They have complained of repeated searches that seem designed not so much to maintain prison security as to humiliate and offend the visitor. People were even required to take their underwear off. It was a sort of rape. Relatives who brought warm clothing and food found that these failed to reach the prisoners, who are supplied by the prison shop reportedly at very high prices. When family members finally got into the visiting rooms in the last days of December, the prisoners who came to the telephone on the other side of the thick glass were visibly injured, half naked, or without shoes, in addition to being in the late stages of a hunger-strike.
Visits are generally no longer than half an hour, and sometimes as shortas five minutes.
The relatives had the impression that the prison authorities deliberately interfere with the telephone connection in the visiting booths by turning the volume very low so that the interlocutors are obliged to shout, or by cutting the connection off altogether. Eighty-three relatives of prisoners who had staged a protest at Freedom Square in the Bakirkoy district of Istanbul were beaten and detained on January 14, 2001. We were heavily beaten on our heads with their truncheons. They were all cursing at us. Some of us fell down and were kicked.