The Justice Ministry will open a prison exclusively for foreigners in consideration of the increasing number of foreign convicts, officials said yesterday.
The prison will be available as early as next month and the Cheonan Juvenile Correctional Service is presently being refurbished to serve that purpose, said officials.
Though some local prisons, such as the Daejeon Correctional Service and the Cheongju Women's Correctional Service, have so far accommodated foreign inmates, a prison exclusively for foreigners is to be the first of its kind in Korea.
The ministry will allocate a maximum of 400 well-behaved convicts to this new prison, which will be equipped with some 24 professional staff members who are fluent in foreign languages including English, Chinese and Russian, said officials.
The Times asks whether Korean prisoners will thus face reverse discrimination, and looks at some of the issues foreign prisoners face.
According to a recent survey, trouble in a multi-racial cells takes place more frequently than in racially homogeneous cells, suggesting the necessity of a foreigner-only prison.
Human rights activist Hwang Myeong-ho, who conducted the survey on prisoners at Daejeon Correctional Center, said, ``Each racial group showed antagonism to others groups. In particular, disputes between hot-tempered Russian and Chinese prisoners, forming the largest racial group, were frequent.''
A lack of understanding about unfamiliar religions worsens the problems, Hwang said.
For instance, a foreign resident who practiced Islam faced complaints from his cellmates over frequent worshiping at the workplace, he added.
The government expects the prison will ease the difficulties faced by foreigners when they try to communicate with the embassies of their home countries or their families.
The reverse discrimination line comes from lawyer Sean Hayes:
``I can understand the government's feeling that increases in the number and diversity of non-Korean inmates has led to a strain on correctional institutes that need to be addressed via segregation within a separate institute. However, I fear that this could lead to a successful challenge at the Constitutional Court,'' Hayes said.
He said a Korean inmate has already filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission, claiming that non-Koreans are being given preferential treatment over Koreans.
The idea of a foreigner-only prison sounds progressive, and certainly a country doesn't need to accomodate the linguistic or religious needs of its foreign prisoners, though the Times article does bring up a good point: where will they find officers who speak the right languages?
Professor Park Kwang-seop of Chungnam National University said, ``Finding officers who speak Chinese, Russian and Arabic is still difficult, even though the number of prisoners from these regions has been on the rise.''
9 comments:
First taxis, and now prisons.
Korea has it's priorities all sorted :p
If the main problem is violence between Russians and Chinese, how exactly will this help? Ah yes, by keeping Korean prisoners (who are still We/Us, after all) safely out of the way.
WeikuBoy, it would probably mean that instead of scattering Chinese or Russians to various prisons, by concentrating them there would be a large enough group to keep them together, thus serving them better and preventing others from being mixed in with them.
Prison is not regular society. If their individual rights were paramount, they wouldn't be incarcerated in the first place: By committing crimes (at least as determined by the state) they have forfeited some (but not all) of their rights.
I have a different take on this, having spent a bit of time sitting in a courtroom to solve a legal matter back in 2001. Since I'm a US national, my case was sent to the courtroom where other foreign nationals' cases were usually sent, mostly because that way they could more efficiently provide translators.
I talked with my court-appointed translator (I speak Korean well enough to usually handle things on my own, but I'm not going to risk it when it comes to a couple million won in fines) and she told me a bit about how the system works. She felt sorry for the foreigners who are thrown into the Korean prison system unable to speak Korean and not accustomed to three meals a day of Korean food. Indeed, there was a giant Nigerian guy who was practically in tears because he couldn't eat the food that was served — but at the same time he needed more of it. This guy didn't look particularly violent, by the way, just very sad.
Anyhoo, I may not be explaining this well, but I think folks like that guy might be better served if they are in a prison with more of their compatriots.
Kushibo, everything you say makes sense, especially about the food (and man, I'd be in tears too if I had to eat my school's cafeteria's food even once every freakin' day -- and I basically like Korean food). However, if the basic problem is violence between Russians and Chinese, I don't see how concentrating all Russian prisoners and all Chinese prisoners together under one roof does anything other than make the problem worse.
On second thought, are you really suggesting this prison's cafeteria will cater to the tastes of the various nationalities by serving Russian, Chinese, American, and Nigerian (etc.) dishes? Now that I think about it, I find that a bit hard to swallow, too. (Get it, swallow?)
I'm speculating, WeikuBoy, but I imagine not everyone in the prison would be out at the same time, in the public areas.
If they have a high enough concentration of Russians or Chinese, they can have whole wings or sections of just Russians or just Chinese, who then interact primarily just with their own group, not the other group, and not the less violent groups.
As for the food, yeah, I could see how having enough people request certain types of food would provide justification for providing it.
Just the fact that they're trying this, and for reasons supposedly to help the prisoners themselves, indicates that they would be open toward catering to some degree toward collective needs of "highly represented ethnic groups" (there's a euphemism I hope sticks). Maybe they'll make borscht instead of 물김치. Maybe they'll have pork fried rice instead of kimchi fried rice. Maybe they'll dump all the excess American beef on the prisoners.
Anyway, I know some muckety-mucks high up in criminology in Korea, and those folks are very much into the rehabilitative aspect of imprisonment, so giving them food they'd like to eat rings true as a possibility.
I hate how all the foreigners are lumped together. As if all foreigners are the same and their will be no tension amoungst them in a prison.
I wrote:
I'm speculating, WeikuBoy, but I imagine not everyone in the prison would be out at the same time, in the public areas.
I meant that I guess not everyone will be out in the public areas at the same time. Like the exercise yard, the cafeteria, exercise rooms, etc. Whatever it is they have in Korean prisons. My only experience with Korean prisons is that movie about the guys who get amnesty on Liberation Day.
Chris wrote:
I hate how all the foreigners are lumped together. As if all foreigners are the same and their will be no tension amoungst them in a prison.
As far as foreigners who don't speak Korean well are concerned, especially those who don't speak English, they probably should all be lumped together to some degree, at least in terms of policymaking. See my comments on the multilingual court.
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