The journey would be a chance to rethink one of America’s most impactful national experiments and global exports. Between 2008 and 2011, the prison population grew in 78 percent of all countries. Some 10.3 million people worldwide are behind bars, many convicted of nothing, waiting years to be tried and lacking access to adequate legal assistance. Yet the public conversation rarely seemed to turn from America’s incarceration crisis to the global prison problem—something the United States built and then foisted on the world.
Justice should be loud and proud, a transparent system endorsed by all citizens. Yet prisons, the crown jewel of today’s international justice system, are anything but transparent. They’re invisible spaces, places most never see yet dimly accept as real and right. And how could anyone endorse what cannot be seen? On a very basic level, I felt an urge to expose the hidden places and forgotten people that exist in every country, across the globe. I hoped to be a witness in the world, and make my readers witnesses, too. Such a journey seemed, for myself and for my readers, a moral imperative.
From the get-go I envisioned a trek through human stories. Human stories. The language of corrections turns prisons into clinical, sterile spaces: “carceral” places, “correctional facilities” or “behavioral management units” filled with “inmates” and “offenders” serving “sentences” under “wardens.” Such language makes it easy to forget that there is nothing facile about a facility. That inside these prisons—day in and day out, for years, for decades, for life—are living, breathing human beings. I wanted myself and others to lay eyes on them, to not look away, just as we could not look away during the crises at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, those rare moments when our nation’s oubliettes, to borrow a fourteenth-century French term for prison dungeons—it means “forgotten ones”—violently pried their way into public view, demanding that we confront the human detritus of our justice system.
To minimize the inevitable anthropological rubbernecking, I would, when possible, volunteer in the prisons, working and doing instead of watching and writing. I’d take most of the trips during my allotted twelve-month university sabbatical, and fund them through both academic grants and journalism assignments. The assignments covering culture and travel would help, moneywise, but they’d also serve as prompts to explore a country’s culture outside the prison walls. And this would deepen my understanding of the big picture, because justice systems and the societies in which they operate are richly intertwined. Prisons are dark mirrors, grand social doppelgängers, profound microcosms: life—distilled, caricatured, intensified.
I selected nine countries that might revolve around themes that defamiliarize foundational concepts about justice and prison, concepts we too often take for granted. After all, at panels and rallies, in newspaper editorials and exposés, I heard plenty of calls for reform, many of them driven by arguments about economics and public safety. These are vital reasons. But what about fundamental moral arguments about prison as an ethical concept—where were these in the public discourse? It was time to go back to the theoretical drawing board. I would re-ask the big questions about punishment, redemption, forgiveness, and second chances that had made me a prison activist to begin with and see if I might convert others not just into caring about such questions but—as voting, thinking citizens of a democracy—into becoming potential agents of change, too.
Perhaps I could make my zealous curiosity contagious, for the greater good.
First stop: Rwanda.
1.
Revenge and Reconciliation | Rwanda
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t befriend that murderer and expect to be our friend, too.
—Crime victim to Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate
That heaven finds means to kill your joy with love.
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Brussels Airlines flight 1027 alights gently into the night at Kigali International Airport. Immigration is a breeze and the lines are short; Americans don’t need visas to enter Rwanda. My suitcase sits placidly, just outside customs. The man bearing the sign “Golf Hills Residence” spies me at once and soon we’re cramming my bag into the trunk of his 1991 Nissan Sunny and cruising down remarkably traffic-free roads into the city.
Golf Hills sits elevated, above the so-called land of seven hills in Nyarutirama, a tony Kigali neighborhood. It has the feel of a suburban-style apartment complex, all russets and browns. As if to compensate for the genericness of everything else, “African” decor abounds: giraffes and tribal prints line the hallways, a leather Africa-shaped key chain holds the key to my room for the next six weeks.
One might suppose that I’ve launched my prison journey in Rwanda because Africa’s prisons are in a dire state. In twenty-seven countries they average 141 percent over capacity. More than one-third of the continent-wide prison population, which comes to at least one million human beings, are held in pretrial detention; this means that in some countries, up to 90 percent of potentially innocent people are living behind bars—where, because most African governments spend little on justice, bribery, drugs, prostitution, and rape are rampant. In 1996, worldwide delegates met in Uganda to draft a report on African prisons, which were deemed to be having scant effect on crime. The result was the Kampala Declaration on Prison Conditions in Africa, which stated that prison conditions were “inhuman” for prisoners and “intolerable” for staff. Prison’s overuse, the report concluded, “does not serve the interests of justice, nor does it protect the public, nor is it a good use of scarce public resources.”
But I’m not here to dwell on the sensational. Instead, I’m interested in learning how cracks let in light. Across Africa, broken justice systems have produced avenues for radical reform. Crisis can be a synonym for possibility.
And I chose Rwanda, in particular, because one word comes to mind when the world hears “Rwanda.” Genocide.
The hundred days in 1994 during which Hutus slaughtered nearly a million Tutsis, mostly by hacking or clubbing them to death, still defines this small East African country. It defines it over and above its newly acquired reputation for peace and political, social, and economic prosperity. Indeed, two decades after the killings Rwanda is a model of the so-called new Africa. Under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, Rwanda, Africa’s third most-competitive place to do business, was ranked the second-best global reformer in the World Bank Doing Business Report for six years. Its gross domestic product has grown at an annual rate of 7 percent since 2001; literacy rates soar; national health care offers coverage for less than one hundred dollars a year per person.
Rwanda achieved this, goes the narrative, in part because it promoted reconciliation on a grand scale. I’d read about the country’s postgenocide gacaca courts, community gatherings in which neighbors sorted through the slaughters committed by neighbors and, instead of punishment, determined a system of compensations. I’d heard about the national approach to justice supposedly being returned to its roots, preaching not of punishment but forgiveness and reparations. Genocide compelled the country to rethink its fundamental pillars, its prison system—and justice itself.
Here is a country where hundreds of thousands of victims and their offenders, the people who killed their fathers and mothers and sisters, live side by side, in some sort of reconciliatory state. It made sense to start my journey in this country because all conversations about crime should start not with those who committed the deed—even though that’s how we always talk about criminal justice, asking Who did it? and How can we punish them?—but instead with devotion to those innocently impacted by it: the victims. Attention to the wrongdoer should never eclipse attention to the wronged. So before plunging into the global wrongdoer territory of prison, I needed to immerse myself in the pinnacle of wronged territory. Hence, Rwanda.
Determining this, I’d researched Rwandan NGOs, looking for one whose programs impressed me and might afford me access to prison. Such NG
Os abound; peace, reconciliation, and rebuilding are the country’s mantras and nonprofit selling points. Sifting through many mission statements, I’d gotten stuck on one, an NGO that works with college-age genocide survivors, all under twenty-five, many of them orphans. Some of these survivors, I soon learned from Skype calls and e-mail exchanges with the NGO’s founders, want to visit prisons—where about 80 percent of the prisoners have committed the crime of genocide. The youth had talked about starting some sort of prison-visit program, I was told, but it hasn’t catalyzed into reality yet. This is where I might fit in.
And so I have landed in Kigali to work with these students, genocide survivors looking to visit prisons filled with genocide committers. What these visits will consist of, what qualifies me to help coordinate them, how I’ll overcome the language barrier—all of this is unclear. But I’ve arrived, inspired by the name of the NGO that struck me the moment I saw it. Never Again Rwanda (NAR). If my childhood had two words looming over it, if post-Holocaust American Jewry had two words looming over it, mantralike, they were those two, Never Again. Almost the entirety of my ancestral line was decimated in the Jewish Holocaust. In this connection might lie an entry point.
———
“Kacyiru. At the roundabout in front of the US Embassy, take your first right.” I present these directions to James, a stout Rwandan whose English is as good as his Kinyarwanda, thereby making him one of the most coveted taxi drivers in Kigali.
The hotel manager puts an umbrella into my hand before I head out, odd since the skies are luminous. “Trust me,” she says.
James pops in his CD. It’s Konshens, a rough-tongued Jamaican dancehall artist.
“Too much love,” James laughs. “Rwandans like too much love songs. I can’t listen to the radio at all.”
We find our destination with ease, across from the electric red One Luv Saloon, which might be called the One Seat Saloon, as it’s essentially a concrete box with a lace doily for a door and All Star Zone spray-painted across the front wall. I make my way past the Never Again Rwanda sign and through the zinc gate. The offices are spare, with faded beige walls, a wooden desk or two, and several outdated computers. No one seems to be around; all I hear is the faint echo of Konshens, this time trickling out from the One Luv Saloon. I drift to the back room and find executive director Eric Mahoro hunched at his desk in a crisp white shirt and tie. He stands up to offer me a shy handshake and a halting “You are welcome.”
“Would you like to meet your project leader?” Eric asks, leading me back to the front office. There stands Dukuzumuremyi Albert, known as Santos. Over six feet tall, twenty-five years old, and gangly, Santos has a languid gait that contradicts his hyperalert eyes.
We sit at an empty desk and get right to business. It’s labor to converse. Santos’s semifunctional English and my semifunctional French add up to moderately functional dialogue. Rwandan schools began incorporating English training after 1994, so members of the postgenocide generation speak it to varying degrees. Ironically, Rwanda is one of the few linguistically united countries in Africa. Hutus and Tutsis—unlike, say, the dozens of clashing ethnic groups in nearby Kenya—share a common tongue, Kinyarwanda.
Santos and I discuss the legacy of Rwandan prisons. German colonizers introduced confinement to the justice system here. When the Belgians took over in 1916, houses of detention proliferated in the form of cachots, informal detention huts consisting of guesthouses, back rooms, even kitchens in private homes. After independence in 1962, the Hutu regime used cachots to imprison masses of Tutsis, who were subject to constant arrest for the crime of being “vagabond” or “delinquent.”
This meant that after genocide, there was no formal infrastructure to handle the mass numbers of killers. They were crammed into any available carceral space, and by 1995 prisons were at five times their capacity. Severe overcrowding produced ghastly conditions. Thousands were dying of TB and dysentery; layers of prisoners were literally piled on top of one another, rotting away from thirst and hunger. In the last six weeks of 1994 at Kigali Central Prison, 166 people died. In 1995 there were seven deaths per day there, and at Gitarama Prison, 900 deaths in eight months. Prisoners slept in toilets and in shifts; a komeza (literally, “continue”) was someone who had nowhere to sleep and was relegated to walking through the night, wandering the prison like a golem.
President Kagame’s response to this crisis was unusual. Let them go, he decreed. First the elderly prisoners, in 1998. Then, in 2003, a mass release of 24,000 prisoners, including the terminally ill, those who had participated in the government confession program, those under fourteen during the genocide. The second mass release in 2005 freed 22,000 more—all of whom, of course, still had to face their charges, clarified by a 1996 law outlining tiered gradations of genocide.
How can one even begin to enact justice in the face of such horror? The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the UN Security Council, prosecuted those bearing the greatest responsibility. It completed its work in 2014, finding sixty-five of seventy-five defendants guilty. Rwanda’s National Court System prosecuted some ten thousand more suspects, twenty-two of whom were executed in the years before 2007, when the death penalty was abolished.
The rest, most, stood before the grand Rwandan experiment, which was really a return to precolonial forms of Rwandan justice. Gacaca means “grass,” indicating that trials and truth-telling transpired on grand lawns, out in the open, overseen by community-elected judges. It’s a scene I find almost impossible to envision, even as Santos describes it to me. Some 12,000 gacacas tried over 1.2 million cases between 2006 and 2012, handing down judgments and reducing sentences for the repentant and those seeking reconciliation with their communities.
In precolonial Rwanda, gacaca justice resulted in a plan for restitution, which could be material payment, beatings, or death. Postgenocide, sentences primarily called for time in one of about forty roving Travaux d’Intérêts Généraux (TIG) camps, established in 2005. Tigistes, as the 53,000 or so sentenced to these camps were known, make reparations through labor, building roads, schools, and houses for the homeless, including genocide survivors. Tigistes work three days a week, some commuting from home, and they are schooled, too, in construction skills, civic education, literacy, Rwandan history, and government policy. TIG camps saved Rwanda millions of dollars and reduced the prison population by some 53 percent, whittling it down to about 58,000. It’s a relatively low number, yet still high enough to give contemporary Rwanda the world’s seventh-highest per capita prison population. The Rwanda Correctional Service, though, continues its attempt to change this, and boldly aims to reduce fourteen prisons to nine.
I learn all this during hours of intense dialogue with Santos. He tells me that a team of NAR youth paid a single visit to the TIG camps about a year ago, which never became a full-fledged program. But the prison visits, which he and I will plan together, should be built into a sustainable program. I study the determined expression on his face.
“Santos, why do you want to do this?” I blurt.
“Parce que …,” he starts softly, in French, then shifts to halting English. “I want to be the—how do you say it?—the root of peace. In Rwanda.”
If he hadn’t uttered it with such forceful sincerity, I’d have believed such a poignant response to be scripted.
Before heading back to Golf Hills that day, I ask James to take me to the Kigali Genocide Memorial. “Be strong,” he says, smiling, as he drops me off. “Don’t cry”—he is almost laughing as he says this.
Oh, do I cry. “Rwanda is a country of hills, mountains, forests, lakes, laughing children, markets of busy people, drummers, dancers, artisan craftsmen,” reads the opening placard in the exhibition, before plunging into excruciating detail about the incomprehensible nightmare that was 1994. There is no Spielberg-esque heart-tugging here, but there is meticulous accuracy. Actually, many genocides preceded the massive one; in 1959 a series of massacres of Tutsis drove t
housands into exile in neighboring Burundi, the Congo, and Uganda. Thirty-five years later women and babies were targets, and mothers were often raped and forced to kill their own children. Their sexual organs were mutilated with machetes, boiled water, and acid; they were deliberately given HIV. A twelve-year-old boy was made to rape his own mother in front of her husband. I stare at a chain that held a pair together as they were buried alive. Walking through a Children’s Room in memory of “those who should have been our future,” I find the listed causes of death revolting: “hacked by machete in his mother’s arms.”
I step outside. The hotel manager was right; sunshine has turned to torrential rain. There is a sign reading Please Do Not Step On The Graves. I start to sob. A grinning teenage boy is sweeping the water off blue tarmac blanketed over one of the mass grave sites.
“Hello! Are you married?” he calls to me.
Nonplussed, I shake my head.
“Where are you from,” comes his reply, jolly as he absent-mindedly sweeps the graves.
New York, I mutter.
“America! You are rich!” he exclaims. He unpeels a corner of the tarmac. “Look—see graves!” It requires all of my willpower to keep from vomiting; the colossal pit is filled to the brim with skulls. Tens of thousands of skulls, like baseballs. Former human heads. Human lives.
I wander away in a daze. My mind follows suit. Is this teenager Hutu or Tutsi? Is it fair to wonder this, about everyone I meet? Whom does Santos live with?
How in hell am I supposed to face the men responsible for all of this?
Maybe they should rot in a Rwandan prison.
At the gift shop, I buy an English–Kinyarwanda–Kiswahili phrase book and one titled We Survived Genocide in Rwanda: 28 Personal Testimonies. “You wear black!” says the smiling man ringing up my purchases. “That is strange! Women like pink.”
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