OVERCROWDING in Moroccan prisons is a “bomb”, the Moroccan Prison Observatory (OMP) said this week, reporting appalling conditions in many of the country’s jails. “The overcrowding is a bomb that forces us to think about alternative solutions to incarceration,” said Abderrahim Jamai, a director of the Casablanca-based independent watchdog organisation. “Integrating minors into social life is impossible inside a prison,” Jamai said. Morocco’s 44 penitentiaries now hold 55_000 inmates, even though they were built to hold 39_000, an OMP report says. – AFP
Thursday May 24, 2001