UNMISS fills know-how gaps among prison officers to address human rights issues

unmiss rule of law prison service wardens corrections officers south sudan training gender sgbv community policing case management women human rights

Senior South Sudanese prison officers received certificates after a week-long training on human rights, sexual gender-based violence and community policing.

29 Jun 2018

UNMISS fills know-how gaps among prison officers to address human rights issues

Filip Andersson

You are a prison officer and an inmate is trying to escape. What can you do about it? Or more importantly: what should you do to stop the want-to-be fugitive?

“How about you chase him? You may be faster than he is. Shooting him should definitely not be your first option, but your very last. In fact, only if there is imminent danger to your or somebody else’s life can you use lethal force legitimately. In all other cases you will have committed a crime and be subject to investigation and punishment.”

Questions and doubts, like the one above, are aplenty as 30 South Sudanese senior corrections officers, including a handful of women, enjoy the second day of a week-long training on human rights, sexual gender-based violence, community policing and other issues pertinent to the daily tasks and tribulations of prison wardens in the capital Juba.

Fortunately, professionals from the Human Rights and Rule of Law departments of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan are on hand to provide keen-to-know participants with all the right answers, including the one given in response to the fleeing prisoner conundrum. UNMISS police officers, gender and women’s protection experts will also play their part over the next few days of training, organized in cooperation with the National Prison Service.

The resources needed to uphold all the rights that incarcerated persons are entitled to may, however, prove a sticking point. Overcrowded prisons pose a significant problem in the South Sudanese correctional system.

“Juba Central Prison was built in the 1940’s, to keep 45 prisoners behind bars. In its current state, the holding capacity is 450 persons when in reality we have 1,088 imprisoned people here, 50 of whom are females,” Joseph Benjamin, Director of Inmates Affairs, says. “There is no space to expand our facilities, so we will need to build a new prison. The question is who will fund it, because we have no money.”

Making adequate room for the prison population, approximately 6,200 in South Sudan as a whole, is not made easier by the large number of people in remand.

“It is really sad. Most of those in remand are there because of very simple cases, they have stolen money to feed their family or something, and yet they can end up being held for a long time, even a year, before they are sentenced or released,” says Captain Betty Paul, who is in charge of the Juba prison’s ever-growing remand section.

According to Captain Paul, more than half of Juba’s prison current prison population, some 600 people, are in remand, arbitrarily and/or protractedly detained.

How can that be? When the training participants discuss the issue, there seems to be a lack of clarity when it comes to the respective responsibilities of prison personnel, police and the courts. Who exactly should take action when a detained person’s arrest warranty expires, and what resources should be used?

“The courts don’t come to pick them up when the [arrest] warrants expire and we don’t have vehicles to take them there, so often we end up just keeping them. Actually, we have an ambulance in case someone is sick, and sometimes we use that one to transport healthy prisoners to court as well,” Captain Paul laments.

unmiss rule of law prison service wardens corrections officers south sudan training gender sgbv community policing case management womenProlonged detentions is the predominant issue when workshop attendees perform a “gap analysis activity”, identifying differences between current practices and what laws and human rights state.

 “Some people are detained for a long time because they have a problem with particular individuals with money and power who say ‘keep him locked up’, and so they stay,” one workshop participant says.

Another gap, both between practices and the law and in terms of knowledge, is revealed when the subject of rights of detained and arrested people comes to the fore. The idea that corporal punishment, like canings or other forms of beatings, is considered cruel and inhumane treatment and hence never ever allowed to be applied to anyone in detention, seems outlandish to some wide-eyed attendees.

How else, they wonder, make people who don’t know how to be good understand that they are out of line, or that they’d better confess that they have done what they are accused of?

Joseph Benjamin, however, is ahead of the curve.

“Times change, the world is moving and becoming one small global village, with values merging. Inhumane treatment actually says it all in one (sic!) word. If you beat someone you will end up in court and that is it,” he says as he addresses his colleagues.

Betty Paul needs no such lessons. She believes in leading by example, and in using words to get her message across. We don’t even know whether those in remand are actually guilty or not, she points out, and even if they are they are still human beings with rights and dignity.

“I’m still a social worker at heart [having been one for seven years]. I don’t ever beat prisoners, I talk gently to them. Human beings make mistakes, and how can you know what is wrong if you have never been told? I tell thieves: you have arms and legs and a head, use them to make the money you need, or ask for it. Just don’t steal.”

Prison life is hard, for inmates and personnel alike, yet Captain Paul chooses to maintain a positive outlook: things could have been worse.

“Believe me, protecting our prisoners against harm is one of our most important functions. If someone has done something bad to the wrong people on the outside, he is better off in prison. Out there he may very well get killed, that is the reality of South Sudan”.

What about Betty herself, though? She has a university degree in community services, she is free to leave whenever she wants.

“Friends and others ask me all the time: Betty, why are you wasting your time with prisoners, making hardly any money at all? To that I say: I do this for my country, and for the appreciation I receive from our inmates. You can ask every single one of them and they will all tell you that they would never want to be transferred to another part of the prison.”