Comics in custody
A scheme where well-known comic artists work with women serving time in maximum-security prisons to create graphic stories has been rated one of the world’s most innovative education projects for people in custody. The Frames Prison Programme in the US state of Colorado aims to increase literacy rates and cut reoffending. The aim is to motivate students and help them recognise talents that have been drained earlier in their lives. Run by the Brink Literacy Project, the scheme was launched in 2015 – and now it has been selected by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as one of the 16 most innovative prison education projects from around the world.
Two-hour queue to use the prison loo
When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go – but men at a prison in India have reported queues of up to two hours to use the toilet. At the Vellore Central Prison in Tamil Nadu, south-east India, there are said to be only three usable lavatories for each block of 70 men. A queue begins to form at 2am each morning, according to The New Indian Express newspaper. The All India Committee on Jail Reforms recommends one toilet per six prisoners, but Vellore Central has only one per 23 men. Prisoners are meant to get up each morning at 5.30am, not at 2am. One former inmate told the paper: “When I would wake, there would be at least 30 in my block already waiting in a line for hours to use the toilet.”
Rebels free 4,200 from notorious prison
When rebel forces toppled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last month, one of the first things they did was to free all 4,200 detainees in the country’s much-feared Sednaya prison.
The jail north of the capital Damascus, known as ‘the human slaughterhouse’, was where the regime held and tortured its opponents. Amnesty International has said that executions of political prisoners there amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Film footage emerged of rebel fighters freeing female prisoners. Some needed to be encouraged to leave their cells, unable to believe that the regime had really fallen and they were free at last.
As news of the fall of the Assad regime spread throughout the country, there were chaotic scenes as rumours emerged that 1,500 more prisoners were trapped underground beneath Sednaya, starving and short of air to breathe. People roamed the corridors and cells, looking for any clue as to where their relatives might be.
Later, Syrian Civil Defence, known as the ‘White Helmets’, released a statement saying that despite an intensive search they had not found any prisoners trapped underground.
The Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison issued a report in 2022 saying that the prison “effectively became a death camp” at the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011, and that it estimated that more than 30,000 detainees had either been executed or died as a result of torture, starvation, or lack of medical care between 2011 and 2018.
A cigarette sandwich, of sorts
A Prison Sergeant at Carmel Prison in Haifa, Israel, found cigarettes hidden inside a sliced loaf of bread whilst undertaking routine food distribution, according to the Israel Prison Service.
The prison reported that an inmate faced disciplinary action over the incident for violating his isolation conditions. The authorities claim to have thorough anti-smuggling systems to stop contraband entering the jail.
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