The General Directorate of Prison has allowed its inmates to interact online with their relatives and other members of the society. The directorate arranged a blog like facility on its website (http://www.pgd.gov.sa/culture/stories/pages) for the prisoners to share their experiences, feelings and emotions with the outside world, especially with their kith and kin.
Most of the messages, 54 in total, written by inmates carry their apologies to their family members. Prisoners, including women, share the circumstances that led to their imprisonment. Some of them recount their harrowing experience after becoming drug addicts and that ended them up behind bars, Al-Watan local daily reported.
The website contains a section under the title “Disclosures of prisoners.” Among the most heart-rending disclosures placed on the site include a message from a mother to her six-year-old daughter on the occasion of Eid Al-Fitr. She apologizes the girl for not giving her a company and taking care of her on the occasion of the upcoming Eid celebration.
Another message begins with “Cries from the heart… and continued “Noise in the world of sorrow, a world that can not express what inside it… a wounded world crying, screaming and crying in order to survive... Survival without injury, survival without blood, without tears, but here there is no way other than stay together with the grief and pain...
Message of another woman prisoner is titled “Areej: victim of family dispute.” She says in the message that though her act of murder shook the nation, she is merely a victim of domestic violence, and that her crime was part of the crimes committed by parents to their children who have neither any voice to resist nor any tricks to defend themselves.
Another message titled “30 years in the world of addiction” recounts the bitter experience of a man who is in a prison in Abu Areesh. He expressed deep sorrow over this predicament, especially losing the chance to bid farewell to mother when she breathed her last after his imprisonment.
In her message titled “the ship did not sail,” a woman prisoner said that separation of parents was the first step that led her eventually to inside prison.
The site contains details of the reform program and cultural activities being conducted for inmates inside prisons across the Kingdom. So far, a total of 68307 prisoners have been benefited from the program.
