THIS SHOULD NEVER AND EVER BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN IN KENYA!

At the bay at Meru Prison, Francis Ndonga, a tuberculosis patient, heaves himself up to his feet, careful not to step on fellow patients jam-packed in the small room.
Inmates at the Meru Prison (above and below), which was built to accommodate 350 but now has more than 1,450 prisoners.
Beside him, inmates suffering from various diseases squeeze against each other on the bare floor. Some are half-naked, their withered bodies further weakened by sickness gleaming with sweat.
The air is intolerably humid. A sharp, rancid stench hangs within, a product of human waste, sweat and filth. Not even the open windows allow in enough fresh air, and the 76 patients are struggling for breath.
"You come to this place, you want to die," said Ndonga, pausing to allow a flurry of coughs from the prisoners to calm. "This is where they bring you when you are sick, but it is a place where you come to die."
Sweat droplets dot Ndonga’s aging face as well as those of other prisoners. They say that since last December, 10 inmates have died of what they suspected to be tuberculosis.
Better attention and medication
When the coughing dies down, a hushed silence engulfs the room. Scraggy-haired prisoners stare with sad, pleading eyes.
"Every week, you hear someone has died," says Esther Waikuru, one of three paralegal officers assisting inmates to have their pending court cases speeded up.
"This is suffering like you can never imagine."
The patients suffer from a catalogue of diseases: some have
TB and HIV, which causes Aids, while others suffer from typhoid, pneumonia, skin conditions and injuries.
The room should hold no more than 10 patients but sometimes, the number rises to as many as 90.
Although many patients defy death, none knows how much longer they can last.
"When we are crowded like this, we can’t get well. Instead, we catch more diseases," Ndonga said.
Ailing prisoners are taken to the sick bay ostensibly to get better attention and medication. But they are shocked to find only misery and vermin, huge gobs of disease.
At least 40 of the prisoners in the sickbay are TB and HIV patients, says the officer in charge of the prison, Henry Kisingu. But few are on treatment and have not been put on antiretroviral drugs, which prolong life for HIV patients.
Dehumanising conditions
Despite their weakened bodies, which require good food, their daily meal is ugali and beans, often not well cooked. Sometimes, the sick ones are given rice.
Although patients with infectious diseases should be isolated from others, this has not been the case.
The sick bay is just one of the wards where inmates, most of them in remand, live in dehumanising conditions in the Meru Prison. The congestion is mainly caused by delays in the hearing of their cases.
As a result, the jail, built in 1962 to hold about 350 prisoners, is congested with more than 1,450.
The jail is a hallmark of neglect and abuse. Child offenders mingle with suspected murderers, violent robbers and rapists. Hardcore convicts criminals share halls with remandees accused of misdemeanours.
In the women’s section, infants accompanying their mothers sleep in the same cells with mentally unsound murder suspects.
With their trials still pending, the remand inmates are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. But the appalling conditions they live in appear to have condemned them to death already.
Patients often get re-infection
Kisingu says conditions in the jail are no fault of his and is beyond what the administration can do. He blames it on neglect of Kenya’s prisons over the years and says only expansion could solve the problem.
"We would like to hold TB patients separately from the others, but we have no space for that. Those who are nearly healed often get re-infected because they continue to stay together with the sick ones," said Kisingu.
"Because of overcrowding, we’ve not been able to give them the care that they deserve. The environment does not help them to get healed, " he said.
The 76 patients share eight mattresses, which they spread on the floor because the sickbay lacks beds.
There is more horror in this room, and across the jail. At one corner in the sickbay, a patient, deeply asleep, snores loudly beside a plastic bucket full of human waste. Another prisoner sits beside the bucket, his eyes wide open as if in a trance.
Patients say they use the bucket at night and empty it in the morning for use during the day. The room is crawling with vermin.
"Most times, there is no water and when we get it, it is never enough," another patient, Christopher Maore, amid coughs and sneezes.
No room to stretch legs out
Several prisoners, having stayed here for many years awaiting the conclusion of their cases, are dressed in worn-out clothes.
In Ward Four, John Ndichu and 235 others spend most of the day and night squatting. This is because if they sit, they would have to stretch their legs and there is no space for that.
Ndichu, 20, has dry, cracked lips with blood caked on them. He is dressed only in shorts. What remains of his only shirt is in tatters and is wrapped around his head.
"I have lived like this since I came here five months ago," he said.
Too tired and deprived of sleep, several prisoners doze while standing against walls in the hall that is as congested as the sickbay. Some have swollen legs because of spending too much time on their feet.
In the ward, every inch of space is so valued that prisoners take turns to sleep in two toilets.
"In the evening, we choose who will sleep in the toilets and in the main hall," said Francis Ngunja, pointing at the wet and filthy toilets.
"This is where I slept last night," he said. The toilets were long blocked and do not flush.
Every evening, inmates dry up the floor of the toilets and spread blankets to sleep on. The toilets take about 10 people.
Not that the blankets are worth the name. They are torn and brown with dirt. During the day, they hang from a wire fastened on the window. In a cell next to the toilet, prisoners can hardly sleep because water leaks in through the wall.


Venting out frustration through graffiti
Waikuru, the paralegal officer with the Legal Resources Foundation, says brawls are common in the wards at night.
"Some sleep while standing and fall on their colleagues," said Waikuru. "When that happens, fighting erupts."
With no signs of help, some prisoners only hope for divine intervention. Graffiti on walls reveal their frustration and yearning for better conditions — not from prison authorities but from God.
"Nothing but prayer," reads graffiti on the wall. "Keep praying, my brother." Another graffiti captures the tragedy of prison: "Never die alone."
Indeed, when a prisoner dies, he never dies alone. Inside a tiny cell where five prisoners died last year after they were allegedly beaten by warders, the situation remains the same as the time they died.
Prison authorities say the inmates died from suffocation due to congestion. New prisoners have taken up the space left by their dead colleagues in the six by seven feet cell, now housing eight prisoners.
"We fear something bad will happen," says an inmate in the cell, Muriithi Nkarisia. He looks healthy, but two of his cellmates have contracted tuberculosis. He says it is only a matter of time before he too comes down with it.
His colleagues are unlikely to die alone.







Social Justice is a concept that has fascinated philosophers ever since Plato rebuked the young Sophist, Thrasymachus, for asserting that justice was whatever the strongest decided it would be. In The Republic, Plato formalized the argument that an ideal state would rest on four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.

Social Justice is distinct from justice as applied in the law — state-administered systems which label behavior as unacceptable, enforce a formal mechanism of control, and may produce results that do not match the philosophical definitions of social justice — and from more informal concepts of justice embedded in systems of public policy and morality, which differ among cultures and therefore lack universality. Social justice is also used to refer to the overall fairness of a society in its divisions and distributions of rewards and burdens and, as such, the phrase has been adopted by political parties with a redistributive agenda.