Designed as places of incarceration, prisons often evolve into terrifying institutions of torture, disease, and degradation. Removed from public view, inmates may be denied adequate food and health care, housed in insanitary and degrading conditions, or subjected to cruel disciplinary practices of torture.
Openness is the best preventive of such abuses.
But many governments are unwilling to open their jails to public scrutiny and human rights violations often take place behind closed doors, where perpetrators are largely hidden from view. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners prohibit cruel and unusual punishment, many nations continue to operate prison systems which violate these principles. PHR began investigating prison conditions in 1990, when it teamed up with Americas Watch to send a medical team, that included Curtis Prout, MD and JudyAnn Bigby, MD, to Haiti. Though it encountered much official resistance, the team gained access to several prisons and revealed a prison system that was chronically overcrowded and grossly unsanitary, where prisoners suffered beatings and were generally in poor health. The findings were reported to the Government of Haiti and published in a 1992 report, Health Conditions in Haiti's Prisons but, before reforms could take place, that country found itself embroiled in a military coup.