by
MICHAEL WINES
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: November 6, 2005
LILONGWE, Malawi - Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison, a dozen iron-roofed barracks set on yellow dirt and hemmed by barbed wire just outside Malawi’s capital city.
At Muala Prison in Malawi, the prisoners sleep on the floor, so tightly packed they cannot turn except en masse. Some cells hold 160 prisoners.
Prisoners take in the sun after being let out of their cells in the morning.
He eats one meal of porridge daily. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease is rife.
But the worst part may be that in the case of Mr. Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, the charges against him have not yet even reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. For sometime after November 1999, justice officials lost his case file. His guards know where he is. But for all Malawi’s courts know, he does not exist.
"Why is it that my file is missing?" he asked, his voice a mix of rage and desperation. "Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this? Should I keep on staying in prison just because my file is not found? For how long should I stay in prison? For how long?"
(Excerpt, Full Story: http://www.phaseloop.com/foreignpris...-africa02.html)

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

Since I'm not a prisoner, that doesn't really make me glad to be in America.

American prisons are too soft. If prison were really a place people didn't want to go, we might see a good bit less crime.

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i wish our prisons were like that. if more prisoners died or got beat up, i bet a lot less people would commit crimes.

You may have missed this a little further down...
Two-thirds of Uganda’s 18,000 prison inmates have not been tried. The same is true of three-fourths of Mozambique’s prisoners, and four-fifths of Cameroon’s. Even in South Africa, Africa’s most advanced nation, inmates in Johannesburg Prison have waited seven years to see a judge.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

Yeah, I saw it. I was just going by the caption to your first post.

To switch gears -- African civil rights and due process. Not so good. I bet it deters crime though.

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An interesting point, but I wonder if the same values that give so little thought to human rights and due process also contribute to the shockingly high rates of crime?
If you tend to view people outside of your own tribe as subhuman, deserving of nothing, I can't imagine caring if you have them stacked in a cell like firewood or stealing their relief supplies during a faimne.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

What other country does not give a trial to some of it's "prisoners of war" or well whatever name the US wants to call them? Hmmmmm......

I do think US jails should be **** holes though. Why should they get 3 hot meals a day, cable etc.? I think we should require some hard labor but a little bit of rehabilitation and schooling as well.

Plus, a lot of the people in those prisons never committed actual crimes. They're in there because of their political opinions, or because they annoyed the wrong people.

If a legal system is perceived as corrupt and arbitrary, that doesn't engender compliance to the law. At best, avoidance.

I have to agree with Tanny. The rule of law is one thing that makes America great. Mind you, it's hardly unique to America, since Canada, Europe, and much of South America are the same, if not better.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

Indeed. It's like the fundemental assumption of safety that we have, which many in third world countries don't. And even if we are on a slippery slope regarding the rule of law, with the detentions without trial in guantanamo, the abuse in abu Ghraib, and the president's heavy use of signing statements, these problems appear more serious here because they're done against the background of the solid rule of law. In many countries, these would be relatively minor things, compared to the authoritarian abuses already common there.