Prisons

Subjects rise and fade here in Lebanon. A hundred a day, a thousand. But they all rise and fade. And when they rise, they rise. They become the talk of the town. Everyone has an opinion and everyone passes judgement on the opinions of others and everyone thinks the matter to be significant. 

And after all the excitement, the subject fades. Just as it rises into such intense focus, it fades into near oblivion. What was the talk of the hour just last hour, is no longer a pressing matter. The rise of something more important shadows all that was before. 

And so the cycle continues. 

I remember not so long ago, there was an uprising in a Lebanese prison. I was one of the many first aiders dispatched to the prison and got the chance to assist several wounded inmates. More interestingly, I got the chance to listen to one inmate who had suffered a blow to the knee, as he explained how the prison politics worked on the inside and what it was like living in a jail. 

A quick search on the prison status in Lebanon in Google (you don't even have to dig that deep), will spit out results of articles related to torture in our prisions, overcrowding, mal-treatment, mal-nutrition, mis-this and mal-that... And at the time of the uprising I mentioned earlier, the media were having a field day with these facts and statistics. 

Now that the subject has been swept under the rug, I wonder what has changed in the status of Lebanese prisons.