A group of 25 young members of the Jaliva prison choir sing in chorus: "I would rather love than be loved. I would rather give than receive. I would rather understand than be understood." The group practices in a community room in the more than 100-year-old prison near the Romanian capital Bucharest, while countless sparrows build nests on the high protective walls outside.
The somewhat artificial-sounding chorus is meant to show visitors that the prisoners are on the road to rehabilitation from drug abuse. The young men in the group are determined to wean themselves off heroin, cocaine and other addictive drugs without the help of medication and only with the assistance of group psychotherapy, art therapy and sport.
But is such an objective even possible? "Yes, if the willpower is there," says Catalin Ionescu, a 32-year-old serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for extorting money from someone so he could pay for his heroin and cocaine consumption. After three months of good behaviour during therapy and lectures, Ionescu is confident that he will be able to begin a new life following his release.
"I want to get a job and start a family," he says. Ionescu is getting help from his parents, who have organised a job for him in their small grocery shop in Bucharest. However, not all prisoners who detox without the help of medication have the benefit of such a welcoming family environment. Many face the danger of lapsing back into drug use following their release.
"The majority of heroin-related deaths occur within two weeks of release from prison because of an overdose," explains experienced Austrian prison doctor Joerg Pont, who is in Jilava prison as part of a visit organised by the Council of Europe. Pont is an advisor for the Council of Europe and advocates therapy with narcotic substitutes such as methadone.
That's because junkies who have managed to detox from heroin without methadone are generally left to their own devices, says Pont. The consumption of hard drugs and the associated criminality associated with their use first became noticeable as a problem in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
In Romania, 7.5 per cent of prisoners admit to being drug addicts, while in Serbia, where there is no drug therapy programme in place in prisons, the figure is estimated at around 30 per cent. The Council of Europe discussed the problem recently at a conference in Bucharest and experts from more prosperous Western European nations such as Switzerland, Germany and Austria reached the conclusion that prisons in Eastern Europe were in many cases using more advanced methods to tackle the problem of prison drug abuse.
Romania and neighbouring Moldova were unanimously praised for handing out clean needles to drug addicts in prisons, which has led to immediate and impressive results in health terms. For example, there was not a single new case of HIV infection in a Moldovan prison last year, says Robert Teltzrow from the Council of Europe's Pompidou Group, which combats drug abuse and drug trafficking.
After all, there is not a prison in the world where drugs cannot be smuggled into, points out Professor Heino Stoever, Director of the Institute for Addiction Research of the Technical University of Frankfurt am Main, (ISFF). "Every politician is afraid to do something for the prisoners," adds Hans Wolff, head of the Unit of Penitentiary Medicine at the University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland.
However, research has proved that the free distribution of needles does not promote drug use and contributes to peaceful conditions in prisons. Wolff is one of the champions of syringe exchange programmes in Swiss prisons. He has been unable to manage its implementation throughout Switzerland, with the programme currently only in operation in the Geneva canton, which is considered less conservative than the rest of the country.
Spain is currently the leader in this area, while France has only recently given the green light for its first syringe exchange pilot programme. Drug-related offences account for between 15 and 25 per cent of all convictions in Europe that result in a custodial sentence, says sociologist Stoever. Of these prisoners, anything from 10 to 42 per cent are regular drug users while up to 26 per cent come into contact with drugs for the first time in prison.
A startling 21 per cent of these first-time users inject heroin and 9 in 10 become addicts as a consequence. Ionescu hails from a middle-class Romanian family and says that he only ended up taking heroin because of the "bad company" he kept. The radical detox programme he signed up to, which includes complete isolation from drug-taking prisoners, was a result of advice from his parents.
"The temptation to be an addict is very great in prison," says Ionescu. Ionescu depicted the results of the drug programme in a painting during his art-therapy class that shows a straight red line on a black background, similar to the heart-rate monitor reading of a dead person. "Don't transform your life in just one direction," he has written below it in English, the language Ionescu learned during his therapy.
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