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BLANTYRE - Malawi's congested 23 prisons, home to about 8 000 convicts but with a capacity of 4 500, are "hell on earth", a high court judge said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday.

Michael Mtegha, who chairs a national committee on community service, said the prisons receive meagre resources from government, leading to "starvation in our prisons".

"Prisons are certainly hell on earth and reformation is out of the question," he told the weekly Saturday Nation. He blamed magistrates of traditional courts who are resisting change and sceptical of sentencing some convicts to community service.

The courts have recently jailed 1 670 minor offenders "who did not warrant the custodial sentence but community service", he said Traditional courts, dubbed " kangaroo courts", were widely used to convict political cases during the dictatorial rule of the late Kamuzu Banda. - Nampa-AFP Times normal

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