Lebanon’s interior minister pushes for prison reform amid calls for radical change
Unless broad, structural reforms to the administration of prisons and military detention centers are passed in conjunction with changes to the criminal justice process itself, the reforms announced by Lebanon’s interior minister so far will likely only have a moderate impact on the penal system.
During an interview with the Lebanese paper L’Orient-Le Jour on Feb. 22, new Minister of Interior Raya al-Hassan stated that reforming Lebanon’s overcrowded and abuse-ridden prison system is high on her agenda.
“Indeed, some projects have been implemented by my predecessors, but much remains to be done,” Hassan said.
Since then, Hassan appears to have made progress on this front. On March 28, she and Maj. Gen. Imad Osman, the director general of the Internal Security Forces (ISF), announced a $2.5 million program funded by the US State Department’s Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
The program will train officers of the ISF to implement prison management plans, inmate classification practices and prisoner rehabilitation strategies according to internationally recognized standards, and comes on the heels of past assistance that the United States has given the ISF, which totals nearly $200 million.
