This year
Africa
Asia
Europe
Oceania
Justice
In March 2023, formerly incarcerated people from around the globe met at the Incarceration Nations Network (INN) hub in Cape Town for the first edition of the Global Freedom Fellowship. Khalil Chait, who spent 10 years in prison in the Netherlands, was one of them. Interview.
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Ireland: adverse motherhood experience
Interview
Women
Europe
Social ties
Rehabilitation
Ireland
The number of women incarcerated throughout the world is steadily increasing. Many of these are mothers. What is the impact of mothers’ imprisonment? The IPRT recently examined the experiences of mothers imprisoned in Ireland and of their children. Interview.
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Minors
Oceania
Material conditions
Torture
Violence
Australia
The troubled Banksia Hill youth detention centre is facing fresh scrutiny amid allegations a girl was sexually harassed by custodial officers. Detainees at Banksia Hill and Casuarina Prison’s Unit 18 youth facility claim they have been subjected to excessive use of force, ongoing lockdowns, forced…
Source — The Advocate
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South America
Facilities
Rehabilitation
Brazil
APAC, a Brazilian non-profit that advocates for better treatment of prisoners, has a unique model in the dozens of facilities it manages across the country. Inmates oversee security and discipline, make their own food and wear their own clothes. Referred to as “recovering persons”, prisoners are ca…
Source — Al Jazeera
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Asia
Violence
India
Tihar Jail, located in New Delhi, is one of South Asia’s largest and most notorious prison complexes. The prison was intended as a correctional facility, but the growing spate of violence and gang wars within the jail has cast a shadow over its reputation yet again. Why have the authorities been un…
Source — The Probe
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USA: disaster in prison
Interview
North America
Facilities
Work
United States
J. Carlee Purdum is the director of the Prisons and Disasters Risk Network, which aims to inform the public about the growing impact of disasters on prisoners. She discusses with us how prison labour is embedded in emergency disaster response. Interview.
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Côte d'Ivoire: a game-changing assist
Interview
Africa
Health
Activities
Rehabilitation
Côte d’Ivoire
Does sport improve living conditions and help prisoners reintegrate into society? That is the hope of the organisation La Balle aux Prisonniers (LaBAP). Its founders are convinced that sport can be a vehicle for social inclusion, integration and equal opportunity. Interview.
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Is dynamic security a realistic utopia?
Interview
Europe
Health
Moldova
Alexander Godin moves through a number of locked doors escorted by a guard to prison 16’s pharmacy. This is part of his daily routine. He comes to get his medicine – a syrup-like dose of methadone. Since 2000, a few prisons in Moldova offered such harm reduction services. Now all do.
Any new prison…
Source — UNAIDS
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Oceania
Access to legal rights
Social ties
New Zealand
Spring Hill Corrections Facility in Waikato is one of three prisons still closed to outsiders, but Corrections says it intends to restart limited visits on May 13. National commissioner Leigh Marsh said staff were working incredibly hard to resume visits as quickly as possible.“We understand that r…
Source — RNZ
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Women
Asia
Activities
India
Recreational activities will be organised for the children of women inmates in jail in connection with project “Khushi” a campaign of the Chhattisgarh State Legal Services Authority (SLSA) to provide a different environment to children suffering for a crime they have not committed while staying wit…
Source — The Times of India
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Africa
Women
Torture
Violence
Egypt
High walls, mobile prison, overcrowded rooms, and no regard for one’s bodily autonomy: this is what many women and girls deal with in Egypt’s prisons, only for being human rights activists, journalists, or political opponents to the regime.
Over the past seven years, Egypt’s prisons, especially the…
Source — Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
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Building bridges through education
Interview
South America
Europe
Activities
Alternatives
Rehabilitation
Many initiatives are emerging as alternatives to the traditional prison, focusing on education rather than security. What is meant by education? How does it lead to change? Sergio Grossi answers our questions.
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Changing the scale
Thematic paper
South America
Europe
Facilities
Social ties
Alternatives
Rehabilitation
New insights are arising concerning alternative forms of detention that are integrated into the community, small-scale and focused on the needs of individuals. This series explores experience from the field, ideas that remain on paper and the potential limits of “small-scale” detention.
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Europe
Material conditions
Ireland
“The prison service has changed hugely in the last 10 years or so, and the case of locking prisoners up and throwing away the key is gone,” Ger Manley, governor of Cork Prison, told The Echo in an interview at the prison.
“Nowadays we’re looking at rehabilitating prisoners through our workshops, th…
Source — Echo Live
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Europe
Justice
Material conditions
Overcrowding
Ireland
As of Friday, 167 prisoners were sleeping on mattresses on the floor, with half of them in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. One prisoner, who had just been released from Mountjoy last Thursday, said it was overcrowded.“It’s packed in there. It’s all double cells and all that, the place is wrecked …it’s ag…
Source — RTE
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Belgium: "a key voice"
Interview
Europe
Justice
Health
Material conditions
Overcrowding
Belgium
Marc Nève is a lawyer and President of the Central Prison Monitoring Council in Belgium. He sat down with us to discuss the work of the Council, as well as the main issues facing the Belgian prison system today. Interview.
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Oceania
Justice
Australia
The study by the Social Policy Centre, University of New South Wales, Griffith University and Epoque Consulting found the state government saved $148.7 million between 2016 and 2022 by diverting offenders out of prison and into supervised home detention.
Researchers found the government saved an es…
Source — In Daily
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Middle East
Justice
Health
Overcrowding
Pakistan
A prominent rights group has raised alarm over Pakistan’s overcrowded prisons and called for reforms to the country’s criminal justice system. In a report released on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Pakistan’s more than 100 jails had at least 88,000 inmates, against the officially approved…
Source — Al Jazeera
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Middle East
Health
Overcrowding
Turkey
Ahmet Göksu, who is jailed in Turkey’s central province of Aksaray, has told his family that inmates suffering from COVID-19 cannot access proper healthcare and are not taken to the hospital, the Mezopotamya news agency reported.
According to Göksu, there are critically ill prisoners among those wh…
Source — Stockholm Center for Freedom
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Asia
Material conditions
Torture
Violence
North Korea
Extrajudicial executions, rape, forced abortions, jail without trial, torture, starvation rations that leave prisoners so hungry some turn to eating insects.
Source — CNN
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Filming the obscurity
Interview
Africa
Asia
Europe
Facilities
Overcrowding
Violence
Rehabilitation
The Netflix documentary series “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons” gives viewers a visual representation of what daily life is like for prisoners around the world. Prison Insider met its host, Raphael Rowe. Interview.
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