Critique of sources’ perspectives on alleviating problems concerning overcrowded prisons through gacaca
How convincing are these arguments regarding gacaca's ability to expedÂite the genocide caseload and improve detainees' living conditions? This section argues that gacaca has generally proven effective at addressing these problems, although with some important caveats.
Regarding the first problem associated with overcrowding, that of dealing with the backlog of genocide cases, gacaca has overall fulfilled this objective by employing thousands of courts to simultaneously prosecute hundreds of thousands of cases. As discussed in Chapter 2, while the government grossly overstates the number of suspects prosecuted by gacaca, citing upwards of 1 million (probably because this matches its estimated numÂber of victims killed during the genocide), gacaca has certainly sucÂceeded in prosecuting hundreds of thousands of suspects. By mid-2010 it appears that gacaca will have completed the backlog of genocide cases, including the multitude of new suspects that the population has identiÂfied since gacaca began in 2002 and the tens of thousands of Category 1 cases transferred from the national courts to gacaca in 2008.By clearing the backlog of genocide cases, gacaca has also overall improved living conditions in the prisons. Gacaca's ability to release detainees more rapidly has created more living space for detainees who remain. In October 2008, the International Centre for Prison Studies stated that 59,311 prisoners remained in Rwanda's jails, which had a capÂacity of 46,700, although this figure has not been updated since 2002 and does not account for the construction of new prisons around Rwanda.[409] These statistics indicate the significant decrease in the overall prison population, which stood at around 120,000 at the beginning of gacaca. The problem of overcrowded prisons in Rwanda has therefore generally been overcome.
However, a key assumption of this claim - which none of the sources mentioned above discusses explicitly - is that gacaca has resulted in a sufficiently large number of detainees being found innocent, or guilty of low-level crimes, allowing them to return home. In practice, this assumption has not always held, as gacaca has found many genoÂcide suspects guilty and reimprisoned them, including thousands of new suspects identified during gacaca who until recently had lived freely in the community. In some prisons, such as in Rilima, this has resulted in similar numbers of individuals being incarcerated after gacaca as before and thus many of the same problems of overcrowding as previously identified.[410]Furthermore, improving living conditions in Rwanda's jails requires more than simply decreasing the number of detainees. From my field observations, many of the buildings used to house detainees are so runÂdown that even a small number of suspects could not live there humaneÂly.[411] Reducing the overall number of prisoners has freed up resources that the government can now deploy towards improving living conditions in the jails. There is little evidence, however, that the government has used newly available resources to improve conditions in the prisons rather than in other crucial areas of need elsewhere in Rwandan society, except in cases such as the new Mpanga Prison, built with recently acquired foreign aid. Gacaca therefore has, to some extent, improved living condiÂtions in the nation's prisons but it has been less successful in this regard than in dealing with the backlog of genocide cases.