Prisoners bid adieu to chamber pots

Prisoners in Vratsa have traded their chamber pots for real toilets as part of a drive to improve conditions in Bulgaria's overcrowded jails.

"No other Bulgarian prison has undergone such renovation for 25 years," the prison directorate's deputy chief Emil Madzharov commented after walls were recently repainted and bathrooms were installed. But in this prison, built in 1914, four inmates are still forced to share one tiny cell and European standards remain out of reach.

According to prison directorate chief Petar Vasilev, no prison has been built in Bulgaria for about 80 years. This is "not normal" for a European country, he noted.

Each prisoner in Bulgaria has an average 2.75 square metres of cell space, far below the EU-required six square metres, justice ministry data shows. A newly adopted law plans to provide an average four square metres per inmate by 2012.

Conditions in Bulgarian prisons "are probably the worst" in the whole European Union, Vasilev said. "We cannot say that we belong to the European family, with prisons where buckets are used instead of toilets or where living conditions pose risks rather than guarantee the physical and mental health of the prisoners."

There are currently 12 prisons in Bulgaria, compared to 30 when the communist regime took over in 1944. The rest were shut as the authorities "planned to stamp out crime in five or 10 years and turned the prisons into factories", Vasilev explained. The number of prisoners surged however after the fall of communism in 1989, reaching a peak of 12,000 inmates in 2005.

People under arrest can spend months without access to fresh air and daylight, while only nine out of a total 43 facilities had separate toilets. (AFP)

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