Unless you’ve spent time in a padded room you should know Cape Town’s Pollsmoor prison has a reputation for being rough around the edges. The Numbers gang rules the roost and often their word is the law, fearful wardens turning a blind eye as hardened inmates dish out their own version of justice.

What you should also know is that the living conditions themselves pose serious health risks to inmates, so much so that two inmates recently died of a disease spread by rats.

Social justice lawyers recently challenged these horrid living conditions in the Cape Town High Court, the affidavits from inmates painting a clear picture of the squalor inside the walls. Below are some of those accounts courtesy of the Mail & Guardian:

[There are] filthy, overcrowded cells with little ventilation, emaciated inmates and insufficient medical supplies. [Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron] wrote about inmates with festering wounds and boils who had not seen a doctor. The hospital unit has one doctor and a few nurses to attend to about 4 000 inmates.

An official working at the prison, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said four mentally ill inmates told they were being raped after lockdown, when most staff go home. “But the warders say: ‘This is what happens in prison.’?”…

Hip-hop artist Bonzaya’s brief stay at Pollsmoor turned into a death sentence. In August last year, he was arrested in Observatory, allegedly with a bag of dagga.

Ra-Mava Ntontela, Bonzaya’s friend and DJ, said: “He was strong, ate healthily, didn’t drink much. He didn’t have money on him for bail, so they brought him to Pollsmoor.”

After eight days, when friends bailed him out, Bonzaya (27) was a different man. “I was shocked when I saw him. He was coughing and had lost a lot of weight,” says Ntontela.

When he went to his family home in September, his mother took him to a clinic, where he tested positive for TB. His condition deteriorated and he died of kidney failure…

Another official at the prison, who works in the remand section and asked not to be identified, told of an inmate who was rushed to hospital in July with imminent heart failure as a result of an untreated scabies infection. The inmate, who was in Pollsmoor because he couldn’t afford his R500 bail, nearly died.

It should also be noted that many of the inmates who suffer through the prison’s fetid conditions have yet to appear in court, their only crime as such being that they were unable to afford the bail set. As many as half the inmates are eventually acquitted or released due to lack of evidence, although first they must endure what can only be described as a hellish stay at Pollsmoor.

It may be rather dated and hammed up for the cameras but Ross Kemp’s The Numbers Gang gives some insight into how things are run when the wardens look away. If ever you needed a reminder to stick on the right side of the law…

[source:m&g]