A video has emerged from the hospital wing of Korydallos prison, the country’s largest jail, where patients started a protest last month to expose the “hellish” conditions in which they are being kept.
The video from the jail, located in Piraeus, was uploaded to YouTube last week by France 24’s Observers team.
“We are going to enter a room where most of the people need help from nurses … who never exist,” a narrator says, as he is followed by a camera into a room that he says accommodates tetraplegics, diabetics and amputees.
One man in a wheelchair who says he is a diabetic explains that both his legs have been amputated.
The narrator points to another patient, jailed on an eight month sentence for debts to the state, remarking that he too faces a double amputation.
“He had an accident inside this place. And now … they will cut his both legs. He cannot walk. He came with two feet and will go out with no feet,” the narrator claims.
The video then moves into another room which the narrator says measures 25m2 and accommodates more than 15 people, among them diabetics, people with HIV positive, heart patients.
The video also shows another prisoner who the narrator states is HIV positive with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer often found in Aids patients.
Earlier on this week, the prisoner patient accused of uploading photographs from the prison wing to Facebook and Twitter appeared before the jail’s disciplinary board, in a move that was condemned by the Initiative for Prisoners’ Rights, a support group.
The man’s lawyer, Yiorgos Thomas, said that his client felt compelled to take this course of action after repeated complaints to the prison authorities about conditions in the hospital wing went unanswered.
“Prosecutors and health officials in particular, whose job it is to monitor Korydallos prison, remained unmoved by their requests over many months,” he added.
Since the second half of February, 178 inmates of the Korydallos prison hospital went on a hunger strike, refusing food and treatment.
Located in Piraeus, the hospital wing of Korydallos prison is designed to hold 60 men but currently houses more than 200, according to prison staff and inmates. Most are HIV positive. Others have cancer, kidney failure and heart problems and are held in close quarters with those suffering from communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and scabies.
Responding to criticism Justice Minister Charalambos Athanasiou stated that the government has given the go ahead for the appointment of 39 doctors in the Greek prison system and for the creation of a special wing in the Korydallos prison, where HIV positive prisoners will be hospitalised.
Source: enetenglish, France24, imerisia
