Prison Suicides Raise Prison Security Concerns

The Kosovo Correcting Service has announced that police and the Prosecutor's Office have conducted investigations into both recent cases. In any case, however, the investigative organs have not come up with any confirmation of the circumstances in which these suicides occurred.

While the Council for Protection of Freedoms and Human Rights in Kosovo, although it has requested addressing these cases as concerns, it has come up with the assessment that cases of death or suicide in Kosovo prisons do not involve the conditions or services offered to prisoners.

Behxhet Shala, executive director of KMLDNJ, The Council, which monitors the correcting Service system and deals with the protection of prison rights, stresses that frequent cases of death in prisons should be addressed as concern.

“It is not that they commit suicide because of severe prison conditions, or that they are subjected to some violence or because they are denied any medical assistance, but we should remember that sick persons go to prison, who have even been abroad (as they were in freedom) ill”.

It's a different situation, and that changes the situation. However, the Kosovo Correcting Service must sit down and do an analysis and find a proposal in order to undertake preventive measures for future cases”, Shala notes.

He says that there are inmates who suffer from serious illness or that they are sick during the suffering of punishment.

There are times when they committed suicide, but there are times when they died from various incurable diseases{, Shala said. In cases where medicine has proof that a person has a serious illness that has reached the stage of terminal illness, he should not be held in prison.

Authorities, who lead with the Kosovo Penitentiary Service, say that prison conditions have advanced in respect to prison rights and infrastructure.

Chief Director of the Correcting Service Nehat Thaci tells Radio Free Europe that the suicide phenomenon in Kosovo society has reflected in prisons as well.

Thaci stresses that this phenomenon is a serious concern in the Correcting Service.

“We are taking concrete action, but unfortunately they have not shown positive results. In the near future, we will review various global strategies and see what are the best practices to prevent this” phenomenon, Thaci said.

He said that in addition to improving prison conditions, relevant institutions will investigate cases of modernising European prisons for preventing negative phenomena.

We will try to see the models, which models and modalities have produced better results and then we will implement them”, Thaci declares.

Kosovo's Correcting Service on Friday announced the public opinion that in Dubrava Prison, a prisoner had made self-dependent on his vest in the blinds behind the cell room door. The self-independent person reportedly was convicted of criminal acts, serious bodily injury.

Within two years, according to Kosovo Corresponding Service data, about ten people have died or committed suicide in prisons until they were serving sentences.

Except one case being investigated, the case of Astrit Dehar, other deaths, according to representatives of this service, have resulted from diseases from which they suffered and that none of the cases are described as suspicious deaths.