The building site is located not far from the administrative border between Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kvemo Kartli, close to a major railway and motorway that link the region with Tbilisi.

The project has caused considerable worry and anxiety in the region, as neither ordinary residents nor local authorities know anything about what kind of prison is being built there, and when and why that very location was chosen for it.

According to the Ministry of Justice of Georgia, the project began a month ago, but local residents claim that it commenced much earlier. When we arrived there, the building site was idle, guarded by two watchmen recruited from among local residents.

According to Salome Makharadze, Head of the Press Service of the State Penitentiary Department, the prison has the capacity to house 3,000 inmates and comprises a pre-trial detention sector and a colony. In her words, 4 million GEL have been appropriated from this year’s central budget for the project. The rest of the funds will be allocated next year. The prison is supposed to start functioning in slightly more than a year.

The building company Satkha Ltd. has been chosen and licensed by the Ministry of Justice to build the prison, according to Mrs. Makharadze. She explained that there was no tender, as a prison is a specific institution and such kind of projects must be classified.

“We have picked this location for the prison because of its proximity to judicial bodies - the court and the prosecutor’s office. We are not going to waste time and energy conveying suspects back and forth,” Mrs. Makharadze said.

There are 17 prisons in Georgia, most of them in the vicinity of big cities: Batumi, Kutaisi, Rustavi, and Tbilisi. There are no prisons in eastern and southern Georgia.

Five prisons have been constructed or renovated in Georgia over the last two years. There are plans to build three new jails in the country in the next two years. According to official data of the Ministry of Justice, some 20,000 Georgian citizens were behind bars as of October 2007. Penal Reform International (PRI), an international organisation focusing on penitentiary reforms, estimates that the number of prisoners in Georgia is increasing by 400 inmates every month.

In the words of Mary Murphy, the director of the PRI Caucasus office, instead of reforming the national judicial system, the Georgian government set out to increase the number of prisoners. Prisons are overcrowded in Georgia and imprisonment conditions are dire there, she emphasised. In some prisons, for instance, several inmates have to share a single bed.

The Georgian government has recently made steps to bring the country’s penitentiary system into line with international standards. Namely, the penitentiary budget has increased almost six-fold in recent times and reached 67 million GEL.

In Mrs. Murphy’s words, PRI knew well in advance about the Georgian government’s plan to build a new prison in eastern Georgia but it was not until three weeks ago that the organisation learnt about its exact location, i.e. the Ninotsminda municipality. Mrs. Murphy is surprised by the choice of the place. Under international norms, in her words, prisons are, as a rule, built in areas with adequate infrastructure - water supply, heating, roads - and usually near big cities. She believes that building a prison in a region that has never been home to penitentiary institutions is a very costly undertaking.

According to Salome Makharadze, Samtskhe-Javakheti was selected as the place for a new prison as early as last year by the decision of an ad hoc commission of the Ministry of Justice. The early decision allowed allocating construction funds from this year’s state budget. However, local residents learnt about the new prison near the village of Sagamo only after the onset of construction.

“At first we thought that it was simply a landscaping project. Afterwards, when heavy machinery arrived, we inquired the builders about the work and they replied that a prison would be constructed here,” Hamlet Ghulidjanyan, a resident of Sagamo, recalled.

Like the majority of the local residents, Hamlet Ghulidjanyan scraps a living from farming. In his words, the new prison is being built right on the pastureland. In addition, the building site cut off local farms from access routes to nearby hills where farmers make hay, basic cattle feed in wintertime.

“If the coming season is rainy, there will be no chances of transporting hay from the hills - no car will be able to make its way to the area,” Mr. Ghulidjanyan emphasised.

In the words of two local residents, the prison occupies their former lands. They were promised similar lands in other places in exchange but one of them, Tirun Ghulidjanyan, claims that the new land plot is too far from the village and he would rather get money as compensation.

Officials of the State Penitentiary Department assured that after the prison is complete, the department would launch a contest to recruit prison personnel from local residents.

“It would have been much better if they had built a dairy factory here. After all, cattle farming is the main business in the village,” Heghine Nalbandyan, a local schoolteacher, said. “They think that the village is too small to offer any resistance. They are strong, powerful and throw their weight around”.

Like many other local residents, Heghine Nalbandyan fears that once the prison begins to function, crime will increase in the region. “What will become of us after they build the prison? What will happen if, say, a couple of jailbirds escape from the cage? I am afraid we may suffer the fate of the Armenians of Sumgait, or even twice worse,” Mrs. Nalbandyan argues.

Mary Murphy views such fears as the legacy of the Soviet past. In her words, although these fears were well justified in Soviet times, the present situation in Georgia is noticeably better in this respect.

She believes that the Georgian government’s activities can be assessed only positively from this viewpoint: authorities have cracked down on corruption and other negative factors normally associated with prison. So this perception is rather outdated, she says.

The start of the prison project came as a surprise for the local government as well. The chairman of the local council (sakrebulo) and the municipality gamgebeli (head of the municipal administration) both said that they had been unaware of the project until the builders arrived in the area. “I know nothing at present. I was only asked by the Ministry of Justice to map the area designated as the prison territory” - Suren Mosoyan, the Chairman of Ninotsminda region, said.

In his opinion, it’s no use protesting against the project inasmuch as the decision to build the prison was made at the governmental level. “It is a governmental decision. New prisons are built all over the country - it’s a national project. The state decided that one of them must be in Ninotsminda region. That is why there is no point in looking for an explanation why the prison is built right here - it is a state issue,” Monosyan said.

Stepan Yeranosian, the sakrebulo chairman, says that he has a lot of questions about the new prison. He believes that it is necessary to ask questions and seek answers.

In his words, there is no official information about the project. “They simply came and began to work. It is unclear who is in charge of the construction and who ordered it. Nobody knows whether there is a project design or not, and whether environmental impact assessment, or other examination, of the project was carried out,” Mr. Yeranosyan emphasised.

One of Mr. Yeranosyan’s questions is about the plan to develop a national park in Ninotsminda region. He fears that the plan may be suspended if the prison really emerges here.

Over the several last years Armenian and Georgian environmental authorities have been promoting the idea to set up a national park on the lands adjacent to the Armenian-Georgian border. National legislations were amended accordingly and a preliminary blueprint was prepared for European donors.

The national park is supposed to protect rare species of birds, which use the lakes in Javakheti, including Lake Sagamo, as stopover points during their seasonal migration. According to Thea Barbakadze, Head of the planning office of the Department of Protected Territories under the Ministry of Environmental Security and Natural Resources, the Ministry will soon name the international organisation in charge of the park development project.

Officials of the State Penitentiary Department said that they had no idea whether the local government had been notified beforehand about the decision to build the prison. In the words of Salome Makharadze, such decisions are usually coordinated with various governmental agencies and all problems and grievances are discussed in detail. However, Thea Barbakadze also appeared unaware that a new prison is going to be built in the area, even though she is responsible for planning the national park.

“The lakes must be surrounded by protected territories, several hundred metres wide. If the prison is outside the protected territory, there will be no problems,” Mrs. Barbakadze said. “But I doubt that the prison will be a pleasant sight for tourists,” she added.

Special to Hetq