Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1411841
9 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 19 SEPTEMBER 2021 INTERVIEW The foreign prison population is, in fact, a major concern. At present, 55% of inmates at Corra- dino are not Maltese. One of our proposals, as PN, is that govern- ment should seriously consider the possibility of expatriating these prisoners. I have to be very clear about this: I am not speaking about people from countries where there is no respect for fundamental human rights; and where sending them back could endanger their safety. But in reality, that 55% also in- cludes people from Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Romania, Bul- garia, Italy, Portugal, the USA, the UK… These are all basically Western democracies. Many of them are members of the European Union, or the Council of Europe. There are international treaties, where- by prisoners serving a sentence in Malta could be sent back to serve the rest of their term in their country; and I am quite certain that most of these people would not object to being sent back. But government is not investing enough energy and time to ex- plore this possibility… Easier said than done, though, isn't it? What if their home coun- tries don't want them back? What if we don't have extradi- tion agreements with some of those countries…? That is an issue, yes. I have no doubt that some counties would object: initially, at least… but I am also convinced that we could be doing much better than we are doing right now. To put that in- to context: in the last two years, we have had only three cases of foreign inmates sent back to their home countries. This is not good enough. If all the powers that be with- in government – including on a diplomatic level; on a bilateral level; and at the EU level – were to focus on this avenue, I am sure it would be possible to achieve better results. Onto another issue now: disci- pline. It is widely known that current CCF director Alexander Dalli is a military-style disci- plinarian (as evidenced by his apparent motto, 'we are here to teach fear')… but isn't it also true that the preceding situa- tion – including under Nation- alist administrations – was the opposite? In 2008, for instance, former director Sandro Gatt ad- mitted that (to quote a newspa- per headline) '[prison inmate] Leli il-Bully runs the show'. Doesn't this mean that the ex- cess of discipline today, is real- ly just a pendulum swing back from yesterday's 'free-for-all'? Yes, let's talk about discipline. I believe that discipline is very im- portant, within a prison set-up; but it has to be a discipline tem- pered with dignity. I think that's the key, to all this. My party is certainly in favour of a prison ad- ministration that 'administers'… and that is not 'bullied' by any 'bully' in our prisons… But any disciplinary measure has to be carried out with dignity. My problem with Mr Dalli is not personal – I hardly even know the guy – but with his school of thought. It is a school of thought that exists, yes: he is not the on- ly one to believe that a prison should be run like a strict military regime. But in this day and age – in 2021 - that school of thought has been put aside in most modern, func- tional democracies. It only still exists in dictatorships. Because the emphasis on 'instilling fear', among prison inmates, is a for- mula that simply does not work. Discipline? Yes. But instilling fear – as a tool to control pris- oners – is passé, as an idea. Ex- perience has taught most modern European countries that, unless the emphasis is on 'reform'… the system will not function. There is, however, a flipside. One of the common criticisms levelled at yourself – but also prisoners' rights activists such as Peppi and Andrew Azzopardi – is that you tend to place more emphasis on the rights of crimi- nals, than of the victims of their crimes. How do you respond to that? Let me be very clear: speak- ing about prisoners doesn't make you 'popular' in Malta. I know this from experience; I get phone-calls, I get messages, I get insults… the 'lock-them-up-and- throw-away-the-key' syndrome is thrown at me every other day. How do I respond? One thing I say is that, 'one doesn't exclude the other'. Speaking about pris- oners' rights, does not exclude the victims of crime. In fact, those two issues have a direct bearing on each other. Today, for instance, a stagger- ing 76% of the people serving a prison sentence at CCF are 're- cidivist'. They have all committed previous crimes. This, in itself, shows us how our prison system is clearly failing to reform prison inmates; it is the result of having a punitive, rather than a correc- tional system. But when you have 76% of in- mates who, once released, will go on to commit another criminal offence... it only means that there will be another victim, every sin- gle time. So it is even in the in- terest of the victims themselves, that we have an efficient prison system: where there is discipline, yes; but where we also prepare prison inmates for reintegration into society. In a nutshell, it is useless im- prisoning people… if they are on- ly going to come out worse as a result. So yes: let's talk about the victims of crime, and their rights; and let's also make it clear that whoever causes victims, has to pay for what they did. That is why we send people to prison in the first place. But 'send- ing people to prison' is the pun- ishment. Once in prison, the State – and society as a whole – has an obligation to reform those people. And that, ultimately, is in the in- terest of the victims themselves… This raises the question of whether imprisonment, in itself, is always an appropriate meas- ure. As we all now know, Kim Borg Nicolas was serving a two- year sentence for what were ul- timately drug-related offences: 'fraud and theft', clearly to sup- port a drug habit. So… should she really have been sentenced to prison at all? It is a problem that has to be addressed, certainly. At present, we have a complement of 60% of the prison population who have some sort of drug problem or other; meanwhile, we gloat that we have 'eradicated drugs from prison'… however, we have peo- ple who are committing suicide in prison; and one common de- nominator, when analysing all those suicides, is that they all had drug problems… Precisely: but with all due re- spect, that is also partly the leg- acy of past Nationalist adminis- trations. It was a PN government that introduced mandatory pris- on sentences for importation, regardless of quantity (resulting, among others, in the Gisela Feuz fiasco); it was a PN government that declared a 'zero-tolerance' policy on drugs… Look: we could do a whole other interview about what happened in the past. I have said this before: the Nationalist Party was not per- fect, when it was in government. We made mistakes. But now, we have to move on. We need to look at what is happening now. Right now, we have a situation where 14 people have died in prison over a period of two years… that is a crisis of the kind we have nev- er seen before… Fair enough: I'll rephrase the question. What credibility does the Nationalist Party have – right now – to talk about these issues: when so many of the present problems are, in fact, attribut- able to past PN governments' mistakes? Let me put it this way: I come from a party that spent 25 years in government. And we made mistakes, yes… but the PN al- so brought about big changes in this country, including within the prison system itself. When we speak about the parole system, for instance. It is one of the things the Nationalist government in- troduced. Even things like 'sus- pended sentences'… certain social services within the prison envi- ronment… these were all intro- duced by my party in government. So… where we perfect? No. But has the entire world evolved since 1987, and throughout the 25 years the PN was in govern- ment, until today? Yes, definitely. Even the way we look at issues such as 'prison administration', in 2021, has changed beyond recog- nition since the 1980s, or 1990s. And I'm not just talking about the 'Nationalist Party', or 'Malta'. Things have evolved since then, everywhere in the world. And the experience of the whole of the Western world teaches us that we should be moving away from the concept of prisons which 'punish'… to pris- ons which 'rehabilitate'. That is where the rest of the democratic world is going. And that is where we, in Malta, are failing today. So, irrespective of partisan poli- tics… let us at least acknowledge that the prison system needs a shake-up. Let us have the humili- ty to acknowledge that… there is a crisis in Malta's prison system and it has to be addressed.