Term Paper on "Prisons in Modern Turkey"

Term Paper 13 pages (4177 words) Sources: 4 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Prisons in Modern Turkey

When performing a simple Google search about the prisons in Turkey, one can find an astonishing amount of links taking you to human rights organizations sites. Reports to or about the Turkish government describe the bad, inssuficient, inappropriate (and name whatever synonim you can think of) detention facilities - they all seem applicable to the Turkish conditions of imprisonment. Complaints, abuses, death tolls and hunger strikes, riots and counter-actions, humiliation and fear are the main words associated with the Turkish prison.

In order to understand and evaluate the situation, even as a remote researcher of the phenomenon, one must first consider the modern history of Turkey, the social and political changes this country has gone through in the last century, particulalry after 1923, when the country was proclaimed a republic, led by its first (and most proeminent) president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the last name was given to him, with the meaning of the father of Turks, by the Turkish Grand Assembly, in 1934). Moreover, a simple description of the conditions within prisons would be insufficient and biased if we disregard the legislative system, which allows political detention and the general political situation from Turkey, particularly the political (and sometimes armed) organizations, the Kurdish issue, the radical leftists, the fundamentalist movements... And the enumeration could go on, since Turkey is such a diverse and varied universe, from many points-of-view.

The reasons for searching all these connections and seeing all the intertwined links between prison and society is quite simple - prisons are created and designed to serve a social role, of protecting the society from the perpetrators of crimes, to punish and to discipline them. And when speaking about prisons within the framework of sociological discourse, one can only think of Foucault and his milestone book about the birth and role of prisons, written as a result of his impressions after visiting a prison. "Discipline and Punish" (1978) traces and describes the transformations of criminal sanctions from the publicly displayed spectacles of execution, designed to punish the body of the criminal, to the modern instituions of prisons, aiming to discipline the delinquents' souls. The penalties currently imposed on criminals control the totality of their lives, being a tool and a model for the larger society, whose main feature is control and main goal is discipline of the citizen/subject.

Turkish prisons are one of the main tool of political action, since the late 1970s, when extremist political violence, coming from both the left and the right, swept the country. It was then that the state began filling its prisons with political prisoners - leftists, rightists, minorities etc. (Carrol, 2001). Later, in 1991, the Turkish governement introduced the Anti-Terror Law, which sent to prison more people, on the same political grounds (by this, I am not trying to say that the political activity of those imprisoned was necessarily purely political. There is a wide array of activities susceptible to result in imprisonment, from hanging a banner or writing an article to throwing a grenade in a crowd).

The prison system was (and still is) quite a peculiar one, if we are to compare it with the Western definition and management of a penitentiary, since it is run as a "ward system" - which means big groups of detainees, sharing a ward-like facility, with little control from the prison guards. This manner of running a prison left a lot of space for discretionary and arbitrary activities within one unit, because in a yard of 60 or more prisoners the control is exercised by the strongest ones, both physically apt or politically influent. Moreover, according to the Turkish official point-of-view, the political activity was continued after imprisonment, and the activists were, due to the detention system, able to recruit new adepts.

Accordingly, in the 1990's the Turkish authorities started to build modern prisons, in an attempt to change the ward system of detention into an isolation one, and the new F-type prisons emerged. Although to any Western eye it is a rather common way of organizing a prison, the idea created a wave of protests from the inmates or from their families, as well as from European or international bodies, due to the long history of problematic treatment of human rights in Turkey. It is being said that this new isolation system will increase the abuses and tortures coming from the police and prison guards against the prisoners. Basically, the whole idea of building isolation system prisons started in 1996, when the "interior minister ulku Gulcugil acknowledged that the world inside Turkish prisons was controlled by revolutionaries" (Carrol, 2001) and therefore decided to launch a policy of segregating political prisoners from each other.

We cannont move on without further detailing the issue of human rights in Turkey. The country has ratified the most important international conventions in this field (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, The European Convention of Human Rights in 1954, The European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Punishment in 1988), but the practical human rights record has continued to raise concerns both for NGOs and EU monitoring organizations. Complaints about tortures and abuses, humiliations and undignifying treatments applied to those detained in the police stations have been submitted in the last years against Turkish authorities. In 2005 only, for example, there were 2302 applications lodged against Turkey before the European Court of Human Rights, from the 290 cases analysed 270 affirming that there were violations against the human rights. Moreover, the issue of political detention is raising some serious questions in the area of human rights, especially with regards to the freedom of expression and the situation of the minorities (the best-known being the problem of Kurdish minority and the systematic opression against its members by the Turkish state) report released in 2006 by The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (in agreement with many other reports concerning the human rights issue in Turkey, such as the Human Rights Watch Report, the Amnesty International Report etc.) was speaking about the following human rights problems: restrictions on political activity, unlawfull killings, torture, beatings and other abuses of persons by security forces, poor prison conditions, arbitrary detention, impunity and corruption, lengthy pretrial detention, excessively long trials, restriction of freedoms etc.

The human rights NGOs kept expressing their concern for the situation in Turkey and, given the Turkish plans to join EU in the future years, the state started to seriously consider the situation and to try to comply with the European regulations in the field. Nonetheless, the new prisons are not only an attempt to provide decent standards of detention, but also to break the political activity (considered to be against the state) of the political prisoners.

One of the controversial issue is this political imprisonment. In Western Europe and the United States, the freedom of speech is perceived as untouchable and undeniable; political activity and activism are a normal part of a citizen's life and to express criticism or concern about the state is just one aspect of political and social activity. In Turkey, on the other hand, one can be put to prison for hanging a banner or for publicly criticizing the government, particularly after 1980 and the military coup which supressed the rising civil movements from the country. The history of civil and political movements from Turkey is too long and intricated, and it does not make the object of the present discussion. Nonetheless, it is worth to mention the strong radical left and the Marxist/Leninist hardliners as well as PKK, the Kurdish organization which is perceived, generally, as a terrorist organization, due to its armed wing. The fight between the state and those militants has been going on since the creation of the modern Turkish Republic, and one way to combat political activism is to arrest and sentence those involved.

From the other side of the fence, the history of prison protests is just as long and intricated. Following the examples of the Irish Republicans, the Turkish political prisoners initiated a series of hunger strike movements ever since 1984, when four Dev-Sol militants died of starvation. The Turkish authorities had brutal interventions in all prison protests, be them riots or hunger strikes, which attracted numerous criticisms from inside and outside Turkey. The 1996 hunger strike of the prisoners, launched after the political decision of segregating political inmates from each other and from ordinary detainees, lasted for 69 days and took 12 lives. In the same year, the confrontation between 33 prisoners of the Diyarbakir prison and the guards led to the astonishing figure of 10 dead prisoners and 23 seriously wounded, which shows that no prisoner escaped the violence, even if locked in the C-block area (where the clash took place) by accident, or trying to surrender, as the eye-witnessed have stated (Watson, 1996). The last major event took place in 2000, when the first F-type prison was being opened and it was directed against moving prisoners within… READ MORE

How to Reference "Prisons in Modern Turkey" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

Being Gay in Turkey Essay

Gay in Turkey

Turkey has a predominant Muslim population with the total population being over 12 million. The country has inherited the culture of both Asia and Europe but with… read more

Essay 13 pages (4332 words) Sources: 10 Topic: Sexuality / Gender

---

Crimes in the Prison Term Paper

Crimes in Prison

The modern prison system exists for the intended purpose of preventing criminals from continuing to perform evil or destructive acts. The penal system is meant to bring… read more

Term Paper 20 pages (5754 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Crime / Police / Criminal Justice

---

Armenian Genocide Term Paper

Armenian Genocide, Turkish Excuses

Children dead or dying in the street. Trenches filled with corpses. Thousands of villages destroyed. The countryside cleared of its inhabitants. A people herded into concentration… read more

Term Paper 30 pages (8945 words) Sources: 25 Style: Chicago Topic: Religion / God / Theology

---

Iran Hostage Discussion Questions: Middle East History Research Paper

Iran Hostage

Discussion Questions: Middle East History

Compare and Contrast the reform policies of Mustafa Kemal and Reza Khan.

In the aftermath of World War I, the world had begun… read more

Research Paper 18 pages (5436 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Israel / Palestine / Arab World

---

American Domestic Terror Groups and International Essay

American domestic terror groups and international terror groups forging common ties? Who are their common enemies? Please provide examples to support your answer. Also, you are encouraged to draw from… read more

Essay 5 pages (1694 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA Topic: Terrorism / Extremism / Radicalization

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>