Yesterday’s suicide of a British national has once again cast the spotlight on Kordin prison’s most notorious section. Raphael Vassallo on the cell block that the Council of Europe urged government to close down five years ago, to no avail
“There are some people in some sections – most of all Division Six, which we call the ‘punishment division’ – who can’t even go out to hear Mass, or to attend classes or go to the gym. And that’s the least of the problems there. Hygienically it’s a disaster. The drainage system is a mess, there are huge rats which come swimming up the toilet through the drains, and it’s almost completely dark at all times of day.”
So said one former inmate of the Corradino Correctional Facility (CCF) – otherwise known as Kordin prisons – shortly after his recent release.
If this were just a random prison inmate complaining, with no means of verifying his claims (Division Six remains to date out of bounds to all visitors, even prisoners’ rights NGOs like Mid-Dlam Ghad-Dawl) it would be easy to dismiss these claims as an exaggeration.
But they are upheld by at least one Constitutional Court ruling – in a case instituted by former inmate Meinrad Calleja, who successfully pleaded that the conditions in this division breached his fundamental rights – and more damningly still, by a report issued by the Council of Europe’s Committee For The Prevention of Torture and Degrading Treatment in 2005.
Meanwhile a second Constitutional case, filed by British national Steven Marsden after spending two years in preventive custody at Kordin, is expected to raise similar complaints of inhuman conditions in the prison’s Division Six.
Talking to MaltaToday shortly after his acquittal on appeal last November, Marsden echoed Calleja’s earlier complaints almost to the letter:
“The conditions in Corradino’s Division Six are appalling,” he said, claiming that he was denied access to the prison library for three years, and that there were “rats running around the floor” in his cell.
The CPT report independently came to a similar conclusion, condemning the entire Division as substandard, its conditions degrading, and recommending its closure with immediate effect.
On its part, the prison administration responded by closing the Division down... temporarily. It was reopened soon afterwards with only minimal refurbishment: initially to provide ‘induction’ to new prisoners, only to later resume its previous role as a punitive block for troublesome or uncooperative inmates.
Detention in the dark Today, prisoners are often held in this Division for prolonged periods of time, sometimes as long as two years. Berry Charles Lee, whose body was discovered hanging in his cell early yesterday afternoon (see full story on page 3), had spent just over six months there before committing suicide.
Some of the division’s current ‘guests’ have been living in the same conditions for almost three times as long.
One of the more common complaints at Division Six involves lack of any adequate lighting system. The division can hold up to 17 inmates at a time, and is powered by a 12-Volt system which is scarcely enough to illuminate a single light-bulb. Officially the reason for such low voltage is security – though judging by yesterday’s incident, security at the same Division is lax in other aspects.
Coupled with a general lack of windows and the fact that prisoners are never allowed out of the division, the low-voltage power system translates into near-total darkness at most times of the day. One inmate described Division Six as being “too dark to even read” after 5pm.
To this must be added a general lack of heating, common to all divisions, even in the coldest winter months: “Would you believe we had to sleep with gloves on, three layers of thermal underwear and four sweaters, and still feel icy cold?” one former inmate, who claims to still require medical attention as a result of his earlier incarceration, told this newspaper. “I understand prison is not meant to be fun and games, but at the same time you don’t expect to go there to get pneumonia and rheumatism.”
Mixed inmates Another complaint - by no means limited to Division Six, but arguably more keenly felt here than in other divisions – is a tendency to mix and match inmates convicted of vastly different crimes within the same general part of the facility.
”People convicted of defaulting on VAT, or of some petty crime, find themselves mixed up with hardened criminals serving life sentences for murder, extortion, and so on,” one inmate complained.
“It’s like going to a University of Crime,” another said almost jokingly. “You go in with your ‘O-levels’ – maybe a petty theft here, or a case of fraud there – and come out with a diploma (‘lawrea’) in drug trafficking or armed robbery...”
Apart from militating against any serious attempt to ‘reform’ prisoners, this system poses a clear and present danger to the more vulnerable inmates. And yet, it is a far cry from the systems employed by prisons in other countries, where clear distinctions are made between violent and non-violent criminals, among other categories.
“The first eight months are the worst for any prisoner in the world, but most especially for the non-violent inmates,” one prisoner, who has some experience doing time overseas, told MaltaToday. “This is why in most prisons in the world, care is taken to keep these different categories apart.”
One simple system to achieve this aim is that employed in the UK, where prisons are divided into four categories:
Category A prisoners are those whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public or national security;
Category B prisoners are those who do not require maximum security, but for whom escape needs to be made very difficult;
Category C prisoners are those who cannot be trusted in open conditions but who are unlikely to try to escape;
Category D prisoners are those who can be reasonably trusted not to try to escape, and are given the privilege of an open prison.
Prisoners at ‘D Cat’ (as it is commonly known) prisons, are, subject to approval, given ROTL (Release On Temporary Licence) to work in the community or to go on ‘home leave’ once they have passed their FLED (Full Licence Eligibility Dates), which is usually a quarter of the way through the sentence.
A typical example of the latter category is ‘Spring Hill’ open prison in Buckinghamshire, UK. Despite its official status as a prison, there are no border walls and no cells; amenities are modern and functional (if not exactly luxury), with a strong emphasis on sports, and inmates are encouraged to pusrsue University courses in the evenings.
As one less fortunate inmate put it: “These things are considered normal in most civilised countries. Here, we still have a long way to go.”
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