UNODC Kyrgyzstan - Prison 24H - Life imprisonment in Kyrgyzstan

• Report rights infringement
• published: 06 Oct 2015
• views: 78

Designed in Soviet times, the Kyrgyz prison system and facilities were conceived as a huge productive system where detainees offered cheap labour force. With independence in the early 90s, the entire production system collapsed leaving prison facilities in decay and with no income. Kyrgyzstan abolished the death penalty in 2007 after a moratorium in 1998. All detainees sentenced to death were subsequently transferred to life imprisonment. The Kyrgyz Prison Service found itself totally unprepared to manage lifers. Many of such prisoners are confined in the Pre-Trial Detention Centre in Bishkek (SIZO): a facility built in 1984 to accommodate 1392 inmates and now desperately overcrowded. Detainees sentenced to life imprisonment are locked in cramped cells in the basement of the SIZO: access to the cells is granted through a long, dank, windowless hallway. Prisoners live permanently locked in their 5 sq metres underground cells: artificial light switched on 24 hours per day, 1 hour exercise per day in an open-roofed cell on the top floor of the building and 1 family visit per year. For them there is no way out of this world, and their first chance of appeal for a reduction of sentence can be submitted only after 40 years of continuous imprisonment. The film Prison Solo was conceived as an extreme experiment: a 37 years old prisoner locked underground in total isolation for the rest of his life narrating his own confined universe. Prison 24H was instead conceived as a stop motion movie covering 24 hours of life in 2 different cells with tens of thousands of pictures taken directly by the author. Alessandro Scotti (nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2005) was granted the extraordinary possibility to stay locked in the prison night and day without access limitations in order to direct the films and interact with the protagonists: "My 2 movies juxtapose two opposite gazes - the first warmly subjective, the second absolutely objective - to describe life in a confined claustrophobic universe. Both films take their move and approach from the tradition of direct cinema though blending with contemporary technology and videoart." The films were produced by the European Union and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in the framework of the Assistance Prison Reform Project in the Kyrgyz Republic. All images and sounds were recorded live in the SIZO in Bishkek. The entire production would have not been possible without the unconditioned collaboration of the State Service for Execution of Punishment of the Kyrgyz Republic.