Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican government is busy working to mobilize financial resources to build penitentiaries in every district as a means to ease overcrowding.
Radio Mozambique quotes Justice Minister Helena Kida as saying that the problem of overcrowding in the prison system will only be resolved with the construction of more penitentiaries.
That’s the reason the government is bent on building at least one prison in every district, of the 161 existing in Mozambique.
The country has an installed capacity to accommodate only eight thousand prisoners.
This will also allow inmates to serve their sentences locally.
“We have a problem of overcrowding because most penitentiaries were built many years ago, so we took the initiative to build, in a first phase, penitentiaries in the districts covered by the construction of a new court building”, she explained.
The minister acknowledged that there are still several challenges facing the prison system, due to continuous growth of the number of inmates.
“Therefore, this will allow decongestion of the provincial level courts, which will be able to send the prisoners that should be tried in these district courts to be there and serve their sentences there.
This is the challenge,” she said.
Recent statistics show that there are over 15,000 inmates in the prison system, most of them with pre-trial detention periods expired.
In addition, a considerable number are still in detention though they are eligible for parole
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