• by Rebecca Murray (zwedru, liberia)
• Wednesday, May 06, 2009
• Inter Press Service

The rain was falling hard in the early hours of April 17, when forty detainees kicked down the doors to their cells at the National Palace of Corrections, scaled the prison’s barbed wire fence and rear watchtower, and disappeared into the dark, sodden jungle.

'One of my officers said when it will rain heavy these guys will break jail. And that night it rained heavy. They started singing gospel songs and yelling and all that other stuff. That’s when they started popping doors,' says prison director Sam Tarley.

The Palace is Liberia’s maximum-security correction facility, built in a dense, humid forest outside the town of Zwedru in Grand Gedeh County. Close to the border with the Ivory Coast, it is over 300 kilometres along damaged, muddy roads from coastal Monrovia.

That night Tarley says only two of his corrections officers were on duty, since there was no transportation to bring staff to work, and that the armed police posted on watchtowers took shelter inside the jail from the rain. The Jordanian United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) peacekeepers monitoring the main gate in front blame the stormy night for missing the men slipping out the back.

But when the break was discovered at dawn, a massive manhunt was mounted. Security forces with dogs fanned across jungle, roads, rural farms and towns, recapturing 39 out of the 40 inmates - all pre-trial detainees bussed in from Monrovia - stumbling through unfamiliar terrain by the week’s end.

Back behind bars after four nerve-racking nights in the forest, Arthur Teglar, a slight 25-year-old charged with armed robbery, has a bandaged bloody head wound he says he got jumping the barbed-wire fence.

'We slept in the bush, went to someone’s farm who was cooking for something to eat, and in the night we started walking, but we didn’t know where we were going. We wanted to go home to Monrovia,' Teglar recalls.

Rehabilitated in 2008 to house convicted prisoners, only 33 out of the 174 inmates serving time at the 300-person capacity Palace of Corrections have been sentenced.

Currently two cellblocks are filled with pre-trial detainees brought from Monrovia, and those arrested during a riot in the town of Gbarnga. Charges in the Palace include rape, armed robbery and murder, as well as petty crime.

'There are a variety of things behind a break,' UNMIL’s Corrections Advisory Unit head, Marjo Callahan, explained to IPS after the riotous escape of over 170 prisoners from Monrovia’s Central Prison in broad daylight last December.

'They are hungry. And what they are saying is that they want access to justice. The staff is acting out because of salaries, and they are not coming to work and then you have crowd behaviour.'

There are currently over 1,600 inmates being held nationwide, scattered among Liberia’s 15 prisons. A revamped justice system is critical to Liberia’s reconstruction under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s administration. But a lack of funding and continuing corrupt practices impact the overloaded courts and prisons nationwide.

Overall, there are too few skilled and regularly paid staff, inadequate facilities and operating standards, and a majority of pre-trial detainees in prison.

Dixon Gblah, director of the reputed independent monitor, Liberia Prison Watch, explains that a shortage of defence lawyers is just one of the factors behind a burgeoning detainee population, starting with the shortage of defence lawyers. 'And a lot of magistrates have not practiced real law before. As a result, they don’t even know what constitutes the elements of crime,' he says.

'Most exceed the [pre-trial] terms without calling the case. And when somebody is sent to jail, they expect one of his relatives will come and give him money before they will be able to go forward with the case.

Gblah sighs. 'The Circuit Court is a court of record, and from there you can go to the Supreme Court. The Magisterial Court does not have the authority to prosecute an armed robbery - it is a capital crime. But because of ignorance, what they do is look at these cases.'

Soft-spoken Daniel Quansah is leader, called a ‘five-star general’, of the inmates at the Palace. Arrested on accusations of committing sodomy, the computer programmer from Monrovia refused to join in the prison break. He hopes good behaviour and his Monrovia-based defence lawyer will push his trial date forward. However, he hasn’t met his defence so far, and thinks communicating will be difficult.

After one month in detention last February, Quansah says he was loaded onto a bus with other cellmates at Monrovia’s Central Prison, and told they were going to court. 'I asked, ‘Why would you cuff our legs if we are going to the Temple of Justice just up the hill?’ The officers said, just sit patiently and comply, you are going to court. So I was surprised that when we arrived at the Temple of Justice, we just kept on going.'

'We then passed the Executive Mansion [next door] and they said the plan had changed. We were not going to court, we were going to Grand Gedeh County, to the Palace of Corrections.'

UNMIL has worked alongside Liberia’s corrections unit since 2004 to improve the jail system. 'You had prisoners being held at the Liberian National Police headquarters in absolutely deplorable conditions,' says UNMIL’s Callahan. 'There was a room there that maybe should hold ten, and they had up to 100 people in there, with no separation of women or kids. There was no water, no toilet - it was awful, absolutely deplorable.'

Conditions at the Palace are better than those in Monrovia’s prison, with three to a cell in renovated buildings, and a just-launched agricultural training program in the garden out back.

However, the inmates are fed only once daily, lack a medical clinic, and while fuel keeps the prison’s only vehicle running, director Tarley says there is little left to power the generators, which leaves the building mostly dark at night.

Understaffed and working 12-hour shifts, the supervising corrections officers are paid US$ 82 monthly salaries, over minimum wage, but with no benefits, and two guarding the women’s wing are volunteers. All rely on their cell phones to communicate.

The Ministry of Justice, with continued UNMIL support, is currently working on a plan for magistrates to visit prisons, and has opened a special court in Monrovia dedicated for sex crimes.

'We have three key challenges,' says Gblah from Prison Watch. 'One is how to ensure there is proper coordination between three branches of the criminal justice system: The police, the courts, and the prisons. Second, the community in Liberia does not trust the justice system, because they feel the court is corrupt and they will not have fair treatment. So they prefer to take the law into their own hands.'

'Finally, we need to control prisoners coming to jail repeatedly. There is a shortage of lawyers, so we need paralegals to investigate and work with the community to educate them about the prisoners, and prisoners demonstrate rehabilitation after their sentences. Then we can release them into the community, who will take it from there, to monitor their rehabilitation and give them some work to do. This will help reduce crime.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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