[German prisons] Thomas Meyer-Falk’s contribution to the 2014 Anti-Prison Days in Vienna

antiknastMany of us are spontaneously and long ago aware of it: prisons are places of ethical, humane, moral and cultural decay. No desire for life, freedom, humaneness is conveyed there, but instead, the guards and any other staff treat the detainees as dead objects; they manage people as cargo in a storehouse.

So prisons are necrophiliac places.

It was only a few weeks ago that one prison inmate – who was kept in solitary confinement for a couple of years, after he broke a guard’s nose with a headbutt in 2012 – was starved to death in Germany. Koala Rosmane was only 33 years old; he came from Burkina Faso, where he had been forcibly recruited as a child soldier. Continue reading