News
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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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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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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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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Middle East
Material conditions
Facilities
Turkey
The Parmakören T-type prison, a newly built prison complex, provides running water for only two hours a day. Families have expressed outrage, saying inmates are unable to shower, clean their cells, use the toilet or even wash their dishes. “Prison authorities need to find an immediate solution to t…
Source — Stockholm Center for Freedom
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Europe
Overcrowding
Hungary
“One day, the guards came in and told me to pack my bags because they were taking me to another prison – on the other side of the country. I couldn’t understand why. I heard back later that it was because of the overcrowding in the prisons. But where I went, it was even worse, there were more of us…
Source — Atlatszo.hu
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Europe
Health
Ireland
Senator Mary Seery Kearney spoke with prison officials in recent days after receiving a number of queries from members of the public. She said a scheme, which will be part of the Assisted Reproduction Bill, will allow prisoners to take part in fertility treatment and the service will be available t…
Source — The Irish Examiner
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Europe
Justice
Bosnia & Herzegovina
The draft amendments to the Criminal Code of the Republika Srpska (RS), which stipulates that a prison sentence of up to one year can be paid off by anyone, if they wish, instead of it being decided by a court, should be presented to the members of the National Assembly of RS (NARS) at the next ses…
Source — Sarajevo Times
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Australia: Queensland judge to receive apology after department refused to detail confinement of boy
News
Minors
Oceania
Justice
Australia
The public servant in charge of Queensland’s youth detention system has apologised for a government department’s refusal to provide the children’s court with information related to the prolonged solitary confinement of a boy, 13, with developmental disorders.
The judgment, reported by Guardian Aust…
Source — The Guardian
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Oceania
Mental health
Australia
Prisons are ungodly beasts – hard to understand for the average incarcerated soul, impossible to comprehend for neurodiverse people, who don’t process the world as the majority do.
In my experience, people come out of prisons in worse condition than they went in.
This is most certainly true of 40-y…
Source — The Age
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Central America and the Caribbean
Justice
Nicaragua
Nicaragua released 222 political prisoners, including an American citizen, in a deal negotiated with Washington that marks one of the biggest prisoner releases ever involving the United States, according to senior Biden administration officials.
The Nicaraguan government, which sought nothing in re…
Source — The New York Times
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Asia
Material conditions
India
To provide therapeutic treatment to prisoners suffering from neuro and lifestyle disorders, the authorities of Berhampur circle jail have set up a physiotherapy unit inside the prison. Several essential equipment required to run the unit have been procured from the donation provided by a physiother…
Source — The Times of India
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Asia
Material conditions
India
As many as 163 prisoners in Ajmer Central Jail have now turned literate, and 62 of them have started studying. Postcards are made available to prisoners to write regularly to their families and share their feelings with them.
“Many prisoners who came to this jail were illiterate, but now they are r…
Source — The Times of India
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Africa
Access to legal rights
Torture
Violence
Egypt
A new prison which Egypt touted as a model for reform and which holds some of its most prominent prisoners denies inmates healthcare and subjects them to punitive treatment including isolation, relatives of those inside and rights groups say.
Four prisoners died at the Badr facility because of medi…
Source — Reuters
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