By Mulengera Reporters
The iron door creaked open slowly, revealing a dim, overcrowded cell where more than a dozen men sat shoulder to shoulder, their knees brushing.
The air was thick with heat and silence. This wasn’t an isolated case it was just one of many haunting images uncovered during the recent Joint Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) visit by the Justice, Law and Order Sector (JLOS) and development partners in Uganda’s Bunyoro sub-region.
At the heart of the findings was a truth too urgent to ignore: Bunyoro’s prison facilities are in a state of collapse.
From Masindi to Hoima and up to Kyangwali, the team encountered facilities straining far beyond their limits some built more than half a century ago, and many standing on borrowed land.
Inmates, including juveniles, are being held in dilapidated structures, some even in metal uniports thin-walled containers that trap heat like ovens under the scorching sun.
Staff quarters are no better, often reduced to graphite houses that offer little dignity or comfort for the officers who serve there.
“We have prisons that are still on Kingdom land,” said Dorothy Apimo, Principal Research Officer in charge of Research and Innovation at the Prisons Headquarters. “We can’t build permanent structures, and now the Kingdom wants the land back. So where do we take the prisoners?”
Her question hung heavy in the air, especially in places like Kyangwali, where the Officer in Charge, Moses Egau, reported having 41 inmates in a facility meant for far fewer.
The team went to Buliisa Prison and saw it with their own eyes the overcrowding, the heat, the lack of basic amenities.
Some prisons don’t even have space to expand, and others have no legal ground to do so.
Yet this wasn’t just a fact-finding mission. It was a reckoning. JLOS officials, development partners, and civil society groups walked through broken corridors and makeshift holding rooms not just to observe but to listen.
They sat down with children in remand homes, with women navigating complex justice systems, with refugees struggling for legal access in host communities.
What they heard was as troubling as what they saw: underfunded institutions, lack of trained staff, and fragile infrastructure.
But they also found pockets of resilience officers improvising, communities stepping in where possible, and a growing awareness that justice cannot exist where systems are literally falling apart.
“The prison doesn’t belong to us,” Dorothy said firmly. “It belongs to the community. And the community must come in. We need land. We need support. Because this… this is not what justice looks like.”
The report from the M&E visit will feed into the national performance review, but for those who were there, the numbers will never tell the full story.
They’ve walked the narrow paths between cells.
They’ve felt the suffocating heat of a uniport. And they’ve seen what happens when a system meant to rehabilitate becomes one that merely contains.
In the Albertine region which is probably Bunyoro, justice is not just delayed. It’s endangered.
And unless urgent action is taken from land allocation to infrastructure development the prison crisis won’t just remain. It will deepen.
Because justice, as everyone on that mission came to realize, begins not in courtrooms, but in the unseen corners of crumbling prisons. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
