Prisons in Modern Turkey

Prisons in Modern Turkey

When performing a simple Google search about the prisons in Turkey, one can find an astonishing amount of links taking you to human rights organizations sites. Reports to or about the Turkish government describe the bad, inssuficient, inappropriate (and name whatever synonim you can think of) detention facilities - they all seem applicable to the Turkish conditions of imprisonment. Complaints, abuses, death tolls and hunger strikes, riots and counter-actions, humiliation and fear are the main words associated with the Turkish prison.

In order to understand and evaluate the situation, even as a remote researcher of the phenomenon, one must first consider the modern history of Turkey, the social and political changes this country has gone through in the last century, particulalry after 1923, when the country was proclaimed a republic, led by its first (and most proeminent) president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the last name was given to him, with the meaning of the father of Turks, by the Turkish Grand Assembly, in 1934). Moreover, a simple description of the conditions within prisons would be insufficient and biased if we disregard the legislative system, which allows political detention and the general political situation from Turkey, particularly the political (and sometimes armed) organizations, the Kurdish issue, the radical leftists, the fundamentalist movements... And the enumeration could go on, since Turkey is such a diverse and varied universe, from many points-of-view.

The reasons for searching all these connections and seeing all the intertwined links between prison and society is quite simple - prisons are created and designed to serve a social role, of protecting the society from the perpetrators of crimes, to punish and to discipline them. And when speaking about prisons within the framework of sociological discourse, one can only think of Foucault and his milestone book about the birth and role of prisons, written as a result of his impressions after visiting a prison. "Discipline and Punish" (1978) traces and describes the transformations of criminal sanctions from the publicly displayed spectacles of execution, designed to punish the body of the criminal, to the modern instituions of prisons, aiming to discipline the delinquents' souls. The penalties currently imposed on criminals control the totality of their lives, being a tool and a model for the larger society, whose main feature is control and main goal is discipline of the citizen/subject.

Turkish prisons are one of the main tool of political action, since the late 1970s, when extremist political violence, coming from both the left and the right, swept the country. It was then that the state began filling its prisons with political prisoners - leftists, rightists, minorities etc. (Carrol, 2001). Later, in 1991, the Turkish governement introduced the Anti-Terror Law, which sent to prison more people, on the same political grounds (by this, I am not trying to say that the political activity of those imprisoned was necessarily purely political. There is a wide array of activities susceptible to result in imprisonment, from hanging a banner or writing an article to throwing a grenade in a crowd).

The prison system was (and still is) quite a peculiar one, if we are to compare it with the Western definition and management of a penitentiary, since it is run as a "ward system" - which means big groups of detainees, sharing a ward-like facility, with little control from the prison guards. This manner of running a prison left a lot of space for discretionary and arbitrary activities within one unit, because in a yard of 60 or more prisoners the control is exercised by the strongest ones, both physically apt or politically influent. Moreover, according to the Turkish official point-of-view, the political activity was continued after imprisonment, and the activists were, due to the detention system, able to recruit new adepts.

Accordingly, in the 1990's the Turkish authorities started to build modern prisons, in an attempt to change the ward system of detention into an isolation one, and the new F-type prisons emerged. Although to any Western eye it is a rather common way of organizing a prison, the idea created a wave of protests from the inmates or from their families, as well as from European or international bodies, due to the long history of problematic treatment of human rights in Turkey. It is being said that this new isolation system will increase the abuses and tortures coming from the police and prison guards against the prisoners. Basically, the whole idea of building isolation system prisons started in 1996, when the "interior minister ulku Gulcugil acknowledged that the world inside Turkish prisons was controlled by revolutionaries" (Carrol, 2001) and therefore decided to launch a policy of segregating political prisoners from each other.

We cannont move on without further detailing the issue of human rights in Turkey. The country has ratified the most important international conventions in this field (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, The European Convention of Human Rights in 1954, The European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Punishment in 1988), but the practical human rights record has continued to raise concerns both for NGOs and EU monitoring organizations. Complaints about tortures and abuses, humiliations and undignifying treatments applied to those detained in the police stations have been submitted in the last years against Turkish authorities. In 2005 only, for example, there were 2302 applications lodged against Turkey before the European Court of Human Rights, from the 290 cases analysed 270 affirming that there were violations against the human rights. Moreover, the issue of political detention is raising some serious questions in the area of human rights, especially with regards to the freedom of expression and the situation of the minorities (the best-known being the problem of Kurdish minority and the systematic opression against its members by the Turkish state) report released in 2006 by The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (in agreement with many other reports concerning the human rights issue in Turkey, such as the Human Rights Watch Report, the Amnesty International Report etc.) was speaking about the following human rights problems: restrictions on political activity, unlawfull killings, torture, beatings and other abuses of persons by security forces, poor prison conditions, arbitrary detention, impunity and corruption, lengthy pretrial detention, excessively long trials, restriction of freedoms etc.

The human rights NGOs kept expressing their concern for the situation in Turkey and, given the Turkish plans to join EU in the future years, the state started to seriously consider the situation and to try to comply with the European regulations in the field. Nonetheless, the new prisons are not only an attempt to provide decent standards of detention, but also to break the political activity (considered to be against the state) of the political prisoners.

One of the controversial issue is this political imprisonment. In Western Europe and the United States, the freedom of speech is perceived as untouchable and undeniable; political activity and activism are a normal part of a citizen's life and to express criticism or concern about the state is just one aspect of political and social activity. In Turkey, on the other hand, one can be put to prison for hanging a banner or for publicly criticizing the government, particularly after 1980 and the military coup which supressed the rising civil movements from the country. The history of civil and political movements from Turkey is too long and intricated, and it does not make the object of the present discussion. Nonetheless, it is worth to mention the strong radical left and the Marxist/Leninist hardliners as well as PKK, the Kurdish organization which is perceived, generally, as a terrorist organization, due to its armed wing. The fight between the state and those militants has been going on since the creation of the modern Turkish Republic, and one way to combat political activism is to arrest and sentence those involved.

From the other side of the fence, the history of prison protests is just as long and intricated. Following the examples of the Irish Republicans, the Turkish political prisoners initiated a series of hunger strike movements ever since 1984, when four Dev-Sol militants died of starvation. The Turkish authorities had brutal interventions in all prison protests, be them riots or hunger strikes, which attracted numerous criticisms from inside and outside Turkey. The 1996 hunger strike of the prisoners, launched after the political decision of segregating political inmates from each other and from ordinary detainees, lasted for 69 days and took 12 lives. In the same year, the confrontation between 33 prisoners of the Diyarbakir prison and the guards led to the astonishing figure of 10 dead prisoners and 23 seriously wounded, which shows that no prisoner escaped the violence, even if locked in the C-block area (where the clash took place) by accident, or trying to surrender, as the eye-witnessed have stated (Watson, 1996). The last major event took place in 2000, when the first F-type prison was being opened and it was directed against moving prisoners within this new facility. Initiated in october 2000 by around 800 detainees, leftwingers and political activists (Carrol, 2001), who were later followed by members of their families as well as human rights militants, the hunger strike changed into a huge protest movement. This was brutally supressed by the police and the miltary in December, when the operation "Back to Life" was launched. This operation was met with resistance from the prisoners and had extremely high costs in terms of human loss - 28 prisoners and 2 soldiers died in the events. In the end, the results of the operation were a success for the Turkish prison authorities - the prisoners were moved into the new facilities and most of the "schools of anarchy," as Turkish president Demirel called them, were closed

The prison population of Turkey was, at that time, of around 72.000 inmates, but the amnesty billed introduced by the government in late 2000 was designed to release almost half of them. Although met with reluctance and even turned down by the Turkish president, the bill was signed during the events of December 2000, which are still being a topic of criticism for Turkey, coming from almost all international bodies. The operation "Back to Life" mentioned above was designed to start moving the prisoners into the new F-type facilities and, on the other hand, to end the hunger strikes and associated protests going on in the prisons. The clashes between armed forces and the prisoners lasted for four days, and the reports coming from the authorities show that the inmates opposed a serious resistance. From the other perspective, the human rights organizations reported numerous abusive episodes of excessive force, of unjustified violence and so on, directed against the prisoners during the riot and later, during the susequent transfer to the F-type prison.

After 2000, the protests and the hunger strikes became epidemically spread within F-type and regular prisons. According to the organization of prisoners' relatives in around ten years (since 1982 and 1993) 122 people died in unlimited hunger strikes known as death fasts (Cooper & Riordan, 1993). Similalrly, 101 prisoners have died after 2000 and more than 400 suffered from unrecoverable effects following hunger strikes (HRW report, 2005).

So far, I have presented a short history of Turkish prisons, in order to start discussing in detail the developments from the last five years, considering that the introduction of F-type prisons constitutes a milestone for this analysis. Where is, one might ask, the big difference between Turkey and Western Europe or U.S. For example, a very interesting perspective of the prison system within the United States, written by Joseph Halinnan (2001), provides us with a fascinating description of the isolation conditions (and their consequences over the prisoners). Moreover, trying to integrate the prison system into a more general analysis of the American society, the author dvelops an interesting conceptual frame - he states that prisons are just an extension of the huge capitalist market where the exchange of goods and assets, whatever shape they might take, are invading any corner of social life. Prisons are no longer designed to punish and/or to rehabilitate offenders, but they become market institutions and their existence is getting disconnected from the original meaning of their creation.

The Turkish prison situation seem to have deep connections with the political, and not economic, activity of the state and of the citizens. Moreover, after the act of sentencing and imprisoning the political activist, the state continues to exercise its power of coercion over the prisoner, in an attempt to disconnect him from the outside world, from its family as well as its political affiliation. I believe this is the reason why isolation regime in Turkey is continuously criticized by all the human rights organizations - mainly because it is not only design to re-educate and reintegrate the inmate within the society, but because the imprisonment is political, on one hand, and because of the huge dose of arbitrary in the detention regime.

I believe that, when speaking about the prisons in Turkey, we have to stress the importance of political prisoners and of the prisoners of conscience and to place the debate within the larger frame of police vs. protestors movements and clashes, of the treatment of detainees and prisoners within the police stations and prisons, of the abuses and ill-treatments which a prisoner can be subject to, particulalry within a prison.

The protest of the inmates against the idea of F-type prisons is, I believe, double layered. On one hand, they were protesting against the interruption of their political activity from within the prisons and against the breach created in their connections, both inside and outside the prisons. However, on the other hand, it might be that they were so violently refusing to be taken out of the community because of the fear of abuse, because the community of other prisoners was also a sort of shelter against police, military or prison guard violence, torture, or bad treatment.

Interesting enough, the Turkish authorities used to place common and political prisoners within the same prisons, without making a difference. The idea of segregating the political prisoners from each other and from the ordinary criminals is a useful tool for diminishing the anti-state activity the prisoners were accused of. Still, when the history of suspicious disappearances, violent supression of street protests and police abuses is flourishingin Turkey, the introduction of isolation regime can only create further suspicions and worries. What will happen with prisoners, particularly with the political ones, when they will be secluded and isolated from their cell-mates?

Another additional concern was raised by how the law was formulated. The provisions of the article 16 of the 1991 Anti-Terror Law state that prisoners are to be kept in their cells almost indefinitely, without providing the circumstances for family visits, number of hours spent outside the cells and even allows that the contacts between the convicts and communication with others can be prevented. Following the concerns expressed by the international organizations and by the Turkish organizations, the prisoners and their families, the Minister of Justice promised to ammend the Law in 2000, even before starting to move the prisoners within the F-type facilities. Nonetheless, the Law was changed as late as in May 2001, after the F-type units were already holding prisoners for more than five months. The ammended article 16 now allows the prisoners the right to participate in communal activities such as sport and education and receive unobstructed visits. However, the wording of the law suggests that these rights will depend on individual prison resources and be provided at the discretion of the prison authorities. The communal activities would also be possible only within the " (Amnesty International Report, 2001)

Still, the provisions of the above-mentioned article leave space for arbitrary and does not prevent in any way the possibility of abuses or violent treatment against the inmates. And the protests have been going on in the last years as well, and will probably keep going for as long as the political imprisonment will be maintained.

On the other hand, it would not be fair to say that the human rights situation in Turkey is not developing and changing. One of the most careful 'watch-dogs', Human Rights Watch, admits that, for example, that: "as of November 2005 no individuals were known by Human Rights Watch to be serving prison sentences for the non-violent expression of their opinions.." The last political sentence was, from this perspective, that of the writer Cemal Topkinar, who was sentenced to serve one year in prison for his article suggesting that the earthquake from Turkey, from 1999, was a divine punishment inflicted upon the militaries.

As of the end of 2005, there were approximately 3500 political detainees in the Turkish prisons, according to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour report. Nonetheless, the authorities claim that almost all of them were charged with violent offences, mainly affiliation with terrorist organizations, and are not in prison due to speech-related offences. The acces to these prisoners was granted only to a few international organizations, particularly CPT and not in all cases.

Why, it might be asked, is there so much space dedicated to political imprisonment? As stated above, I believe that it is impossible to speak about the conditions from the Turkish prisons and the protests of the prisoners without seriously considering this issue, because the main actors of the protests are the imprisoned political militants. Subsequently, the military interventions against the riots within prison facilities must not disregard the fact that the same troups that might have been displaced in some of the hot areas of Turkey, to fight the separatist movements, the minority organizations and the leftist militatnts can be send within one prison, to fight the same persons they have met before, in open space. Not sooner than November 2005 there was an extrajudiccial execution, carried on by a few gendarmes who threw grenades into a bookshop in Semdinli, Hakkari province, killing one man and wounding eight. Maybe many of the problematic clashes between prisoners and security forces would be avoided if civilian control over prisons is enforced.

Another issue to be discussed here is that of material endowment and of funding. Most of the Turkish prisons, be them F-type or ward-like facilities, provide poor condition - overcrowding, underfunding, untrained personnel, sometime poor piping/sewage systems, unavailability of medical assistance and healthcare facilities and so on. These circumstances are definitely contributing to the problematic environment within the prisons and generate quite a few series of problems. Many prisoners were complaining about inadequate medical treatment, for example, or about the impossibility to have a medical examination following their complaints of being abused. Alll the shortcoming generate tensions and sometimes the tensions accumulate and explode into a riot.

Another issue of concern for the human rights organizations is the fact that Turkey has not abolished the capital punishment, including for political prisoners (again, here the opinions of the state and of NGOs or of other civil or political organizations are different). There are very few data regarding the regime of detention for the prisoners who were sentenced to death, either they are being kept in special conditions (for example, in F-type units) or not. Judging by the provisions of the law, which place the political prisoners in F-type prisons, one might say that the death-sentenced inmates are kept within the same facilities, but, given the scarce information about this topic, it is hard to make a solid statement. Maybe the most proeminent example is that of the Turkish leader of PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, sentenced to death in 1999, sentence not executed yet. The turkish authorities have pressed charges of terrorism against the Kurdish leader, but the Kurdish organizations claim that it is just a political decision taken against their strongest leader.

Another more recent example of political imprisonment is that of the detention and trial of three Kurdish activists, charged under the Anti-Terror Law for propaganda for the PKK, all three of them being, in fact, officials of a Kurdish peaceful organization recently closed by the Turkish authorities (according to HRW, 2006). This represents a set-back in the Turkish efforts to meet the international requirements, according to HRW.

As far as the situation within the prisons in the last few years, the situation is quite unchanged and stationary, with a slight tendency of improvement. The improvement was mainly noticed in the openess of the Turkish authorities, although some times the human rights organizations or the monitoring bodies complained the openess is rather seen into words, but not in practic changes. The prison facilities are both ward-type and F-type, and the situation within each category is rather the same as it was in 2000-2001, after the introduction of F-type units. The most important development seem to be the recent safeguards against torture, which was one of the main point of worry and discontent with the Turkish prisons. Comparing to the beginning of the 1990, when journals like Middle East Report were talking about the wide-spread refined torture within the penitentiaries from Turkey (Schwartz et. al., 1989), the Turkish government seems to be keeping its word and the complaints against abuses within prisons have diminished. Of course, the facts can also be interpreted as proving the protests against the F-type prisons to be right - and, in this line, there are less complaints because torture is better covered by the isolation conditions and the prisoners are more afraid to file complaints, even after being released. For a political activist, the Turkish movements would say, the freedom is never guaranteed, and anybody can go back to prison.