Initiative for social action and renewal in eurasia third sector news information bulletin

Women and Prison

By Elmira Abdullaeva

ISAR-Azerbaijan

In Azerbaijan as in many other places, law-abiding citizens view these people as leaches on

society, people who should just as well be forgotten.  But these people do live in our society—

they are part of society just like the rest of us, people who have lived among us and will again

live among us, so long as they follow society’s moral and ethical codes.  These people are

prisoners.

Prisoner work colony #4 is the only women’s prison in Azerbaijan.  It is home to women of all

ages and ethnicities.  Each one of them awaits her own fate, but they are all united by their

common criminal past.  And one more thing unites them as well—almost all of them are mothers.

Some even gave birth in the prison.

“Women and prison” was the topic of my recent discussion with Elmira Alekberova, president of

the El Center for Development, a local NGO that has for several years been working to help

women in prison.

How did you get the idea to work with this category of women?

Several years ago, I was working at the Dilara Alieva Society for the Protection of Women’s

Rights.  Women whose sons, husbands, and brothers were in prison came to us for help.  That

was the first time I came into contact with the problems of the imprisoned and began to think

about their rights.  Slowly, more and more people became aware of our work, and we started to

receive letters from prisoners themselves.  They wrote to us about the difficulties they

encountered.  These very letters are what brought me to Prison-Work Colony #4.

After visiting the Colony several times, I understood that I could not help the women prisoners if

I was only going to work with them from time to time.  Thus came the idea to develop a project to

work regularly with these women.

 Have you always found understanding for your work with these prisoners?

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Of course not.  Many people think that it is not worth helping prisoners.  I have often been told to

do something else.  But we were lucky enough to find understanding and financial support from

Oxfam.

At the start of our work, we helped to improve the living conditions for these women, building a

library and a television room.  I want to emphasize that from the very beginning, we received

complete understanding and support from the government.

Working together with the government, we were able to carry out medical exams on all of these

women and work to improve their daily living conditions.  But this was too little.

I saw that many of these women were in need of psychological rehabilitation.  Specialists have

pointed out that being imprisoned has negative consequences on people, especially women.

Women who are locked up for a long period feel socially and morally degraded and have very

little chance to preserve themselves as individuals.

As part of our work, we aimed to help these women develop confidence in themselves.  Doctors

and psychologists worked with them.  We helped them celebrate birthdays and holidays.  We did

everything we could to make their living conditions as similar as possible to those they had had

outside of prison.  Unfortunately, this project was only funded for six months.  We are doing

everything we can to make it an ongoing program.

What are your future plans?

Women prisoners represent a unique social group in our society.  As a rule, after five years in

prison, many lose their family contacts, which leads to their being cut off from society, and

makes them antisocial.  Thus we are now working on the development of a program to

rehabilitate women who have recently been released from prison.  While in prison, women have

one type of problems, but once they are released they have even more problems.  The difficulty of

adapting after life in prison is difficult from a psychological perspective.  Women who have been

locked up for years have forgotten how to live independently and how to make everyday

decisions.  Many of them are passive and cannot find their place in society.  Many have

difficulties finding jobs.  They often encounter difficulties relating to the large number of people

who they encounter outside of the prison.

Therefore, in the future we hope to start a center to help women make the transition to life outside

of prison.  The center would work on several levels, helping those still in prison, those about to be

released, and those who have recently begun their new lives outside of the prison walls.  In many

countries, such centers already exist thanks to private initiatives.

These ideas which El Center for Development President Elmira Alekberova shared with The

Third Sector News are likely to elicit mixed responses.  But whether we like it or not, prisoners

exist in our society.  And like any civilized country, we are obligated to ensure that these

prisoners are treated according to legal norms.  The bottom line is that, while in prison, these

prisoners do not have the right to live like you and me—they do not have the right to freedom.

But this is not the issue at hand.  The issue is that these people will live amongst us after they are

released from prison, and it is best for us and for them to help them become productive citizens in

the future.  It makes more sense for us as a society to support their rehabilitation rather than their

re-imprisonment.

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