Sunday Times!
Nov. 6th, 2005 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On Africa's horrific prisons
The Forgotten of Africa, Rotting Without Trial in Vile Jails
By MICHAEL WINES
LILONGWE, Malawi - Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison, a dozen iron-roofed barracks set on yellow dirt and hemmed by barbed wire just outside Malawi's capital city.
He eats one meal of porridge daily. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease is rife.
But the worst part may be that in the case of Mr. Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, the charges against him have not yet even reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. For sometime after November 1999, justice officials lost his case file. His guards know where he is. But for all Malawi's courts know, he does not exist.
"Why is it that my file is missing?" he asked, his voice a mix of rage and desperation. "Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this? Should I keep on staying in prison just because my file is not found? For how long should I stay in prison? For how long?"
This is life in Malawi's high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.
But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa's one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable - or more so.
The inhumanity of African prisons is a shame that hides in plain sight. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia's jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo's prisons have housed children as young as 8. Kenyan prisoners perish from easily curable diseases like gastroenteritis.
When the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights last visited the Central African Republic's prisons in 2000, it heard that officers had deemed 50 prisoners incorrigible. Then, dispensing with trials, they executed them.
Even the African Commission's special rapporteur for inmates has not visited an African prison in 18 months. There is no money, says the rapporteur, Vera Chirwa, a democracy activist who herself spent 12 years in Malawi jails under a dictatorship.
"The conditions are almost the same," Ms. Chirwa said. "In Malawi, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in almost every country I have visited. I've been to France, and I've seen the prisons there. In Africa, they would be hotels."
Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts, said Marie-Dominique Parent, the Malawi-based regional director of Penal Reform International, a British advocacy group. Prisons, she said, "are at the bottom of the heap."
With so much misery among law-abiding citizens, the world's poorest nations have little incentive to improve convicts' lives. But, then, not everyone in African prisons is a convict.
Two-thirds of Uganda's 18,000 prison inmates have not been tried. The same is true of three-fourths of Mozambique's prisoners, and four-fifths of Cameroon's. Even in South Africa, Africa's most advanced nation, inmates in Johannesburg Prison have waited seven years to see a judge.
Some of Africa's one million or so prisoners - nobody knows how many - are not lawbreakers, but victims of incompetence or corruption or justice systems that are simply understaffed, underfinanced and overwhelmed. Kenya's former prisons commissioner suggested last year that with proper legal representation, a fifth of his nation's 55,000 prisoners might be declared innocent.
The most immediate and apparent inhumanity is the overcrowding that Africa's broken systems breed, compounded by disease, filth, abuse, and a lack of food, soap, beds, clothes or recreation. A survey of 27 African governments by Penal Reform International found that national prison systems operated, on average, at 141 percent of capacity. Individual prisons were even more jammed: Luzira Prison, Uganda's largest, holds 5,000 in a 1950's facility built for 600.
Babati Prison in Tanzania, built for 50 inmates, housed 589 as of March.
Malawi's 9,800 inmates, living in effectively the same cells that were too crowded when they housed 4,500 a decade ago, are luckier than many. Three years ago, half the prisoners had yet to go before a judge. Under a pioneering program run by Penal Reform International and financed in part by the British government, paralegals have winnowed that to fewer than one in four - among the lowest rates in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet the flood of newly accused still outstrips Malawi's ability to deliver justice.
"This is not a hotel, where we can accommodate no more than our capacity," said Tobias Nowa, Malawi's commissioner of prison operations. "We must accommodate whomever is sent to us."
Prison Population Doubles
Paradoxically, democracy's advent has catalyzed the problems of Africa's prisons. Freedom has permitted lawlessness, newly empowered citizens have demanded order - and governments have delivered.
Malawi's prison population has more than doubled since the dictatorship ended in 1994. But its justice system is so badly broken that it is hard to know where to begin repairs.
Malawi's 12 million citizens have 28 legal aid attorneys and eight prosecutors with law degrees. There are jobs for 32 prosecutors, but salaries are so low that the vacancies go unfilled.
So except in exceptional cases like murder and manslaughter, almost all accused go to trial without lawyers. The police prosecutors who try them have only basic legal training. And the lay magistrates who sit in judgment are largely unschooled in the law.
Justice Andrew Nyirenda, 49, the chief of Malawi's High Court, said the system had been swamped by the growth and rising complexity of crime since Malawi became a democracy in 1994.
"There are conspiracies to commit crimes, drug trafficking, even human trafficking, and instances of lower-level white-collar crimes where people are literally swindling institutions," he said. "These are extremely complicated cases for people who have not been trained sufficiently. We get convictions that aren't supposed to be convictions, and acquittals that aren't supposed to be acquittals."
Pacharo Kayira, one of the eight prosecutors, seconds that. "I've done so many cases where I don't agree with the conviction by the lower court," he said in an interview here. "It's not the best situation, to say the least."
Malawi's police officers can take two years merely to send prosecutors their report on a homicide. Prosecutors need months more to decide whether the case should be taken to a lower court, the start of a legal process that lasts years.
Malawi's High Court, which must pass judgment on all capital crimes, has not heard a single homicide case in the last year. There is no money to assemble lawyers, judges and witnesses for hearings in the locales where the crimes occurred; no money to empanel juries as required since 1995; no money for the written record that the Supreme Court needs for its mandatory review of convictions.
Ishmael Wadi, Malawi's director of public prosecutions, said his eight prosecutors had a backlog of 44 untried fraud and tax-evasion cases, 173 robbery and theft cases, 388 fatal accident cases and 867 homicide cases.
"When the offenses occur, they send the files to this office," he said. "The files keep on coming, so the number keeps increasing. So what do you do? You accumulate the files, keep them nice and put them on the shelves."
And the caseload is rising. Capital crimes - homicide, rape and manslaughter - consume virtually all the time of legal-aid lawyers and prosecutors. While they process about 380 homicides a year, 500 to 600 other homicides are committed.
Shortages of judges, prosecutors and lawyers ensure that justice is both sluggish and mean. Many inmates sit in cells for lack of bail that can total less than $10 or $20.
The interminable wait between arrest and courtroom torments the innocent and lets the guilty escape justice. Evidence in police stations is misplaced or discarded. Witnesses die and move away.
Mr. Kayira, the prosecutor, encounters such cases far too often, after much life has been wasted and long terms already served, by both the innocent and the guilty.
"There have been many times when I have used the discretion granted me as a prosecutor to tell the police to release a person who has been there five, six years," he said. "I look at their file and say to myself, 'There isn't the evidence here to convict this person.' " For prisoners like Lackson Sikayenera, their cases lost in a system that only sporadically works, the only alternative is to hope someone hears their pleas for help - and to make a new life.
The Road to Prison
Built 40 years ago to house 800 inmates, Maula Prison, on a recent visit, held 1,805 inmates, all but 24 of them men. Mr. Sikayenera lives in Maula's Cell 3, one of 160 in a pen as big as a two-car garage.
Once a farmer near Dowa, a dirt-road village 25 miles north of Lilongwe, Mr. Sikayenera was sent here after he killed his elder brother Jonas. Their father, he said, gave him a choice tobacco plot that Jonas claimed was rightfully his. Jonas threatened to kill him if he did not surrender it. Lackson refused, he said, and Jonas attacked.
"To protect myself, I took a hoe handle and hit my brother on the forehead, and he fainted," he said. "Then I went to the police to report that I had harmed my brother." The police jailed him, then moved him to Maula Prison a week later.
That was 2,100 days ago.
"I have not seen my family since 1999," he said. "I was the only productive person in my home, and now there is too much poverty for them to afford transport to see me. The only communication I have gotten is from my first wife, who informed me, 'I am tired of staying alone here, and I am going to get married.' "
"Life is very hard here," he said.
He and the other men spend daytimes in the prison yard, a field of thick yellow dust with an outdoor privy, a communal shower and one water spigot. At 4 p.m., they are herded into a dozen concrete cells. Fourteen hours later, at 6 a.m., they are let out again.
Their cells have iron-barred windows and thick walls to discourage escape attempts. A sporadically working shower and toilet are crammed in each cell's corner.
One cell wall is painted glossy black - a blackboard where inmates scrawl trivia like the cell's head count, prisoners' faiths and works of chalk art, like drawings of autos and dream homes.
Prisoners sleep on blankets on the floor, too tightly packed to reach the toilet - too packed, in fact, even to turn in their sleep. One inmate awakens the rest each night for mass turnovers. The most privileged inmates sleep on their backs, ringing the walls of the cell. Everyone else sleeps on his side.
"It is so unhygienic here," Mr. Sikayenera said. "Basically, if you need any source of water, you have to get it from the toilet. The showers, most of them are broken. There is a lot of dysentery. A lot of the time, the water isn't running." Maula Prison's commanding officer, an expansive man named Gibson Singo, disputes none of that.
"They were designed for 50 or 60 people in one cell," he said. "But now it's 150, 155. If you talk of human rights, there is no way you can put 150 people in one room."
Maula and four nearby prisons split a monthly state allotment of $12,500, from which Mr. Singo must pay Maula's 124 employees and meet inmates' needs. Maula's share is laughably small. There are no prison uniforms, no blankets, no soap, save what charities provide. The only food is nsima, corn mush leavened with beans or meat from the prison rabbit hutch. The only drink is water.
The mush is boiled in massive tubs outside the prison, where wardens moved the kitchen after hungry inmates began fighting over the food. The old kitchen is now a rudimentary school, its lessons scrawled in chalk on the walls.
These conditions exact a cruel toll. Maula Prison lost an average of 30 prisoners a year in 2003 and 2004 - about one death per 60 inmates. The average for American prisons is one death per 330 inmates.
It could be worse: Zomba Prison, 100 miles south, loses one in 20 inmates annually. But it is bad enough.
How They Survive
"It's just unbearable," said Frances Daka, 32, jailed on an unresolved murder charge since 2002. "We make ourselves live, just to survive."
Survive they do, in ingenious fashion. On each cell's wall, beside the chalk artwork, is a list of rules, laws that are both prosaic and telling: "Do not make noise when the lights are off"; "Do not smoke during prayers."
Prisoners must be clothed, lest a bare body excite sex-starved men. "Sodomy is not allowed in this house," one rule states.
A cell hierarchy maintains order. A minister of health checks daily for sick prisoners and arranges medical care.
If justice outside the prison is slow to come, inside it is swift, lest unrest ensue. Cell policemen "arrest" rule breakers, and cell magistrates hear evidence and pronounce sentences.
"Let's say someone was helping himself while the others are eating," Mr. Sikayenera said. "This person might be given 500 days of cleaning the cell."
After 20 or so, the offender might be taken again to a cell judge, who can grant a reprieve.
"The reason why there is all this hierarchy is to find conflict resolution," Mr. Sikayenera said. "So there is no chaos. And it's effective. In most of the cells, you find there is no fighting. People don't break the rules."
Mr. Sikayenera is the magistrate of Cell 3. For six years, no one in Malawi's justice system has decided whether he should be punished or freed. But in prison, elevated by seniority and fellow inmates' respect, he metes out mercy and retribution with an even hand.
And without delay.
"When a case comes up," he said, utterly without irony, "it is dealt with. Right there."
On a floating island. Too cool.
And Sometimes, the Island Is Marooned on You
By PAM BELLUCK
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - The island of Island Pond had it in for Andrew Renna.
Or so it seemed one Saturday evening a few weeks ago. In the middle of a pounding storm, Mr. Renna looked out across the pond, which borders his backyard.
"It was raining crazy," he recalled. "I said, 'That wind's going to blow that thing right over here.' Ten minutes later it did. When it moves, it moves pretty quick."
The island, about the size of a football field, made a beeline for Mr. Renna's house - crushing his three-foot chain-link fence, swamping his red-blue-and-purple flagstone patio, wrecking his dock, flooding his shed, hobbling his weeping willow, and drowning the oregano, cilantro, tomatoes and peppers in his garden. Then, with an insouciant shrug, it came to a standstill in Mr. Renna's backyard, an interloper squatting in stubborn silence.
"Normally when it floats you can actually hear the roots rip - it sounds like ripping up carpet," said Mr. Renna, 51, a roofing and siding sales manager. "But this time, it didn't make any noise."
Island Pond's island has been floating for as long as anyone can remember, buoyed by a mat of sphagnum moss and gases from decomposing plants. It is a curiosity and sometimes a nuisance for the 20 or so homes around the nine-acre pond.
Sometimes it boings mischievously around as if the pond were a pinball machine, sailing, for example, into Richard and Beverly Vears's backyard just hours after they moved in. That gave a neighbor a perfect welcome gag: telling the Vearses he was a tax collector who would charge them for the extra property.
Locals, including city officials and the pond's owner, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, which runs the adjacent Cathedral High School, say the wandering island is a rarity that must not be tethered, altered or otherwise brought to heel.
"There's only two in North America," said Stan Tenerowicz, environmental affairs administrator of the Springfield Conservation Commission. He said that 12 years ago, Cathedral High tied the island to shore to spare homeowners an unwelcome floating visitor, but the conservation commission ordered it unchained.
"Tethering it would be a type of alteration of a wetlands system," Mr. Tenerowicz said. "And this is a pretty unique natural resource."
It turns out, however, that the claim of "two in North America" is apocryphal, according to experts on floating islands.
Such islands appear across the country and around the world - familiar enough that Minnesota issues removal permits to homeowners, and prevalent enough in some lakes in Florida that they are chopped up or pulverized by large machines with sharp blades.
"People who live near a floating island always claim that it is the only one," said Chet Van Duzer, author of "Floating Islands: A Global Bibliography."
Mr. Van Duzer estimates that there are dozens of floating islands, sometimes called floating bogs, in several states including California, Indiana, Maine and Ohio. Many others once floated but have since been destroyed or become land-locked, said Mr. Van Duzer, including ones on Lake Ontario in New York, Bolton Lake in Connecticut and Kettle Moraine Lake in Wisconsin.
"Globally, they're not rare, and in this country they're not rare," said Stuart E. G. Findlay, a senior scientist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.
The islands usually form in wetlands, where plants take root in peaty soil or sphagnum moss in a shallow lake or riverbed, said Dave Walker, a senior project manager with the St. Johns River Water Management District in Florida, where, he said, "you can get acres and acres of floating islands on a lake."
When the plants decompose, they release gases that can create buoyancy, he said. And if there is a surge in the water level, from a flood or hurricane for instance, the peaty mat can break away from the bottom and float. Mr. Walker said some islands could even be precipitated by "a large alligator burrowing" on a lake bottom.
The islands, which can be as big as an acre and six inches to six feet thick, are rich environments for wildlife, allowing small creatures to outfloat predators. Many of the islands sprout trees, which act as sails; the 20-foot birches, alders and pines on the Island Pond island can ferry it across the entire pond in as little as 20 minutes, residents say.
In some parts of the world, like Loktak Lake in India and Lake Kyoga in Uganda, people live or fish on floating islands, Mr. Van Duzer said.
In Springfield, few people seem to venture onto the Island Pond island; some residents say they worry about falling through its spongy surface. But it teems with birds and amphibians, and there is even rumored to be a turtle the size of a bear, nicknamed Big Ben, that ostensibly feasts on ducks, geese and anything else it can snap up.
The island is kleptomaniacal, scooping up baseballs and tennis balls from the high school on its banks, and it gives safe harbor to some marijuana plants that have blossomed into a sizable patch.
Some experts believe that floating islands are becoming more common or lasting longer in some places, especially where human encroachment has created reservoirs or where fertilizer use has made certain plants grow faster.
Others, like Wayne Mueller, an aquatic plant management specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said that so many more people lived around lakes these days that floating islands previously unnoticed were being spotted.
While the islands can be pretty, "they are not benign," Mr. Walker said. "They can crash into a dock, they can block a canal entrance, they can uproot a lot of vegetation."
In Minnesota, Mr. Mueller said, islands can become "aquatic footballs - people push it off their property and it becomes attached to another person's property."
State officials will sometimes "stake down" a floating island with long pieces of wood, "pinning it to the bottom," Mr. Mueller said. Homeowners in Minnesota wanting to get rid of an island cannot use machines, he said, so they often spend hours using ice saws, axes or manure hooks to cut it up, then carting the soggy pieces away.
In Florida, officials have tried pushing the islands with boats, roping them into corners and blocking their paths with wood pilings.
And there is what might be called extreme island annihilation, done by the likes of a Florida company called Texas Aquatic Harvesting.
Using 90-foot boats with large blades, the company carves up islands that "average the size of Yankee Stadium," said Mike Hulon, a project manager. He also uses boats that he calls "cookie cutters," which act like Cuisinarts on an island, "turning it into puree."
In Lake Jackson, he said, "those islands were full of marsh rats and rabbits," and once, when the cookie cutter got going, "the alligators were in a feeding frenzy - they would have three or four rats and rabbits in their mouths at one time."
Told about the kid-glove approach of the Island Pond denizens in Massachusetts, Mr. Hulon practically sneered. "Bunny huggers," he said.
But many Island Pond residents feel affection for their itinerant island. Dan Blais tried to plant tomatoes on it and named a pair of geese who return to it each year Hansel and Gretel.
"It's like walking on a waterbed," said Mr. Blais. "I love to see it moving around."
Two weeks after the island plopped onto Mr. Renna's yard, Cathedral High School agreed to tow it to freedom, hoping to raise charitable donations to recoup the cost of $5,500. It commissioned CJ's Towing Unlimited, which towed the island in 2001, an undertaking that lasted 14 hours. This time, the process took five hours. CJ's used a truck that could pull 45 tons, two winches, a speedboat to stretch cable to the island, 55-gallon barrels to buoy the cable above the water and a team of burly men to attach the cable to trees on the island.
With Craig Morel, CJ's owner, directing them through two-way radios, the crew members freed the island in half an hour, and it floated to the other side of the pond. There, it was temporarily tied to a stand of swamp maples, to be freed after officials lowered the water level in the storm-swollen pond.
"It'll probably go back to somebody else's property," said John Miller, principal of Cathedral High. "Ultimately, it's going to float. It's a floating island. We don't want to violate its natural state. There's only two of them in North America."
On the riots in France
France Has an Underclass, but Its Roots Are Still Shallow
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS — Just two months ago, the French watched in horrified fascination at the anarchy of New Orleans, where members of America's underclass were seen looting stores and defying the police in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Last week, as rioters torched cars and trashed businesses in the immigrant-concentrated suburbs of Paris, the images of wild gangs of young men silhouetted against the yellow flames of burning cars came as an unwelcome reminder for France that it has its own growing underclass.
The coincidence of timing can be revealing - and deceptive.
The corrosive gap between America's whites and its racial minorities, especially African-Americans, is the product of centuries: slavery, followed by cycles of poverty and racial exclusion that denied generation after generation the best the United States could offer. France, on the other hand, is only beginning to struggle with a much newer variant of the same problem: the fury of Muslims of North African descent who have found themselves caught for three generations in a trap of ethnic and religious discrimination.
Even so, France is still low on the curve toward developing an entrenched, structural underclass - one that could breed extremism and lasting social problems.
So far, while hundreds of cars and buses have been burned and dozens of businesses destroyed in violence that has spread to a dozen towns, most rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news than making a coherent political statement.
"It's a game of cowboys and Indians," said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam. He is usually keen to warn Europeans of the potential danger posed by Islamists living among them. But in this case, he said, the danger is a long-range one. So far, he said, the attacks on the police and the torching of cars has less the character of a religious war than of "a local sport, a rite of passage."
The violence, on the other hand, reflects something that any American who lived through the urban upheavals of the 1960's, or the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, might recognize: a dangerous degree of isolation felt by a growing segment of its population, especially its young.
Although many Americans feel that their country still has a lot of work to do to close the gap between blacks and whites, the social protests and urban upheavals of the 1960's produced a stream of measures intended to increase political and economic opportunities rapidly for members of minority groups, and to stress the value of diversity to a democracy. By contrast, the French model has so far relied largely on expensive measures to keep poor Muslims fed, housed and educated, but has not effectively addressed the social or political isolation they feel from job and housing discrimination, and has actually limited their ability to define themselves as a political interest group. Affirmative action, a cornerstone of the American approach, has been a taboo here.
Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and mayor of Évry, a troubled suburb south of Paris that has seen its share of violence in the past few days, put it this way: "We've combined the failure of our integration model with the worst effects of ghettoization, without a social ladder for people to climb."
"In the U.S. and Britain, the communities help create opportunities for advancement," he continued. But in France "the state and the politicians have left the playing field open for a political-religious response - that's undeniable."
Still, because France's difficulties are relatively recent, it may have a chance to escape the depth of the American problems.
For one thing, the physical conditions in these neighborhoods have not begun to rival poor urban areas in the United States. Even in the worst government housing developments, green lawns and neat flower beds break the monotony of the gray concrete.
There are more than 700 such neighborhoods in the country, housing nearly five million people or about 8 percent of the population.
The despair in these housing projects (called cités here) has been mitigated by better schools than those that serve poor, minority districts in the United States (education is financed nationally in France, rather than through local tax rolls) and by extensive welfare programs. Even when employed, a family of four living in a government-subsidized apartment typically pays only a few hundred dollars a month in rent and can receive more than $1,200 a month in various subsidies. The unemployed receive more. For all, health care and education are free.
There is crime, but not nearly at the level of random violence feared in poor neighborhoods in American cities. Guns are tightly controlled and are still relatively rare. When a teenager was killed in a drive-by shooting in a Paris suburb this year, it made national headlines. The family unit among immigrants is still strong, as are ties to their homelands.
But that tight social fabric is fraying as the second and now third generations of French-born immigrants come of age. On two levels, many young immigrants find themselves questioning where they really belong. They have weaker ties than their parents did to their ancestral countries, but they are also discovering that, contrary to what they have been taught in school, they are not fully French.
That is one foundation of the fear among some experts that a structural underclass is emerging. Already, French-Arabs and French-Africans make up the majority of inmates in France's prisons, just as minorities make up a vastly disproportionate part of the American prison population.
France's definition of citizenship also presents problems. While the United States stresses pluralism, France continues to discourage anything that could carve up the French body politic along ethnic lines; the word "communautarisme," which roughly translates as ghettoization, is known to all French as a destructive force that afflicts, most notably, the United States.
It was only in 2003 that the French government encouraged the formation of an umbrella Islamic organization that could represent French Muslims in a dialogue with the state. The overall policy has only increased Muslim resentments by banning any form of affirmative action and by suppressing cultural expression in measures like forbidding Muslim girls to wear veils in school.
As in the United States, most experts agree that in the long run, full employment would be the best way to solve the problems and accelerate integration. Here, the comparison between the history of American minority groups and those in France seems particularly close. The jobless rate among French-Arabs and French-Africans is as high as 30 percent in some neighborhoods, triple the national average. French-Arabs regularly claim that when identical résumés are submitted to an employer with an Arab name on one and a French name on another, the résumé with the French name will get the priority.
That much, at least, may be changing. In March, President Jacques Chirac appointed the chairman of the automaker Renault, Louis Schweitzer, to head a council created to fight job and housing discrimination. The country is also engaged in a debate over whether to bend its laws to allow affirmative action in the job market.
"The picture of France as a country that doesn't want to recognize diversity - that's partially true," said Patrick Weil, an expert on immigration and integration based in Paris for the German Marshall Fund. "But there's a debate now about what steps should be taken to change that."
The Forgotten of Africa, Rotting Without Trial in Vile Jails
By MICHAEL WINES
LILONGWE, Malawi - Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison, a dozen iron-roofed barracks set on yellow dirt and hemmed by barbed wire just outside Malawi's capital city.
He eats one meal of porridge daily. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease is rife.
But the worst part may be that in the case of Mr. Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, the charges against him have not yet even reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. For sometime after November 1999, justice officials lost his case file. His guards know where he is. But for all Malawi's courts know, he does not exist.
"Why is it that my file is missing?" he asked, his voice a mix of rage and desperation. "Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this? Should I keep on staying in prison just because my file is not found? For how long should I stay in prison? For how long?"
This is life in Malawi's high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.
But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa's one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable - or more so.
The inhumanity of African prisons is a shame that hides in plain sight. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia's jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo's prisons have housed children as young as 8. Kenyan prisoners perish from easily curable diseases like gastroenteritis.
When the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights last visited the Central African Republic's prisons in 2000, it heard that officers had deemed 50 prisoners incorrigible. Then, dispensing with trials, they executed them.
Even the African Commission's special rapporteur for inmates has not visited an African prison in 18 months. There is no money, says the rapporteur, Vera Chirwa, a democracy activist who herself spent 12 years in Malawi jails under a dictatorship.
"The conditions are almost the same," Ms. Chirwa said. "In Malawi, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in almost every country I have visited. I've been to France, and I've seen the prisons there. In Africa, they would be hotels."
Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts, said Marie-Dominique Parent, the Malawi-based regional director of Penal Reform International, a British advocacy group. Prisons, she said, "are at the bottom of the heap."
With so much misery among law-abiding citizens, the world's poorest nations have little incentive to improve convicts' lives. But, then, not everyone in African prisons is a convict.
Two-thirds of Uganda's 18,000 prison inmates have not been tried. The same is true of three-fourths of Mozambique's prisoners, and four-fifths of Cameroon's. Even in South Africa, Africa's most advanced nation, inmates in Johannesburg Prison have waited seven years to see a judge.
Some of Africa's one million or so prisoners - nobody knows how many - are not lawbreakers, but victims of incompetence or corruption or justice systems that are simply understaffed, underfinanced and overwhelmed. Kenya's former prisons commissioner suggested last year that with proper legal representation, a fifth of his nation's 55,000 prisoners might be declared innocent.
The most immediate and apparent inhumanity is the overcrowding that Africa's broken systems breed, compounded by disease, filth, abuse, and a lack of food, soap, beds, clothes or recreation. A survey of 27 African governments by Penal Reform International found that national prison systems operated, on average, at 141 percent of capacity. Individual prisons were even more jammed: Luzira Prison, Uganda's largest, holds 5,000 in a 1950's facility built for 600.
Babati Prison in Tanzania, built for 50 inmates, housed 589 as of March.
Malawi's 9,800 inmates, living in effectively the same cells that were too crowded when they housed 4,500 a decade ago, are luckier than many. Three years ago, half the prisoners had yet to go before a judge. Under a pioneering program run by Penal Reform International and financed in part by the British government, paralegals have winnowed that to fewer than one in four - among the lowest rates in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet the flood of newly accused still outstrips Malawi's ability to deliver justice.
"This is not a hotel, where we can accommodate no more than our capacity," said Tobias Nowa, Malawi's commissioner of prison operations. "We must accommodate whomever is sent to us."
Prison Population Doubles
Paradoxically, democracy's advent has catalyzed the problems of Africa's prisons. Freedom has permitted lawlessness, newly empowered citizens have demanded order - and governments have delivered.
Malawi's prison population has more than doubled since the dictatorship ended in 1994. But its justice system is so badly broken that it is hard to know where to begin repairs.
Malawi's 12 million citizens have 28 legal aid attorneys and eight prosecutors with law degrees. There are jobs for 32 prosecutors, but salaries are so low that the vacancies go unfilled.
So except in exceptional cases like murder and manslaughter, almost all accused go to trial without lawyers. The police prosecutors who try them have only basic legal training. And the lay magistrates who sit in judgment are largely unschooled in the law.
Justice Andrew Nyirenda, 49, the chief of Malawi's High Court, said the system had been swamped by the growth and rising complexity of crime since Malawi became a democracy in 1994.
"There are conspiracies to commit crimes, drug trafficking, even human trafficking, and instances of lower-level white-collar crimes where people are literally swindling institutions," he said. "These are extremely complicated cases for people who have not been trained sufficiently. We get convictions that aren't supposed to be convictions, and acquittals that aren't supposed to be acquittals."
Pacharo Kayira, one of the eight prosecutors, seconds that. "I've done so many cases where I don't agree with the conviction by the lower court," he said in an interview here. "It's not the best situation, to say the least."
Malawi's police officers can take two years merely to send prosecutors their report on a homicide. Prosecutors need months more to decide whether the case should be taken to a lower court, the start of a legal process that lasts years.
Malawi's High Court, which must pass judgment on all capital crimes, has not heard a single homicide case in the last year. There is no money to assemble lawyers, judges and witnesses for hearings in the locales where the crimes occurred; no money to empanel juries as required since 1995; no money for the written record that the Supreme Court needs for its mandatory review of convictions.
Ishmael Wadi, Malawi's director of public prosecutions, said his eight prosecutors had a backlog of 44 untried fraud and tax-evasion cases, 173 robbery and theft cases, 388 fatal accident cases and 867 homicide cases.
"When the offenses occur, they send the files to this office," he said. "The files keep on coming, so the number keeps increasing. So what do you do? You accumulate the files, keep them nice and put them on the shelves."
And the caseload is rising. Capital crimes - homicide, rape and manslaughter - consume virtually all the time of legal-aid lawyers and prosecutors. While they process about 380 homicides a year, 500 to 600 other homicides are committed.
Shortages of judges, prosecutors and lawyers ensure that justice is both sluggish and mean. Many inmates sit in cells for lack of bail that can total less than $10 or $20.
The interminable wait between arrest and courtroom torments the innocent and lets the guilty escape justice. Evidence in police stations is misplaced or discarded. Witnesses die and move away.
Mr. Kayira, the prosecutor, encounters such cases far too often, after much life has been wasted and long terms already served, by both the innocent and the guilty.
"There have been many times when I have used the discretion granted me as a prosecutor to tell the police to release a person who has been there five, six years," he said. "I look at their file and say to myself, 'There isn't the evidence here to convict this person.' " For prisoners like Lackson Sikayenera, their cases lost in a system that only sporadically works, the only alternative is to hope someone hears their pleas for help - and to make a new life.
The Road to Prison
Built 40 years ago to house 800 inmates, Maula Prison, on a recent visit, held 1,805 inmates, all but 24 of them men. Mr. Sikayenera lives in Maula's Cell 3, one of 160 in a pen as big as a two-car garage.
Once a farmer near Dowa, a dirt-road village 25 miles north of Lilongwe, Mr. Sikayenera was sent here after he killed his elder brother Jonas. Their father, he said, gave him a choice tobacco plot that Jonas claimed was rightfully his. Jonas threatened to kill him if he did not surrender it. Lackson refused, he said, and Jonas attacked.
"To protect myself, I took a hoe handle and hit my brother on the forehead, and he fainted," he said. "Then I went to the police to report that I had harmed my brother." The police jailed him, then moved him to Maula Prison a week later.
That was 2,100 days ago.
"I have not seen my family since 1999," he said. "I was the only productive person in my home, and now there is too much poverty for them to afford transport to see me. The only communication I have gotten is from my first wife, who informed me, 'I am tired of staying alone here, and I am going to get married.' "
"Life is very hard here," he said.
He and the other men spend daytimes in the prison yard, a field of thick yellow dust with an outdoor privy, a communal shower and one water spigot. At 4 p.m., they are herded into a dozen concrete cells. Fourteen hours later, at 6 a.m., they are let out again.
Their cells have iron-barred windows and thick walls to discourage escape attempts. A sporadically working shower and toilet are crammed in each cell's corner.
One cell wall is painted glossy black - a blackboard where inmates scrawl trivia like the cell's head count, prisoners' faiths and works of chalk art, like drawings of autos and dream homes.
Prisoners sleep on blankets on the floor, too tightly packed to reach the toilet - too packed, in fact, even to turn in their sleep. One inmate awakens the rest each night for mass turnovers. The most privileged inmates sleep on their backs, ringing the walls of the cell. Everyone else sleeps on his side.
"It is so unhygienic here," Mr. Sikayenera said. "Basically, if you need any source of water, you have to get it from the toilet. The showers, most of them are broken. There is a lot of dysentery. A lot of the time, the water isn't running." Maula Prison's commanding officer, an expansive man named Gibson Singo, disputes none of that.
"They were designed for 50 or 60 people in one cell," he said. "But now it's 150, 155. If you talk of human rights, there is no way you can put 150 people in one room."
Maula and four nearby prisons split a monthly state allotment of $12,500, from which Mr. Singo must pay Maula's 124 employees and meet inmates' needs. Maula's share is laughably small. There are no prison uniforms, no blankets, no soap, save what charities provide. The only food is nsima, corn mush leavened with beans or meat from the prison rabbit hutch. The only drink is water.
The mush is boiled in massive tubs outside the prison, where wardens moved the kitchen after hungry inmates began fighting over the food. The old kitchen is now a rudimentary school, its lessons scrawled in chalk on the walls.
These conditions exact a cruel toll. Maula Prison lost an average of 30 prisoners a year in 2003 and 2004 - about one death per 60 inmates. The average for American prisons is one death per 330 inmates.
It could be worse: Zomba Prison, 100 miles south, loses one in 20 inmates annually. But it is bad enough.
How They Survive
"It's just unbearable," said Frances Daka, 32, jailed on an unresolved murder charge since 2002. "We make ourselves live, just to survive."
Survive they do, in ingenious fashion. On each cell's wall, beside the chalk artwork, is a list of rules, laws that are both prosaic and telling: "Do not make noise when the lights are off"; "Do not smoke during prayers."
Prisoners must be clothed, lest a bare body excite sex-starved men. "Sodomy is not allowed in this house," one rule states.
A cell hierarchy maintains order. A minister of health checks daily for sick prisoners and arranges medical care.
If justice outside the prison is slow to come, inside it is swift, lest unrest ensue. Cell policemen "arrest" rule breakers, and cell magistrates hear evidence and pronounce sentences.
"Let's say someone was helping himself while the others are eating," Mr. Sikayenera said. "This person might be given 500 days of cleaning the cell."
After 20 or so, the offender might be taken again to a cell judge, who can grant a reprieve.
"The reason why there is all this hierarchy is to find conflict resolution," Mr. Sikayenera said. "So there is no chaos. And it's effective. In most of the cells, you find there is no fighting. People don't break the rules."
Mr. Sikayenera is the magistrate of Cell 3. For six years, no one in Malawi's justice system has decided whether he should be punished or freed. But in prison, elevated by seniority and fellow inmates' respect, he metes out mercy and retribution with an even hand.
And without delay.
"When a case comes up," he said, utterly without irony, "it is dealt with. Right there."
On a floating island. Too cool.
And Sometimes, the Island Is Marooned on You
By PAM BELLUCK
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - The island of Island Pond had it in for Andrew Renna.
Or so it seemed one Saturday evening a few weeks ago. In the middle of a pounding storm, Mr. Renna looked out across the pond, which borders his backyard.
"It was raining crazy," he recalled. "I said, 'That wind's going to blow that thing right over here.' Ten minutes later it did. When it moves, it moves pretty quick."
The island, about the size of a football field, made a beeline for Mr. Renna's house - crushing his three-foot chain-link fence, swamping his red-blue-and-purple flagstone patio, wrecking his dock, flooding his shed, hobbling his weeping willow, and drowning the oregano, cilantro, tomatoes and peppers in his garden. Then, with an insouciant shrug, it came to a standstill in Mr. Renna's backyard, an interloper squatting in stubborn silence.
"Normally when it floats you can actually hear the roots rip - it sounds like ripping up carpet," said Mr. Renna, 51, a roofing and siding sales manager. "But this time, it didn't make any noise."
Island Pond's island has been floating for as long as anyone can remember, buoyed by a mat of sphagnum moss and gases from decomposing plants. It is a curiosity and sometimes a nuisance for the 20 or so homes around the nine-acre pond.
Sometimes it boings mischievously around as if the pond were a pinball machine, sailing, for example, into Richard and Beverly Vears's backyard just hours after they moved in. That gave a neighbor a perfect welcome gag: telling the Vearses he was a tax collector who would charge them for the extra property.
Locals, including city officials and the pond's owner, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, which runs the adjacent Cathedral High School, say the wandering island is a rarity that must not be tethered, altered or otherwise brought to heel.
"There's only two in North America," said Stan Tenerowicz, environmental affairs administrator of the Springfield Conservation Commission. He said that 12 years ago, Cathedral High tied the island to shore to spare homeowners an unwelcome floating visitor, but the conservation commission ordered it unchained.
"Tethering it would be a type of alteration of a wetlands system," Mr. Tenerowicz said. "And this is a pretty unique natural resource."
It turns out, however, that the claim of "two in North America" is apocryphal, according to experts on floating islands.
Such islands appear across the country and around the world - familiar enough that Minnesota issues removal permits to homeowners, and prevalent enough in some lakes in Florida that they are chopped up or pulverized by large machines with sharp blades.
"People who live near a floating island always claim that it is the only one," said Chet Van Duzer, author of "Floating Islands: A Global Bibliography."
Mr. Van Duzer estimates that there are dozens of floating islands, sometimes called floating bogs, in several states including California, Indiana, Maine and Ohio. Many others once floated but have since been destroyed or become land-locked, said Mr. Van Duzer, including ones on Lake Ontario in New York, Bolton Lake in Connecticut and Kettle Moraine Lake in Wisconsin.
"Globally, they're not rare, and in this country they're not rare," said Stuart E. G. Findlay, a senior scientist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.
The islands usually form in wetlands, where plants take root in peaty soil or sphagnum moss in a shallow lake or riverbed, said Dave Walker, a senior project manager with the St. Johns River Water Management District in Florida, where, he said, "you can get acres and acres of floating islands on a lake."
When the plants decompose, they release gases that can create buoyancy, he said. And if there is a surge in the water level, from a flood or hurricane for instance, the peaty mat can break away from the bottom and float. Mr. Walker said some islands could even be precipitated by "a large alligator burrowing" on a lake bottom.
The islands, which can be as big as an acre and six inches to six feet thick, are rich environments for wildlife, allowing small creatures to outfloat predators. Many of the islands sprout trees, which act as sails; the 20-foot birches, alders and pines on the Island Pond island can ferry it across the entire pond in as little as 20 minutes, residents say.
In some parts of the world, like Loktak Lake in India and Lake Kyoga in Uganda, people live or fish on floating islands, Mr. Van Duzer said.
In Springfield, few people seem to venture onto the Island Pond island; some residents say they worry about falling through its spongy surface. But it teems with birds and amphibians, and there is even rumored to be a turtle the size of a bear, nicknamed Big Ben, that ostensibly feasts on ducks, geese and anything else it can snap up.
The island is kleptomaniacal, scooping up baseballs and tennis balls from the high school on its banks, and it gives safe harbor to some marijuana plants that have blossomed into a sizable patch.
Some experts believe that floating islands are becoming more common or lasting longer in some places, especially where human encroachment has created reservoirs or where fertilizer use has made certain plants grow faster.
Others, like Wayne Mueller, an aquatic plant management specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said that so many more people lived around lakes these days that floating islands previously unnoticed were being spotted.
While the islands can be pretty, "they are not benign," Mr. Walker said. "They can crash into a dock, they can block a canal entrance, they can uproot a lot of vegetation."
In Minnesota, Mr. Mueller said, islands can become "aquatic footballs - people push it off their property and it becomes attached to another person's property."
State officials will sometimes "stake down" a floating island with long pieces of wood, "pinning it to the bottom," Mr. Mueller said. Homeowners in Minnesota wanting to get rid of an island cannot use machines, he said, so they often spend hours using ice saws, axes or manure hooks to cut it up, then carting the soggy pieces away.
In Florida, officials have tried pushing the islands with boats, roping them into corners and blocking their paths with wood pilings.
And there is what might be called extreme island annihilation, done by the likes of a Florida company called Texas Aquatic Harvesting.
Using 90-foot boats with large blades, the company carves up islands that "average the size of Yankee Stadium," said Mike Hulon, a project manager. He also uses boats that he calls "cookie cutters," which act like Cuisinarts on an island, "turning it into puree."
In Lake Jackson, he said, "those islands were full of marsh rats and rabbits," and once, when the cookie cutter got going, "the alligators were in a feeding frenzy - they would have three or four rats and rabbits in their mouths at one time."
Told about the kid-glove approach of the Island Pond denizens in Massachusetts, Mr. Hulon practically sneered. "Bunny huggers," he said.
But many Island Pond residents feel affection for their itinerant island. Dan Blais tried to plant tomatoes on it and named a pair of geese who return to it each year Hansel and Gretel.
"It's like walking on a waterbed," said Mr. Blais. "I love to see it moving around."
Two weeks after the island plopped onto Mr. Renna's yard, Cathedral High School agreed to tow it to freedom, hoping to raise charitable donations to recoup the cost of $5,500. It commissioned CJ's Towing Unlimited, which towed the island in 2001, an undertaking that lasted 14 hours. This time, the process took five hours. CJ's used a truck that could pull 45 tons, two winches, a speedboat to stretch cable to the island, 55-gallon barrels to buoy the cable above the water and a team of burly men to attach the cable to trees on the island.
With Craig Morel, CJ's owner, directing them through two-way radios, the crew members freed the island in half an hour, and it floated to the other side of the pond. There, it was temporarily tied to a stand of swamp maples, to be freed after officials lowered the water level in the storm-swollen pond.
"It'll probably go back to somebody else's property," said John Miller, principal of Cathedral High. "Ultimately, it's going to float. It's a floating island. We don't want to violate its natural state. There's only two of them in North America."
On the riots in France
France Has an Underclass, but Its Roots Are Still Shallow
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS — Just two months ago, the French watched in horrified fascination at the anarchy of New Orleans, where members of America's underclass were seen looting stores and defying the police in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Last week, as rioters torched cars and trashed businesses in the immigrant-concentrated suburbs of Paris, the images of wild gangs of young men silhouetted against the yellow flames of burning cars came as an unwelcome reminder for France that it has its own growing underclass.
The coincidence of timing can be revealing - and deceptive.
The corrosive gap between America's whites and its racial minorities, especially African-Americans, is the product of centuries: slavery, followed by cycles of poverty and racial exclusion that denied generation after generation the best the United States could offer. France, on the other hand, is only beginning to struggle with a much newer variant of the same problem: the fury of Muslims of North African descent who have found themselves caught for three generations in a trap of ethnic and religious discrimination.
Even so, France is still low on the curve toward developing an entrenched, structural underclass - one that could breed extremism and lasting social problems.
So far, while hundreds of cars and buses have been burned and dozens of businesses destroyed in violence that has spread to a dozen towns, most rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news than making a coherent political statement.
"It's a game of cowboys and Indians," said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam. He is usually keen to warn Europeans of the potential danger posed by Islamists living among them. But in this case, he said, the danger is a long-range one. So far, he said, the attacks on the police and the torching of cars has less the character of a religious war than of "a local sport, a rite of passage."
The violence, on the other hand, reflects something that any American who lived through the urban upheavals of the 1960's, or the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, might recognize: a dangerous degree of isolation felt by a growing segment of its population, especially its young.
Although many Americans feel that their country still has a lot of work to do to close the gap between blacks and whites, the social protests and urban upheavals of the 1960's produced a stream of measures intended to increase political and economic opportunities rapidly for members of minority groups, and to stress the value of diversity to a democracy. By contrast, the French model has so far relied largely on expensive measures to keep poor Muslims fed, housed and educated, but has not effectively addressed the social or political isolation they feel from job and housing discrimination, and has actually limited their ability to define themselves as a political interest group. Affirmative action, a cornerstone of the American approach, has been a taboo here.
Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and mayor of Évry, a troubled suburb south of Paris that has seen its share of violence in the past few days, put it this way: "We've combined the failure of our integration model with the worst effects of ghettoization, without a social ladder for people to climb."
"In the U.S. and Britain, the communities help create opportunities for advancement," he continued. But in France "the state and the politicians have left the playing field open for a political-religious response - that's undeniable."
Still, because France's difficulties are relatively recent, it may have a chance to escape the depth of the American problems.
For one thing, the physical conditions in these neighborhoods have not begun to rival poor urban areas in the United States. Even in the worst government housing developments, green lawns and neat flower beds break the monotony of the gray concrete.
There are more than 700 such neighborhoods in the country, housing nearly five million people or about 8 percent of the population.
The despair in these housing projects (called cités here) has been mitigated by better schools than those that serve poor, minority districts in the United States (education is financed nationally in France, rather than through local tax rolls) and by extensive welfare programs. Even when employed, a family of four living in a government-subsidized apartment typically pays only a few hundred dollars a month in rent and can receive more than $1,200 a month in various subsidies. The unemployed receive more. For all, health care and education are free.
There is crime, but not nearly at the level of random violence feared in poor neighborhoods in American cities. Guns are tightly controlled and are still relatively rare. When a teenager was killed in a drive-by shooting in a Paris suburb this year, it made national headlines. The family unit among immigrants is still strong, as are ties to their homelands.
But that tight social fabric is fraying as the second and now third generations of French-born immigrants come of age. On two levels, many young immigrants find themselves questioning where they really belong. They have weaker ties than their parents did to their ancestral countries, but they are also discovering that, contrary to what they have been taught in school, they are not fully French.
That is one foundation of the fear among some experts that a structural underclass is emerging. Already, French-Arabs and French-Africans make up the majority of inmates in France's prisons, just as minorities make up a vastly disproportionate part of the American prison population.
France's definition of citizenship also presents problems. While the United States stresses pluralism, France continues to discourage anything that could carve up the French body politic along ethnic lines; the word "communautarisme," which roughly translates as ghettoization, is known to all French as a destructive force that afflicts, most notably, the United States.
It was only in 2003 that the French government encouraged the formation of an umbrella Islamic organization that could represent French Muslims in a dialogue with the state. The overall policy has only increased Muslim resentments by banning any form of affirmative action and by suppressing cultural expression in measures like forbidding Muslim girls to wear veils in school.
As in the United States, most experts agree that in the long run, full employment would be the best way to solve the problems and accelerate integration. Here, the comparison between the history of American minority groups and those in France seems particularly close. The jobless rate among French-Arabs and French-Africans is as high as 30 percent in some neighborhoods, triple the national average. French-Arabs regularly claim that when identical résumés are submitted to an employer with an Arab name on one and a French name on another, the résumé with the French name will get the priority.
That much, at least, may be changing. In March, President Jacques Chirac appointed the chairman of the automaker Renault, Louis Schweitzer, to head a council created to fight job and housing discrimination. The country is also engaged in a debate over whether to bend its laws to allow affirmative action in the job market.
"The picture of France as a country that doesn't want to recognize diversity - that's partially true," said Patrick Weil, an expert on immigration and integration based in Paris for the German Marshall Fund. "But there's a debate now about what steps should be taken to change that."
