Abdul Hayi Moomen in Prison: A horrible experience

The writer: Abdul Hayi-Moomen

Until Friday 3^rd July 2015, the nearest I had ever come to a prison was when I became addicted to the TV series Prison Break. In the series, the Prison from which the protagonist was plotting to escape was actually equipped with television sets, workout rooms, ping-pong tables, and hearty servings of food. As I watched one of the episodes of Prison Break with an acquaintance of mine whose ultimate dream was to travel abroad, he remarked, “I’d choose prison life over this miserable life I am living now.”

I got my first reality check when I watched two documentaries produced by GBC’s Ibrahim Kwarteng and Multimedia’s Seth Kwame Boateng Boateng. While the prison in Prison Break was manufactured in Holywood, the prisons as presented in the documentaries represented the reality of the state of Ghanaian Prisons – third world prisons – a complete departure from the “comfort” in Prison Break. Even then, after watching, I only sympathized with the Prisoners and moved on with my life.

Seth Kwame Boateng of Joy FM’s documentary led to the release of over 100 remand prisoners

However, when I embarked on a trip to the Nsawam Prisons, not as a convict but as a “working journalist”, I was rudely awoken to the crude reality of crime, of guilt, of innocence, of repentance, of regret, and of despair, right down to total indifference on the part of some of the inmates. I saw hell on earth!

Of course, there are those who say criminals must suffer for inflicting pain on others. I share this opinion too. However, after watching an interview on GBC24 during which a prisoner at the Ankarful Prison confessed of having lied in order to get another man to join him in jail, I became aware that not everybody languishing in jail is indeed a criminal.

Some people have found themselves there simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. The case of Francis Agyare who was unlawfully detained in prison for 14years readily comes to mind. Just a few days ago, a colleague journalist who has also spent about four months in jail was released because it was later found that the allegations leveled against him could not be substantiated.

Drawing from these examples, what it means is that if one is set up, or finds himself at the wrong place and at the wrong time, one could easily find one’s self in jail. It could be you!

I am no lawyer and I do not pretend to know anything about law. I am just a mere journalist with a pen and paper and sometimes a microphone and camera as my only tools. But now I do know that it is not impossible that as at the time I visited the Nsawam Prisons, some of the inmates, many of whom were on remand, could actually be innocent people – people who are there because police officers may have been transferred or some documents may have been lost, or someone somewhere is just being lazy. Some of them may be suffering because of another person’s ineptitude.

My experience inside prison walls wasn’t particularly exciting. For a prison with a capacity to hold just about 700 prisoners to accommodate about 3500 appears almost unthinkable. But that is the reality. As I entered what most people refer to as the “condemned cells”, but which Prisons officials prefer to call “Special Cells”, and as the extreme heat greeted me at the entrance to the cells, I thought to myself “this must be the most infernal place on earth”

Crammed into a thick walled space less than half the size of a football pitch, hundreds of men are detained in conditions which, were they cattle in Europe, would have animal rights activists up in arms.

Such is the overcrowding in Nsawam that each Prisoner has only less than half a square foot of space to sleep on.

As I approached the cell for remand prisoners, the story was not any different. The heaving sea of faces and the stench of semi-naked bodies stopped me in my tracks as I attempted to go beyond the iron gate to engage some of them in a conversation. They spoke of how they each have to contribute to flushing the only toilet in the cell by urinating into a bucket and using the urine to flush the toilet.

With a prison population several times more than the facility is capable of accommodating, one can only hope that the “Justice for All Programme” is fast tracked in order to get the innocent ones out.

Prisoners are packed in prison cells

So pervasive can be our sense of loss after an armed robbery attack, the murder of a loved one, being defrauded, etc, similarly, so overwhelming can our desire for retribution be that we may want to say to the criminals “go to hell”, and rightly so. But remember, it could be YOU!

Inhumane penal conditions and possible miscarriages of justice impinge greatly on the national consciousness.

This is why I support the “Effiase” project which has been initiated by the Ghana Prisons Service Council. Do you?

The writer is a journalist with GTV