MONROVIA, 24 September 2005 — Every night, Benu Passaway has to decide whether to tie her blanket across the bars of her cell to keep out the rain or huddle under it on the thin foam mattress she shares with three other women.
Four-months pregnant, the 38-year-old is locked up in the Central Prison of Liberia’s capital Monrovia awaiting trial on charges not of murder or theft, but of defaulting on a loan. “I’m cold all the time,” she said. “We need clothes, blankets, soap, anything please.”
Fourteen years of civil war have reduced Liberia’s justice system to a shambles of overflowing prisons and endless waits for trial that point to a virtual collapse in the state’s ability to enforce law and order. But as candidates gear up for presidential and parliamentary elections on Oct. 11 — the centerpiece of a peace deal signed by warring factions in 2003 — promises of judicial reform have largely been absent from campaign speeches.
With most Liberians struggling to survive on less than a dollar a day and with no access to electricity or running water, reconstruction is a bigger priority than prisoners’ rights. Whoever wins the polls will nevertheless have to tackle judicial reform to impose authority in the West African country. They will face a huge task.
Prisons are bursting with inmates but inefficient court bureaucracy prevents most from ever facing trial: only 15 of the 248 people in the Central Prison have been sentenced and many go for months without seeing a lawyer or entering a courtroom.
In the men’s quarter at Central Prison, 12 prisoners are crammed into one cell barely 3 meters (9 feet) square, with only a few straw mats to sleep on and one meal of buckwheat and brackish water a day. If they are lucky, inmates are held near a large, barred window, which lets in torrents of water during the rainy season. If they are unlucky, a tiny strip along the very top of the cell, too high to see over, is the only source of light.
Everywhere, hands scarred by infectious skin diseases reach between the bars, plucking at visitors’ clothing and brandishing scraps of paper bearing the names of prisoners who have been unable to tell friends or family where they are. “I been here nine months, no trial, they say I killed someone but I got no finance for lawyer,” shouts Ambrose Toe, 22. Most of the men held here are charged with serious crimes - rape, robbery and murder - but mixed among them are petty thieves, debt defaulters, and perhaps victims of circumstance. “I don’t even know why I here, but I been here eight months without trial,” insists Joe Tragnga.