Prisons - new material (50)
01 March 2002
"Turkish jails, hunger strikes and the European drive for prison reform", Penny Green. Punishment and society, vol 4 no 1, January 2002, pp.97-101.
This piece criticises the role of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (CPT) in promoting the F-type isolation cell regime. The CPT fails to acknowledge "the politicised nature of the Turkish prison population". Green says that there seems to be a "penological tenet, held by the moral custodians of penal policy in Europe that single cell prison accommodation is a mark of a civilised society representing a significant evolutionary development from the dormitory style accommodation". By way of contrast, she notes that "imprisonment in Turkey may be less of a de-humanising experience than incarceration in many western European establishments", because the dormitory system facilitates communication and solidarity between prisoners. It also offers protection against arbitrary violence by prison guards or security forces. The CPT's approach leads it to "focus on reforms to existing F-type prisons", while ignoring opposition to single cell prisons by prisoners. This approach "accords" with the Turkish state's desire to isolate prisoners and stop them from organising. Protests over single cell prisons for political prisoners continued through the 1990's, with 12 political prisoners dying on hunger strike in 1996, and 11 killed in a raid by security forces to break up protests in Uluncanlar Central prison in Ankara in 1999. Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk said in December 2000 that no transfers would take place until three measures were in place, including amendments to relax Article 16 of the 1991 Turkish Anti-Terrorism Law, which "provides for a regime of intense isolation", with "no open visits" and "communication with other convicts ... prevented". On 19 December [year], a raid by security forces on twenty prisons in which two gendarmes and thirty prisoners were killed, led to the forcible transfer of over 1,000 prisoners to three of the four F-type prisons which are presently operating (Edirne, Kandira, Sincan and Tekirdag). In April 2001 prison monitoring boards were established, sentence execution judges were created, and amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Law provided for the introduction of rehabilitation and educational programmes and activities for prisoners. Inmates could attend these depending on the offences they had committed and behaviour in prison, "to the extent that this does not pose a security threat".s