Lt Col. Rodento Tongun, spokesman of South Sudan’s national prisons service, says the detention facilities in the country are not built to accommodate the increasing numbers of inmates.
Speaking on Radio Miraya this morning Tongun said, “We in South Sudan here we don’t have prison, with the exception of Bor which was built by the Multi-Donor Trust Fund, the other prisons are just containments, they were just built to suit the colonial interests by then.”
“We just inherited those prisons and even the capacities of those prisons were very small. If you want to take Juba prison in the seat of the government, it was projected to be 400 but if you talk about today there are about 1,400 and something prisoners.”
He concluded, “The prison condition in this sense is very much deteriorating and it is not there.”
But the spokesman also spoke of efforts to improve services and training programmes for inmates. He said Yambio prison is making headway in providing inmates with basic skills in different technical fields to help prisoners start life after serving their sentences.
“Yambio really they are trying despite the fact that there some many challenges. They have got their own workshops, they have got tailoring center. Workshops of different skills; blacksmith, carpentry everything they are there and also agriculture.”
“They are even transferring prisoners from Juba here from Western Bahr Ghazal to Yambio. This small project is just a director’s initiative,” he said.
File photo: A prison in Raja County, South Sudan (Radio Tamazuj)