Prisons In Mozambique

In February 2012, a joint delegation of Amnesty International and the Mozambique Human Rights League visited five prisons in the Mozambique provinces of Maputo and Nampula. They found scores of detainees who have been held for months and even years after arrest and without having been tried before a court. Such arrests and detentions are arbitrary and prohibited by national and international human rights laws. This joint report looks at shortcomings of the criminal justice system which has allowed this pattern of arrests and detentions to occur. It shows how poor, mostly young, unemployed or self-employed men are particularly disadvantaged. They are often disproportionate targets of arbitrary arrest, and often subjected to illtreatment by police officers. In the majority of cases, these people are not informed of their rights or are unable to understand them, and cannot afford legal representation; their cases are therefore almost invariably handled by unqualified individuals or poorly qualified lawyers. Those held on criminal charges are held in particularly inhumane and overcrowded prison conditions, with poor sanitation and medical care and few opportunities for learning or training. Inmates have to depend on family to provide food to supplement their inadequate diet. In addition, in some cases inmates are ill-treated by police or prison authorities or other prisoners. This report calls on the Mozambique authorities to bring an end to arbitrary arrests and detentions in the country and to improve conditions of detention for both detainees and prisoners.

Prisons are always a key focus of those interested in human rights and the rule of law. Human Rights in African Prisons looks at the challenges African governments face in dealing with these issues. Written by some of the most eminent researchers from and on Africa, including the former chairperson of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. This collection provides a current analysis of the situation in African prisons and examines how regional and international legal instruments have dealt with human rights concerns such as overcrowding, healthcare, pretrial detention, and the treatment of women and children. Human Rights in African Prisons reveals that there are reforms under way across nations in Africa and makes recommendations for strengthening and building on them.

"This interdisciplinary volume presents a nuanced critique of the prison experience in diverse detention facilities across Africa. The book stresses the contingent, porous nature of African prisons, across both time and space. It draws on original long-term ethnographic research undertaken in both Francophone and Anglophone settings, which are grouped in four parts. The first part examines how the prison has imprinted itself on wider political and social imaginaries and, in turn, how structures of imprisonment carry the imprint of political action of various times. The second part stresses how particular forms of ordering emerge in African prisons. It is held that while these often involve coercion and neglect, they are better understood as the product of on-going negotiations and the search for meaning and value on the part of a multitude of actors. The third part is concerned with how prison life percolates beyond its physical perimeters into its urban and rural surroundings, and vice versa. It deals with the popular and contested nature of what prisons are about and what they do, especially in regard to bringing about moral subjects. The fourth and final part of the book examines how efforts of reforming and resisting the prison take shape at the intersection of globally circulating models of good governance and levels of self-organisation by prisoners"--

Rather than reducing criminality, prisons in Latin America drive crime by creating the conditions for its growth.