![]() ![]() Unfortunately, in most cases, there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling the functionality and features they add to the site. We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below. We will also share how you can prevent these cookies from being stored however this may downgrade or ‘break’ certain elements of the Site’s functionality. This document describes what information they gather, how we use it, and why we sometimes need to store these cookies. It was the 20th wedding inside the prison since Aristotelous took over. Rowe remained sceptical as he left the prison on the sixth day but not before attending a wedding of two Greek Cypriot convicts, which was reported back in December. “The reoffending rate has dropped to 15 per cent from over 50 per cent under the punitive system,” she said, citing this as a major success. Without really answering the questions, Aristotelous cited the results of the “human approach” and the data on reoffending. “The victims expect them to be punished,” he said. Rowe asked Aristotelous if the prisoners in Nicosia central might not have it “too good” and what about their victims. One of the things Rowe did observe was that the prisoners, especially addicts, may have the help and support they need within the prison walls, but there was nothing to compare on the outside. Rowe says he didn’t come across any drug dealing in the prison and the prisoners he spoke to, a couple of them addicts, say they don’t have access to any. She just wants to help people “change, reform and reintegrate back into society”. When he does have a conversation with Aristotelous, he tells her she is more like a politician, which she denies. ![]() ![]() It’s been easy to forget I’m in a maximum security prison,” he adds. Rowe asks him if everything he is seeing is all for show but Phaethon assures him it is not. Inmates can win extra blankets, quilts and sweets.Īccording to Rowe’s cell mate, a two-times convict named Phaethon who is now serving eight years for armed robbery and who remembers the bad old days before 2014 when there was “less water, less food, more punishment”. “You make me a better person,” Aristotelous tells them when she makes an appearance at the bingo, which includes both male and female inmates, as do the Greek dancing classes. The answer from those in authority in the prison say to see convicts reintegrate into society and not re-offend. Rowe meanwhile wonders what the prison authorities want in return for the adulation. She doesn’t treat us as prisoners but as VIPs,” the Cameroonian man said.Īristotelous thinks asylum seekers and irregular migrants should not be in prison at all and has been pushing for a more administrative solution. One asylum seeker tells Rowe it is because on the outside they had nothing and now they have three meals a day, “gym, clothes, shoes. These are the director’s biggest fans, cheering and surrounding her every time she enters the yard and chanting: ‘We love you Anna’ and ‘Anna, Queen of the Prison’. There are 800 at the prison, 300 of whom are irregular migrants and failed asylum seekers. It was the idea of one of the inmates, he’s told. “Then I encounter something I would normally expect to find in a hotel lobby, a music-playing water fountain in the shape of a piano,” he says. A wedding inside the prison features on the show He said the whole process caught him off guard and the place was very different to what he expected coming through the gate. Rowe was then interviewed, given brand-name toiletries and new sheets, no uniform. “Before we didn’t respect people and violence existed in the prison,” said one, but he would not be drawn further. Rowe asks them about the prison’s reputation. Two guards present have been there for many years. On entry to the prison, his handcuffs are removed and he has to pass a sniffer dog. One of his biggest questions was that since most of the guards were the same people, how Aristotelous had changed their mindset to see the prisoners as human beings and not, in the words of one older guard “as their slaves”. He described it as a prison unlike any he has been to before that used to have the reputation for being one of the most brutal in Europe, “a place where they refused to allow inspectors to go because of what used to take place there”. He wondered if it could all be too good to be true. Throughout his week, Rowe expressed surprise and puzzlement at the informal way the prison was run, after serving 12 years himself in British jails. In his introduction, Rowe said it was well known that the Nicosia Central Prisons “once had a fierce reputation for guard brutality” with prisoners beaten every day and six suicides in less than 10 months before Anna Aristotelous took over in 2014. ![]()
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