\u201cOnly 17 people\u201d died in Armenian prisons over the past year, 2 of whom committed suicide; 7 inmates died due to health issues, Tigran Sahakyan, a representative of the Penitentiary Department of the Justice Ministry, stated during a press conference on Friday, firing back at members of the Prison Monitoring Group Zaruhi Hovhannisyan and Robert Revazyan who commented that the list of diseases incompatible with detention should be revised, since prisoners are \u201cneither treated properly nor released.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think that the prisoners\u2019 diseases should be linked with the condition of detention, and I don\u2019t agree that the ministry is inconsistent with their treatment. Only 17 people inmates died in 2017,\u201d Sahakyan argued, adding that 1740 prisoners were transferred o various medical institutions \u201cover the past year alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Human rights activist Zaruhi Hovhannisyan recalled that at the end of 2017, the prison monitoring group visited the women\u2019s prison in Abovyan, where they learned of the death of one inmate and found out that another woman had been taken to an intensive care unit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe group is convinced that the full responsibility for this death and the deterioration of another inmate\u2019s health lies solely with the Justice Ministry and the Penitentiary Department,\u201d Hovhannisyan charged. She added that the woman who had ended up in intensive care had earlier applied for an early release; however, she is currently unable to attend the court hearings due to her health state.<\/p>\n
Robert Revazyan, for his part, stated that over the past two years, the authorities have done nothing to to resolve prison overcrowding; \u201cYerevan\u2019s Nubarashen jail is as overcrowded as in the past years.\u201d In addition, he went on, the ground floor of Nubarashen is \u201cpractically unlivable\u201d but continues to house the cells designated for hunger strikers.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the cells in Nubarashen are in a pretty good conditions, but others are nearly dilapidated. Often, prisoners repair the cells on their own expense. On the one hand, it is good that the detention conditions improve for some prisoners, but the cells are not renovated with state funds, which is fraught with discrimination and corruption issues,\u201d Revazyan said.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, he continued, the authorities do not take any serious measures to eliminate hierarchical relations among inmates; \u201cPrison officials even say that this system is good for keeping the prison under control.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tigran Sahakyan acknowledged the existence of problems with prison conditions and promised that the issues \u201cwill eventually be resolved. But this requires time and finances.\u201d He recalled that the jail in Armavir, for example, was built to help solve the problem of overpopulation.<\/p>\n
\u201cBuilding new prisons is not a solution; we need to focus not on punishing a person, but on preventing crimes,\u201d Robert Revazyan countered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What\u2019s more, he continued, the authorities do not take any serious measures to eliminate hierarchical relations among inmates; \u201cPrison officials even say that this system is good for keeping…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[66056,65966],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}