Today was Hive Learner's hangout and one of the topic that didn't make it to the top three was the one about the prison system in our various countries and how things work over there.
Honestly, I've never been to a prison before either as a prisoner or as a visitor and I have no plans to because of the scary things I've heard people say about it. It's because of these stories that makes standing close to a police officer the more scarier than it should be, because in this country, you don't even have to commit a crime to be arrested. Unless you come from a well-respected family or a wealthy one, police officers don't care about you and would treat you like animals.
Over here, they torture citizens illegally to get information and most times to force them to admit to offences they hadn't committed and if they could do that to innocent citizens, imagine what they would do to people in maximum prisons.
My dad used to tell me stories of how whenever the cells were congested, these officers would take some inmates to the back of the cell and shoot them and I used to think he was exaggerating and was just trying to make us understand how dangerous these officers can be but then I remember some time last year during my final exams, this lady had walked into our exam hall about thirty minutes before the exam time and had started talking to us about the prison system in the country.
She was looking for donations to take to the prison and had even asked us to accompany her if we felt like it. According to her, she planned on using the money to buy some edible stuff like bread because the guys in the prison were fed once a day and sometimes not at all. She had said that some of the prisoners were due to be executed that same day, and that some of them were innocent people who were picked up by corrupt officers.
She had gone ahead to give us more details of some of the bizarre and barbaric things that goes on there and with each word that came out of her mouth, I find myself more and more scared of being in this country.
In a nutshell, the prison system over here is a death sentence and not something anyone would even wish upon their worse enemies. And this is why with each day that passes, the majority of us (especially the youths) live in fear and hope that when these corrupt officers come hunting, we don't fall prey to them.