a part of a nation that does that to people: to anyone.
And we should care about what measures are being taken to move us forward from there.
Indeed, we chuck rocks regularly at our politicians, and especially at election time, about tribalism, and how they aren’t ‘issue-based’. But our mainstream media seems to have its eyes very firmly off our nation’s policy issues.
Only a couple of rather sophisticated bloggers seem to go near these subjects, with their thoughts on prison privatisation, or conference reports on which reasons are compelling enough to be held under arrest for 24-hours, or whether the 2009 confession rules are adequate.
This is our nation, our society, our world, shouldn’t we know and care how we arrest people, where the boundaries are, just what cannot be done to any of us, where our rights begin, where the rights of society begin.
Sometimes, I think - as I wonder how many women and children are today stood outside Kenyan prisons, or cells, or police stations - we are not even having the right conversations. And that’s actually why things are as they are.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
