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Uganda Prison System
During colonial times, the principal penal facility was
Luzira Prison near Kampala, although jails were common in
larger
towns. Prisoners in Luzira were separated according to
categories
such as long-term convicts, "recidivists," women,
children,
Asians, and Europeans. Cells for specific punishments and
death
row were also separate from the regular prison population,
and
the facility had several workshops and a hospital. The
government
also maintained smaller prisons for local convicts in
Buganda,
Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole. Terms of less than six months
were
generally served in smaller jails located in each
district.
In 1964 the Prison Service operated thirty prisons,
many of
which were actually industrial or agricultural facilities,
intended to rehabilitate prisoners. By mid-1968, the
Prison
Service had a force of about 3,000 under the command of
the
commissioner of prisons.
During the 1970s, civilian and military prison
conditions
deteriorated, and prisoner abuse became common. At
Makindye and
Mutukula military prisons outside Kampala, for example,
Langi and
Acholi soldiers suspected of disloyalty to the regime were
murdered. The PSU killed several thousand political
opponents at
the Uganda Police College at Naguru. At the SRB's Nakasero
headquarters, some prisoners claimed they had survived
through
cannibalism.
Prison conditions in the early 1980s were also dismal.
According to Amnesty International, the Obote regime
imprisoned
civilians without charge or for political crimes. Many
were held
in police stations, military barracks, and NSA detention
centers.
Almost all penal facilities were overcrowded, sometimes
housing
ten times the number of inmates intended. Other reports,
however,
indicated that members of the Uganda Prison Service
sometimes
treated inmates relatively humanely, allowing them to
read,
exercise, and attend religious services.
When Museveni seized power, he promised to improve the
country's prison system, but this proved to be a difficult
task,
in part because so many people were arrested. In late
1986, the
Uganda Human Rights Activists (UHRA) charged that the
authorities
had imprisoned as many as 10,000 people at the Murchison
Bay
Prison in western Uganda, a facility with an 800-inmate
capacity.
Moreover, the UHRA and Amnesty International claimed that
prisoners lived in abominable conditions, which caused a
number
of deaths from disease.
In 1987 Museveni allowed the ICRC to survey conditions
in
Uganda's civil prisons. Although some reports suggested
that
prison conditions improved as a result, there had in fact
been
little change. In late 1990, for example, Chief Justice
Samuel
Wako Wambuzi condemned overcrowding in Masaka Central
Prison.
According to his investigation, the prison contained 456
inmates
rather than the authorized 120 people. Similar conditions
existed
in most of Uganda's other prisons.
Data as of December 1990
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