Africa-Press – Uganda. Mr Joseph Kabuleta, the leader of National Economic Empowerment Dialogue, one of the Opposition political parties, has called for reforms within the prison system saying a high percentage of prisoners are given lengthy jail terms for petty crimes.
“There is an economic civil war between the rich and the poor in this country. The biggest crime that the people in Luzira committed is being poor. For example, I met a guy who served two years for not wearing a mask. He was released shortly before I got there and people were narrating such stories to me,” Mr Kabuleta said yesterday.
He added: “Now they are on these hawkers whom Kampala Capital City Authority gets and some are there because they can’t pay the penalties. There is one I met who is making his third month because at the time of his arrest he couldn’t pay Shs50,000.”
Addressing the first press conference since his release, Mr Kabuleta, who was remanded to Luzira for close to three weeks on charges of promoting sectarianism, said some prisoners are serving sentences because they refused to surrender their pieces of land to high-ranking officials.
“There is an old man I met there whose land they are trying to steal and he has been charged with trespass. If you accept to give away the land, the state then loses interest in your case and there is no evidence. The case then collapses. However, if you insist that you want your land, then you serve your time in prison,” he said.
Mr Kabuleta called upon authorities to review prisoner sentences so as to ensure people are not serving time they don’t deserve.
“We should have people in prison who deserve to be there, not people who are just accused of being poor. Hawkers just selling things on the street and just because they can’t pay simple fines, they end up serving years,” Mr Kabuleta said.
He added: “Let us not have people in prison because some top government officials want to steal their land. Let us have people who have actually committed crimes.”
According to the Uganda Prison Service statistical report, August 2022, the number of prisoners increased from 59,544 in January 2021 to 67,532 in January 2022 and to 70,535 prisoners in August 2022.
Efforts to get comment from the prison’s spokesperson, Mr Frank Baine, were futile since all our calls to his phone were unaswered by press time.
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