Broken jails broken justice: thousands of prisoners across Africa wait years for their day in court, all the white riving in unspeakably horrible conditions.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: Cover story

Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison in central Malawi. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease runs rampant.

But the worst part may be that the charges against Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, have not yet reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. His case file is lost.

"Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this?" he asks. This is life in Malawi's high-security prisons. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, and justice scandalously uneven.

Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts, says Marie-Dominique Parent, the regional director of Penal Reform International, a British advocacy group. Prisons, she says, "are at the bottom of the heap."

With so much misery among law-abiding citizens, the world's poorest nations have little incentive to improve convicts' lives. The problem is, most people in African prisons aren't convicts. In the United States, the Sixth Amendment guarantees anyone accused of a crime the right to a speedy trial, but across Africa, the lack of resources translates to long, inhumane waits before getting one's day in court.

The results are shocking: Two thirds of Uganda's 18,000 prison inmates have not been tried. The same is true of three quarters of Mozambique's prisoners, and four fifths of Cameroon's. Even in South Africa, Africa's most advanced nation, some inmates in Johannesburg Prison have waited seven years to see a judge.

BADLY BROKEN SYSTEM

It's a systematic failure of the judicial system, says Susan Rice, an Africa expert at the Brookings Institution, and it has ramifications beyond the thousands of people stuck in prisons. "It makes for a broader society in which fear has to play a fairly substantial role," she says. "If you can be arrested without cause and have no hope of ever seeing an attorney or seeing a day in court--even if it's inadvertent, it must undermine confidence in the state."

Indeed, some of Africa's million or so prisoners--nobody knows exactly how many--are not lawbreakers, but victims of incompetence or corruption or justice systems that are simply understaffed, underfinanced, and overwhelmed. Kenya's former prisons commissioner suggested in 2004 that with proper legal representation, 20 percent of his nation's 55,000 prisoners might be declared innocent.

Meanwhile, across Africa, prison conditions are horrible. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia's jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo's prisons have housed children as young as eight years old. Kenyan prisoners die from easily curable ailments like diarrhea.

The most immediate and apparent inhumanity is the overcrowding that Africa's broken justice systems breed, compounded by disease, filth, abuse, and a lack of food, soap, beds...