The Straits Times
Saturday, Jul 27, 2013
JAKARTA - Two recent prison breaks in Indonesia have cast a spotlight on the country's strained prison system, which observers have described as a "ticking time bomb".
The list of problems is long: Overcrowded jails, underpaid guards who are far outnumbered by inmates, and inhumane treatment. These factors, and a system where graft sees unequal treatment of inmates and rogue officers, provide fertile conditions for a riot.
Earlier this month, a power and water outage at Medan's Tanjung Gusta penitentiary saw inmates riot and set fire to part of the complex. Two guards and three inmates were killed and more than 200 escaped. Some 100 are still at large, including four terrorists.
Six days later on July 17, 12 inmates at a Batam detention centre overpowered two guards and broke a window to escape.
The Medan prison had 2½ times more inmates than its capacity of 1,056; the Batam prison held nearly double its capacity of 250.
"Prisons are overcrowded, squalid, and underfunded. It's no surprise that incidents like that in Tanjung Gusta and Batam happened," Mr Albert Hasibuan, a member of the Presidential Advisory Council, told The Straits Times. "Certainly, what the inmates did cannot be allowed. But they are still entitled to basic human rights."
There were 163,279 inmates in total in Indonesian prisons across the country, government data shows. But these jails were only meant to hold 108,186 persons.
Prison officers themselves feel overwhelmed and barely able to keep an eye adequately on inmates and their needs, what more their own.
"The number of prison officers must be increased, as well as their professionalism, salaries and equipment," Mr Albert said.
A total of 11,868 prison guards in Indonesia work in four different shifts. This means each officer is responsible for an average of 55 inmates, well above the ideal ratio of one to five.
"Inmates in general as well as the prison guards are the first victims of the prolonged problems of overcrowded prisons, and bad management," influential ex-inmate and prominent writer Arswendo Atmowiloto, 64, told The Straits Times.
He was jailed for 4½ years in 1990 when the tabloid he ran was found to have published blasphemous content.
Prison guards, however, also play a role in a system where low pay and graft allow the better-off to pay their way through prison.
Examples abound. In July 2011, a former tax official convicted of corruption, Gayus Tambunan, made headlines when he confessed to bribing his way out of a jail in West Java to watch a tennis match in Bali.
Last month, investigative magazine Tempo discovered that former Democratic Party treasurer Muhammad Nazaruddin, in jail for graft, was running several businesses from his cell.
Machmudi Hariono, 36, who was released in 2009 after serving five years for terrorist activity, told The Straits Times a lack of rehabilitation efforts was at fault.
"If inmates are left alone, they just sit around, daydream, then at some point they start planning all kinds of funny things," he said.
"First, the government needs to make every prison a more liveable place, and second, it has to keep all the inmates busy and get them to join entrepreneurship or skills training programmes."
Two days after the Tanjung Gusta riot, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said the government would set aside 1 trillion rupiah (S$120 million) to expand prison capacity across Indonesia.
However, observers suspect that vested interests, including top-down graft, are the real force behind the prisons' problems.
Much more, it seems, is needed to defuse the tinderbox in prisons here.
