Health concerns lead to closure of two prisons

The government of Rwanda has closed two prisons in a bid to solve problems arising from poor health facilities in the overcrowded detention centres, the secretary-general in the Ministry of Interior Affairs, Joseph Mutaboba, told IRIN on Friday. The closure on Thursday of Gikondo Prison, on the outskirts of the capital, Kigali, follows that of the Kibuye Central Prison, in the southeastern province of Kibuye, early in the year. Mutaboba said the prisons had been closed because they posed "grave environmental and health" problems to the inmates and the people living in areas surrounding the facilities. "They created unbearable conditions for the surrounding communities given the fact the two were in urban areas," he said. The town of Kibuye, where one of the closed prisons was located, often had the stench of malfunctioning drains from the prison, which was initially designed for 600 people but held 3,000 inmates at the time of its closure, Mutaboba said. A trench that was carrying waste water cut right through a densely populated neighbourhood in Gikondo, where up to 5,000 inmates had been held. Mutaboba said the closures were also aimed at cutting the money spent on renting some of the detention facilities, such as the Gikondo Prison. "We have been relocating the inmates to bigger prisons where we have enough land to expand the facilities, and also where they can have ample space to grow their own food," he said. He added, "We have embarked on a process of modernising these prisons." As at December 2002, Rwanda's 18 central prisons had at least 110,000 inmates but this figure has fallen to 78,000 following a presidential decree issued in January, for the conditional release of up to 40,000 prisoners. The poor sanitary conditions and overcrowding in prisons have caused the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of prison management, to call for yet another immediate release of the elderly inmates, the sick and those held for petty offences, Mutaboba told IRIN. He said that jails numbering up to 230 that were being administered by local government authorities were also being closed down across the country. Two other large prisons, one in Byumba town in the west, and the other in Nyanza, in the southwest, would be closed before the end of the year, he said.