The prisons of Malawi are overpopulated to such an extent that it poses a serious threat to the physical and mental well-being of inmates. The Mundende Research Project aims at a relief of the prison system. The very word ‘mundende’ means ‘in prison’ in the local Chi-chewa tongue. Together with our funders we have set the goal of exploring posibilities to diminish the strain on the carceral system by looking at the ones who desire this most: the youngsters.
Young inmates of Zomba prison
In Malawi, a small country situated between Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia in the eastern part of Afrika, we are working with a variety of willing NGO`s, ensuring the long-term and gradual development of a program that`s looking for ways to implement alternative sanctions, short-sanctioning and rehabilitative schemes so that imprisonment becomes the last resort. Just as magistrates can decide to send offenders to prison they can also decide to keep juveniles and petty criminals out of prison. This will give a different future perspective for younger inmates, further reduce the congestion of prison cells and give additional relief to the older inmates.
The Mundende Research Project has been officially authorized to conduct research inside the prisons of Malawi. Through ethnographic research this project aims to identify the ways and means to keep juveniles out of the Malawi prison system, or offer them an alternative for locking the youngsters among the elder inmates. Eventually we will help and advise the NGO`s already working inside the institutions with the development of a factbased and demand-driven long term solution. At the same time we pay attention to the general conditions and demands of the prisonpopulation as a whole.
