Zimbabwe's Prisons: A Death Sentence

by Matt Kelley

Published May 20, 2009 @ 07:22PM PT

Zimbabwe's prisons may be the worst place on Earth.

The country's Standard newspaper is reporting this week that 700 of the 1300 inmates in Harare's maximum security Chikurubi prison have died in the last year, mostly of disease and starvation. Six were found dead on Sunday alone. Although the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Programme have begun to intervene, the situation is about as bad as it gets.

The blog This is Zimbabwe has some in-depth coverage of this issue, showing that the suffering is not confined to Chikurubi (which is 12 miles outside of Harare), it's not new, and it's not going away. Keep reading past the jump, but be warned, it ain't pretty.

Towards the end of (2008) a senior prison official told a journalist that “An ordinary jail sentence in Zimbabwe today is as good as a death sentence”. He said that at least 20 prisoners are dying every day of hunger and disease in Zimbabwe’s over-crowded jails.

In 2004 it was reported that deaths from natural diseases had surged by more than 400% since 1999, with most of the deaths attributable to AIDS related illnesses, many of which are opportunistic diseases that take advantage of rapidly weakening immune systems and filthy conditions. When Roy Bennett left Chikurubi in 2005, he said he had seen “at least three bodies a day being taken out”. In 2007, a medical orderly working for the prisons services said, “every day, dead bodies are recovered, especially at Chikurubi Maximum Prison, where as many as 10 deaths can be recorded in one day”.

The article goes on to tell of bodies piled up in storage rooms like lumber, of prisoners being forced to go naked for many years, infants in cells with their mothers and piles of feces in the corners of crowded cells. By all accounts, life in one of these prisons is a horror most of us could never imagine.

On top of all of this, many prisoners in Zimbabwe are incarcerated without charges or fair trials. I wrote last month about a documentary that put the suffering in Zimbabwe's prisons into world headlines for a split second, but that kind of international attention doesn't last. And when an entire country is starving and facing serious epidemics, it is difficult to draw the attention of the world to people accused or convicted of crimes. But it has been said that to see the true nature of a society one should visit its prisons. It's already well known that Zimbabwe is in bad shape, but the state of its prisons simply underlines the chaos.