ALLEVIATING PROBLEMS CONCERNING OVERCROWDED PRISONS

The first pragmatic concern with which various sources associate gacaca is addressing a range of social, political and economic problems regarding the overpopulation of Rwanda’s prisons.

Second, some sources argue that, by processing the backlog of geno­cide cases, gacaca will lead to the release of large numbers of detainees and thus will improve living conditions in Rwanda’s prisons, including for suspects unrelated to the genocide. This too is a practical concern with a vital moral dimension, as the government must provide reason­able conditions for suspects whom it chooses to incarcerate. According to the sources analysed here, these two objectives are linked by a com­mon process: the need to hasten the hearing of genocide cases through gacaca, which, some sources argue, will deal more efficiently with the backlog of cases and improve the living environment in the prisons by releasing the innocent or perpetrators of certain categories of crimes, thus decreasing the overall number of suspects in jail.

This section shows that the government primarily, and to a lesser extent the population, associates gacaca with expediting genocide cases and improving living conditions in the prisons. Commentators on gacaca remain largely silent on these issues, most likely because, in wanting to advocate due process for genocide suspects, they are wary of any claim that gacaca will provide hastier, and therefore (according to many sources) possibly unfair, trials. Nonetheless, some commen­tators do consider processing genocide cases more efficiently as an important objective of gacaca. After analysing the claims of the gov­ernment, the population and observers of gacaca and assessing the empirical evidence from my observations of gacaca and its impact, this section argues that - with important caveats - gacaca has success­fully decreased the backlog of cases and improved the living environ­ment in the jails.