...crowds me till I die

"Prisons face ongoing over capacity problems in Indonesia" - so states a recent headline in the Jakarta Post. What an understatement! The article quotes Untung Sugiyono, Director General of Penitentiaries at the Justice and Human Rights Ministry as saying that Indonesia has around 400 penitentiaries with a total capacity of nearly 90,000, but currently they are required to hold more than 130,000 detainees and convicts.

That average is pretty bad, but it masks some really horrendous overcrowding in individual prisons. For example, I visited one prison in West Java in late 2007, where they told me the capacity was 400 inmates. At that time they had more than 1,100! Even worse was one just outside Jakarta with more than 1,700 inmates against a capacity of 350. One can imagine the conditions! I was told that the prisoners did not actually have to sleep standing up, but they did have to sleep right in front of the bathroom door.

According to Pak Untung, the overcrowding has caused "a spike in disease among detainees." Again, an understatement. We often refer to the spread of TB in 'congregate settings.' These must be classical examples of this, especially since overcrowding is worse in the 'narcotics prisons', the prisons set up to house the exploding number of drug offenders, many of whom have HIV.

Apparently 750 inmates died during their prison terms in 2008, most of them from HIV infections and tuberculosis contracted before they entered the facility, according to Pak Untung. He admitted that they generally got worse following incarceration: "I guess most of them were depressed because of the change of environment," the Post reports him saying. Another understatement!

The news is not all bad: antiretroviral therapy is increasingly available in the prisons here. I'll talk about this in more detail later.

Babé