Disease, Brutality, and Forced Labor in Uganda's Packed Prisons
Submitted by annie on Sun, 07/31/2011 - 11:17
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KPFA Weekend News, 07.30.2011:
Transcript:
Uganda's prisons are notoriously overcrowded.
KPFA Weekend News Anchor Eric Klein: This week Human Rights Watch called upon the Ugandan authorities to stop using military courts to prosecute civilians. Two weeks earlier, Human Rights Watch delivered a shocking report on Ugandan prisons. The report cited brutal compulsory labor, frequent violence, miserable overcrowding, and diseases in 16 prisons it studied throughout the country. KPFA's Ann Garrison has more.
KPFA/Ann Garrison: More than half of those in Uganda's prisons are held in pre-trial detention, and may well spend years, or even die, awaiting trial. Human Rights Watch researcher Katherine Todrys described the horrific conditions of their incarceration:
Human Rights Watch Researcher Katherine Todrys: Prisoners are sleeping packed together in tiny cells throughout the night. They are sleeping on one shoulder, so that, if prisoners need to roll over, they have to coordinate with dozens of other prisoners in their cell to do it all at the same time. What we heard over and over again from prisoners, the prisons we went to, was that even when they were sick, prison wardens would often stop them from going out to the medical facilities that were available, even in their prison, or in the surrounding community, to access treatment.
Human Rights Watch Researcher Katherine Todrys: Prisoners are sleeping packed together in tiny cells throughout the night. They are sleeping on one shoulder, so that, if prisoners need to roll over, they have to coordinate with dozens of other prisoners in their cell to do it all at the same time. What we heard over and over again from prisoners, the prisons we went to, was that even when they were sick, prison wardens would often stop them from going out to the medical facilities that were available, even in their prison, or in the surrounding community, to access treatment.
Sick prisoners are made to work for private landowners who pay the prison authorities. And they're made to work day after day. They're brutally beaten, to make 
Ugandan prisoners asleep side by side
them work harder, and that's because the money goes to the prison authorities, because the prison authorities need that money to operate their prisons. They pocket some of it personally, and so the prisons have an incentive to push prisoners to work under backbreaking conditions, to brutally beat them, even when they're ill.
Ugandan prisoners asleep side by side
them work harder, and that's because the money goes to the prison authorities, because the prison authorities need that money to operate their prisons. They pocket some of it personally, and so the prisons have an incentive to push prisoners to work under backbreaking conditions, to brutally beat them, even when they're ill.
Overcrowding is a result of delays in the criminal justice system, lack of access to bail, lack of access to legal representation, and so prisoners can wait, in some cases for years, for their cases to be resolved by the courts, and they'll be kept in prison often for that whole time. Overall the prison system has 56% of its prisoners incarcerated awaiting resolution of its case, not convicted of any crime.
When you go to the prisons, the prisoners will all tell you that they're scared, because they're hearing their fellow prisoners coughing throughout the night. We heard people coughing throughout their interviews with us. We know that the TB rates in the prisons are almost double that in the general population. But, very few people are getting tested, particularly in rural areas. Very few people are getting treatment, particularly in rural areas as well. We know that drug resistant TB could be spreading within the prisons, and it could be spreading outside of the prisons as well.
KPFA: Reverend Jonathan Vojir, a long time San Francisco gay activist and ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, wrote about the implications of the Human Rights Watch prison study for the
Reverend Dan Vojir
LGBT rights struggle in Africa in an OpEdNews essay, "Africa's Gay Question": Ghana Teeters On The Brink Of A Holocaust ...Just Like Uganda." Today, Vojir spoke to KPFA News:Rev. Dan Vojir: This kind of genocide has been actually happening for a long time. When it comes down to the LGBT community, the people who are instigating this kind of genocide, and the people who are attempting to criminalize it, in any way, shape or form, know that when these people go to prison, they might not come out, because of the bad conditions in most all of the African prisons. That's what makes it a genocide as opposed to just criminalizing it.
KPFA: In its 2009 report, "Open Secret, Illegal Detention and Torture by the Joint Anti-terrorism Task Force in Uganda," Human Rights Watch wrote that Ugandan Chief of Military Intelligence Brigadier James Mugira had told them that the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel have all provided training to his forces.
KPFA Weekend News Anchor Eric Klein: Uganda's human rights record was further tarnished yesterday when the New York Times reported a high incidence of women dying in childbirth in overburdened Ugandan hospitals simply for lack of a doctor or midwife. The Ugandan government triggered fury this spring by paying more than half a billion dollars for fighter jets and other military hardware, almost triple the amount of its own money dedicated to the entire public health system in the last fiscal year.
