Africa-Press – Cape verde. The facilities at the Fogo Regional Prison, whose first phase of rehabilitation and expansion works were inaugurated in September 2022, are overcrowded and with inmates sleeping on the floor and without the minimum conditions.
The situation was reported by relatives of some inmates who asked not to be identified following the visit to their relatives who are in that space.
The implementation of the works in the first phase, which cost around 86 thousand contos, aimed to improve the prison system and make this establishment safer, respectful of human rights and sustainable, but according to inmates’ families, this prison establishment is “overcrowded with inmates lying down on the floor and without mattresses”, currently numbering more than 150 inmates.
There are many inmates in pre-trial detention awaiting trial, but due to lack of space they are all mixed up and other convicts with a longer sentence who should serve their sentence in the São Martinho Central Prison.
The same source indicated that based on information obtained from inmates, the cafeteria itself is being used and turned into cells with dozens of inmates sleeping on the floor with just a sheet due to lack of mattresses, adding that they also complain about food.
The Fogo Regional Prison serves the islands of Fogo and Brava and only last week more than a dozen inmates were admitted to this prison in the pre-trial detention system, thus increasing the prison population and overflowing the prison’s capacity.
Inforpress contacted the director of the Fogo Regional Prison, Amílcar Lopes Cabral, to carry out the adversarial process and confirm or not the complaint from the inmates’ family members, but he referred it to the General Directorate of Penitentiary Services and Social Reinsertion in the City of Praia and attempts to make telephone contact were unsuccessful.
It is recalled that in the first phase of rehabilitation and expansion, works were carried out on the rehabilitation of female cells so that this prison establishment that serves the islands of Fogo and Brava can once again receive inmates, rehabilitation and vertical expansion of the male cells, construction of kitchen and dining room with space for men and women, rehabilitation of the administrative part.
The sports sign and the establishment’s fence were not built in the first phase and are pending for the second phase.
Regulatory decree number 6 of 2017, of 10 November, established that inmates with sentences of up to eight years can serve them in regional prisons, such as the Fogo Regional Prison, and with the works introduced, in addition to allowing the reopening of a women’s wing should increase capacity to accommodate more than twice as many inmates as it had by September 2022, when the first phase was inaugurated.
Another advantage of the rehabilitation and expansion of the Fogo Regional Prison, indicated at the time of the inauguration by the Minister of Justice, Joana Rosa, is that it will allow the Praia Central Prison to be decongested, humanizing the prison and having greater capacity for social reintegration of inmates, improvements that inmates are not yet feeling, according to family members.
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