Staff from over 100 corrections facilities in Indonesia took part in a recently finalized two-year project aimed to improve prison management and treatment of prisoners in the country.
“The Director General of the Directorate General of Corrections (DGC) said the project provided him with an honest, measurable, reliable, and on-the-ground review of his facilities,” says Aisyah Yuliani, Programme Officer at RWI’s Indonesian office. “In addition, he said it provided him with suggestions on what to prioritize and worked as an early warning system.”
The project, funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aimed to strengthen the capacity of the staff at the Ministry of Law and Human Rights’ provincial offices by boosting auditing capacity at corrections facilities.
The project also assisted the DGC in sampling and data collection from various provinces to give better information of the service provided in the institutions and the gap between regulation and implementation.
The Auditing Component
While originally the program was only piloted in seven institutions, starting in 2014 RWI and the Directorate General began a nationwide training and accompaniment to ensure that the junior auditors were properly trained and had access to a safety net in the form of senior auditors during the audit.
During the project, the auditors would do a five-day visit to the institutions to check whether the facility met the standard made by the United Nations, called the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. During these audits, the auditors would go and check all of the living quarters, facilities, and documents, in addition to interviewing the officers.
The History
The Raoul Wallenberg Institute has been partnering with the Indonesian Directorate General of Corrections and the Ministry of Law and Human Rights’ provincial offices since 2005.
The Institute has been working to strengthen human rights capacity in corrections facilities most recently in three different phases.
• Leadership training (2014-2015)
• Audit training (2014-2015)
• Audit accompaniment (2015 -2016).
More about our work in Indonesia.