One of first prisons I slept in was in Kigali, Rwanda. It had been designed for 2,500 inmates, but when I visited it in 2001, more than 6,400 lived there. The men slept on bunk beds stacked so closely you couldn’t even sit up. Instead of toilets, the prisoners used a 7m-long wooden box on which they sat side by side. In the night, I woke up because I felt something heavy running over my body. It was a rat as big as a cat.
Today, I have visited more than 140 prisons and slept in about half of them. It’s not that I am a serial criminal – I do this to shed light on the lives of prisoners around the world.
I got interested in prisons when I was a development worker in Chile in the 1980s. I took care of glue-sniffing street kids. Because a lot of them ended up behind bars, I started to work inside prisons. Before I went back home to Belgium, I wanted to find out how it felt to spend a night in there. I asked the warden, who told me that he could only confine me if I committed a crime. I asked: “What crime?” And he said: “You could steal a chicken.” “What sentence would I get for that?” I asked. He answered: “Five years.”
I declined. But I decided to undertake a tour of the world’s prisons. I wrote to embassies, prison wardens and aid organisations. I exercised at the gym, ate old bread and slept on concrete floors to get accustomed to prison life. And yet when I made the trip, the conditions were much worse than I had ever imagined. I ate rotten beans, drank dirty water and got infected with scabies. In Laos, a prison officer beat me up. In Rwanda, I was attacked by an inmate. In Guatemala, I stayed in a gang-controlled prison. The wardens didn’t dare to go in. One day, I saw a man who hadn’t paid his debts to the gang thrown against an electric fence. He died instantly.
A country is only as humane as its prison system. It is not always obvious which country treats its inmates well. Some democracies are worse than dictatorships. One of the worst prisons I encountered was in Tokyo. The floors and cells were very clean, but the detainees were more isolated than anywhere else. They had to obey an endless list of rules. No one was allowed to look in the eyes of a corrections officer. The only time detainees were allowed to talk was the hour after dinner. They were forced to sleep in certain positions. To some extent, I would prefer to stay in an overcrowded prison in Rwanda than endure that.
Despite the atrocities, my work has been rewarding and made me a happier person. The prisoners helped me to focus on what’s important in a life. Despite all their suffering, I still found a lot of solidarity among detainees. When I got attacked in Rwanda, other inmates saved me. They shared food and water with each other; if they hadn’t, some would have died.
Four years ago, I went to a prison in Congo and stayed for four weeks. It was so dirty and food was so scarce that two inmates every week died. When I left, the warden burst into tears and asked me for help. I decided to found a charity for prisoners around the world. With other activists, we collected about $240,000 – enough money to replace the old Congo prison with a better one.
The more prisons I see, the more I ask myself if it is really necessary to incarcerate people. I think the best way to avoid crime is to reintegrate offenders into society. When I stayed in another prison in Congo, an 86-year-old inmate told me that before the Europeans came, a criminal had to stay under a mango tree to be punished. The villagers would gather round and everyone would say something positive about him and he would start to feel guilty and repent.
But I don’t want to oversimplify. In other cases, criminals were wrapped in banana leaves and set on fire.
