“Life is different on this side of the walls and barbed wire. We live differently, there are different rules and all this causes psychological pressure,” said 40-year old Seyran and grew silent, wishing to limit his description of everyday life to these few words.

 It was difficult in general for this former public official and candidate of sciences to speak of his everyday life. He is serving a five-and-a-half year prison sentence and all his days at the Convicts’ Hospital are spent staring down the road to the home where his family is waiting for him. His mother is gravely ill and he recently lost a child, and the stress exacerbated a skin disorder he suffers from.

Seyran is one of the 255 convicts serving sentences at the Convicts’ Hospital, an institution under the Ministry of Justice. Sixteen of the “residents” are HIV-positive, 40 of them suffer from tuberculosis, and the others - ranging in age from 18 to 87 years old - have psychiatric disorders or other serious conditions.

The other convicts are in this institution only temporarily. They walk freely here within certain permitted hours during the day. The convicts can use the money they receive for work to buy cigarettes, sweets, juice and other items from a small kiosk located in the yard.

The are various cross-stones place all along the path to the cafeteria and the convicts have set up a small chapel on the adjacent wall. This scene - with people standing near the wall or squatting next to it, dressed in dark colors and fingering worry beads - was not nearly as strange as the cabinet in the doctors’ room of the hospital.

This cabinet contained metal and other heavy items that had been surgically removed from the bodies of the convicts, and each item had a note on it which bore the name of the person it had been taken from.

Judging by the contents of the cabinet, the items most frequently swallowed by convicts were nails and spoons. There were also thermometers, pens, knives, pieces of iron and other items, all of which had been extracted from their bodies. Artur, the doctors said, was the “hero” from whose body they once took out 15 spoons and a piece of iron tubing. Artur said that this was a common way of achieving a particular goal in prison. “You break off the head of the spoon, smooth it out and push it in,” he said, demonstrating in order to better explain to me, and added that it was more difficult to swallow iron tubing and that he had been forced to bend it and adjust it. He said that he was well aware of the level of danger associated with each item swallowed. He really did want to hurt himself, which is why he swallowed such a large number of metallic items.

“I still can’t imagine myself as a free man. How should I know what I’m supposed to do when I’m released? The world will definitely be different by then,” he said.

The convicts all complained about the new committee created by presidential decree. This committee most often rejected convicts’ pleas to be released before completing their sentences. Earlier, this right had been given to the administrators of detention centers.

Seyran, who has served out 1 year and 10 months of his sentence, had already appeared before the committee twice before and turned down. “The committee cannot know us well, so it’s a matter of luck that someone gets a positive answer and someone else gets rejected. It’s also insulting that the administration recommends your case, but they don’t take that into consideration,” said Seyran, but maintained hope that good fortune would smile upon him one day and he would be released.

“The Toughest Thing is to Work With Ill Convicts”

Arsen Afrikyan, the head of the Convicts’ Prison, said that their achievements included an improved system, renovated rooms, and better drug supply and that the construction of a new building was underway. When we asked him whether the convicts took care of the furniture in the hospital, Afrikyan replied, “As if it were their own,” and emphasized that it all depended on their upbringing. If they were took care of their own furniture at home then they would take care of the hospital as well, although he added that his experience showed that some of them were “uncontrolled” at home.

The deputy head of the detention center, Aram Khachatryan, noted that enormous changes had occurred since 2004 and that even the convicted patients had changed. In his words, there used to be cases in those days when patients with AIDS would extract their own blood in syringes and threaten the staff with it, even running after them sometimes. “We have incidents now too, but they are of a different kind. For example, we had an escape attempt in late August, when a 31-year old convict jumped from a window on the fourth floor where the tuberculosis patients stay. He jumped on to the guards’ tower, where we have armed personnel and then on to the yard of the printing house next door, from where he ran away. Naturally, we’d caught him by the next day. It then turned out that he had had no particular reason to escape,” said Khachatryan.
He said that his institution was unique in that the staff had to deal with ill convicts.

“When someone is ill his personality changes for the worse, even if he was very nice when he was healthy. He thinks that everyone should work at making things better for him, even if it means breaking rules,” said Aram Khachatryan, adding that the whole staff of 200 people worked as psychologists with these people. The roles of psychologists, lawyers and social workers were very important here.

Chief specialist of the Convicts’ Hospital, social worker Haik Tovmasyan, said that he tried to support convicts in getting disabled status and allowances and finding employment. He noted that 30-40% of the convicts expressed the desire to work, but that employment opportunities were limited.

“The wives, mothers and sisters of these people usually come to visit them. Sometimes only male relatives come to visit because the convicts don’t want their women to set foot in this place,” said Haik Tovmasyan, adding that there were convicts whom nobody visited because they “lived here” - they were released from prison, committed another crime and returned, becoming the “big shots” of the place.

Head legal expert Narine Mikoyan said that the convicts who came to the hospital were well aware of their rights even in the detention center and that they all wanted to have their sentences mitigated by appealing to the European Court. According to her, they would often get her involved in cases where they felt that they had certain rights.

“We had two marriages this year and one divorce was registered,” said Narine, citing another social indicator.

At the Convicts’ Hospital, it is often difficult to calm those convicts who had been rejected for early release by the committee.

“We have a convict with AIDS who had been rejected by the independent committee. He sewed his lips together and declared a hunger strike. Imagine, I was sitting talking to him as the blood flowed - I understood that I was not in contact with him physically, but a drop of his blood could fly into my eye. It is especially difficult to calm them down early on,” said Khachatryan.

He interpreted the case from two different angles. “On one hand, it’s a case of national security and there is great risk in considering whether someone who has been convicted 8 times and released early twice may finally have been rehabilitated. Our experience shows that they usually return 4-5 months later. On the other hand, there are some people who have definitely changed and are now trustworthy, you can feel it.”

It should be noted that since the beginning of 2007 to this day, 82 cases of conviction have been reviewed at the Convicts Hospital for possible early release, but 75 of them have been presented to the independent committee. The committee has approved the release of 20 convicts, who have all then been set free by the court.

Shushan Harutyunyan