The documentary, shown last night on South Africa’s state broadcaster
SABC, documented the living hell for prisoners across 55 state
institutions. The result, Hell Hole, was a grim account of a crisis in
which dozens of inmates die each day.
Describing the conditions in two of the main prisons in the capital,
Harare, in late 2008, a prison officer said: We have gone the whole
year in which – for prisoners and prison officers – the food is
hand-to-mouth. They’ll be lucky to get one meal. Sometimes they will
sleep without. We have moving skeletons, moving graves. They’re dying.
The film was made by SABC‘s Special Assignment programme and shot over
three months with cameras smuggled into the prisons. Reaction in South
Africa, where the authorities try to deny the extent of the crisis in
its neighbour, is certain to be fierce.
The film showed how prison staff have converted cells and storage rooms
to hospital wards for the dying and makeshift mortuaries, where
bodies rotted on the floor with maggots moving all around. They have
had to create mass graves within prison grounds to accommodate the
dead. In many prisons the dead took over whole cells and competed for
space with the living. Prisoners described how the sick and the healthy
slept side by side, packed together like sardines, along with those who
died in the night.
Prisoners in the film are suffering from slow starvation,
nutrition-related illnesses and an array of other diseases to which
they are exposed as a result of living in unhygienic conditions.
A former prisoner, a young man, struggled to convey the horror of these
conditions: That place, I haven’t got the words … I can describe it
as hell on earth – though they say it’s more than hell. In October
last year the Zimbabwe Association for Crime Prevention and
Rehabilitation of the Offender (Zacro) released a report noting that
there were 55 prisons in Zimbabwe, with the capacity to hold 17,000
inmates. But in October 2008 it was estimated that more than 35,000
people were in jail.
A report released to accompany the film said that, unlike Zimbabweans
on the outside, inmates can’t beg for food from passers-by, they can’t
forage for wild berries in the bush, and they can’t rummage through
dustbins for waste food.
Because of this, Zimbabwe’s prisons constitute a unique and especially
cruel form of torture, said the report compiled by a human rights
organisation called Sokwanele, or Enough is Enough. The number of
deaths from disease in the prisons have risen since the start of the
economic decline and political crisis that has gripped the country
since the late 1990s.
From 1998 to 2000 the Zimbabwe Prison Service estimated that there were
some 300 deaths each year because of disease, with tuberculosis the
biggest killer. In May 2004 a senior prison officer reported 15 deaths
a week, and a peak of 130 deaths in March of that year, in just one of
the prisons in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo.
Since then the crisis has deteriorated greatly as all the country’s
services have entered meltdown after Mr Mugabe’s refusal to leave
office in the wake of rigged polls.
The Times spent ten days in one of the better prisons in Bulawayo
last year, surrounded by young skeletal men who fought over small
plates of sadza (local maize), and noted severe overcrowding,
overflowing toilets, water and electricity cuts, and a lack of blankets
and basic commodities such as soap. Those without people on the outside
to bring them food face almost certain starvation unless they find
another solution, such as resorting to prostitution.
Prison populations also have high rates of HIV/Aids infection, with
some reports estimating that more than half of prisoners are
HIV-positive. Antiretrovirals are unavailable and the dietary
requirements of treatment cannot be met in any case.
There are few drugs for the treatment of tuberculosis and other
diseases, and the cramped and filthy conditions ease the transmission
of infection. Late last year and early this year a cholera outbreak in
Harare’s Central Prison killed four to five prisoners each day, with a
peak of 18 deaths in one day, according to prison officers.
The Times (UK)
Post published in: News