Overcrowded, unhealthy, unmanaged and inhumane: that is how Amnesty International has characterized Liberia’s prison system in a damning report issued last week entitled “Good Intentions are Not Enough.”
The report documents situations in several government run facilities where there is no sanitation, prisoners are forced to sleep in shifts and where psychological counseling or legal services are non-existent.
What this report doesn’t fully address is a systemic problem having to do with the country’s outdated, underfinanced judicial system which even President Sirleaf has admitted, in some statements made in 2010, is broken.
Effective legal representation is a rare commodity for most Liberians as competent lawyers are hard to come by and judges are both overburdened and lacking the administrative support for effective case load management and judicial work-flow. The end result is hundreds of languishing prisoners who have fallen through the judicial cracks. Coupled with severe budget restraints across the whole administrative landscape and the lack of non-governmental prisoners’ rights groups, the conditions described by Amnesty are unsurprising no matter how unacceptable.
It might be difficult to make a case to focus resources on improving conditions in prisons in a country where the majority of people lack proper sanitation and recourse to legal and psychological services, but at least people on the outside are visible. Amnesty has provided a service to the faceless and voiceless and for this is should be commended.
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