Open Visits, Release Prisoners

Statement by the Revolutionary Socialists

Despite the state’s easing lockdown and restrictions on various services and public and private interests, prisons have remained under a visit ban since last March.

Since June 1st, the state has taken accelerated steps in easing the curfew until its complete termination, reopening hotels, restaurants, cafes, places of worship, museums, tourist sites, cinemas, theaters, and various other areas that were closed to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this widespread reopening, the sole exception has been prison visits, highlighting the underlying motivation behind the state’s decision to ban visits to prisoners as exploiting the pandemic for security purposes rather than as a preventive measure.

Tens of thousands of prisoners today are deprived of visits from their families for approximately four months, while the state deals with extreme rigidity towards families’ attempts to check on prisoners. Phone calls are prohibited, and letters that prisoners have the right to send to their families are subject to the discretion of security officers. They are used to punish dissenters, and supplies sent by families to prisoners are also subject to the whims and desires of the officers.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the state has ignored all demands to reduce overcrowding in prisons to prevent them from becoming hotspots for the virus. While most countries around the world, even the most repressive and authoritarian regimes, released large numbers of prisoners to avoid the spread of the virus, the state has taken the opposite approach. It continued to arrest more dissidents, canceled visits and turned prisons into black holes where nobody knows what is happening inside, and nobody knows what has become of the prisoners.

We continue to demand the wide-scale release of prisoners to prevent the spread of the virus within prisons or at least to mitigate the situation after reports of actual cases of illness have emerged in prisons. The release should include the elderly, those with chronic diseases, those most vulnerable to contracting COVID-19, pretrial detainees in cases that do not warrant pretrial detention, those convicted of non-threatening offenses, and those who have served half of their sentences. However, we also demand the immediate resumption of prison visits and that prisons be treated with the same standards as other places that have resumed operations while taking all necessary precautions to protect prisoners, their families, and prison staff from spreading infection.