Governnientls perspectives on alleviating problems concerning overcrowded prisons

While the government rarely expresses its intentions regarding deal­ing with overcrowded prisons, for fear of alienating genocide survivors by raising too loudly the issue of potentially releasing suspects into the community, it undoubtedly believes that expediting genocide cases is one of gacaca's main objectives.

People who lost their relatives wish that trials are speeded up so that per­petrators of crimes are punished. They fear to see the culture of impunity prolonged. There are people who say that their relatives are detained for 5 years while they are innocent... They wish that [the] Gacaca courts will be quickly operational and will be explained to them.^{1 [395]}

Implicit in the Gacaca Law is the idea that gacaca will rapidly hear suspects' cases. In the Law, the judicial process comprising a suspect's response to accusations in the general assembly, the assembly's public discussion of the suspect's evidence, and the judges' decision regarding the guilt or innocence of the suspect and the handing down of appropri­ate punishments for those found guilty is described as being fulfilled in two or three weekly hearings.^[396] That the laws governing gacaca allow for the general assembly to consider the evidence concerning multiple cases during the same hearings - and the fact that such a multitude of gacaca jurisdictions function simultaneously in different communities - implies a faster judicial process than has previously been possible.^[397] Though the government never states this explicitly, its primary aim in hastening genocide trials appears to be processing the backlog of genocide cases rather than improving living conditions in the prisons.

As explored in the section on gacaca's modalities in Chapter 2, the government has also reformed the Gacaca Law on several occa­sions, with one primary purpose being to further speed the hearing of genocide cases.

We have faced many difficulties in trying to speed up gacaca... We need to stress that gacaca is not open-ended because, as a nation, we have other aims, such as developing our economy and building the country's skills base. Today the genocide caseload is still massive, so with gacaca we may have to think of new ways to address this. Even an amnesty is possible, especially for low-level perpetrators. Anything is possible, even for more serious cases. What we have attempted here is justice on a massive scale but the costs have also been immense.^[398]

Kagame's views echo his continuing ambivalence towards the gacaca process, as highlighted in Chapter 2, as well as the government's growing rhetoric in recent years that the country must move �beyond' questions of addressing genocide crimes to pursue other national objectives such as economic growth and poverty alleviation.