The Pandemic Ended. The Cells Did Not Change: Somalia’s Prisons in 2022
- COVID-19 showed that Somalia’s prisons could not protect anyone inside them: overcrowded cells, shared sanitation, almost no medical care.
- By 2022 the emergency measures had ended, but the conditions had not changed. The U.S. State Department’s 2022 report still recorded tuberculosis and cholera outbreaks, especially at Mogadishu Central Prison, and said information on death rates in prisons was unavailable.
- Most prisons still had no ombudsperson (an independent official who handles prisoners’ complaints), and federal law did not clearly allow prisoners to submit complaints to a court without censorship.
- 2022 brought a new president and a new director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), and familiar promises of reform.
- OPR’s December 2022 assessment counted 1,540 convicted prisoners at Mogadishu Central Prison and 270 at the Mogadishu Prison and Court Complex, plus 1,134 people held awaiting trial (on remand), in a prison designed for 400 to 500.
The pandemic did not create Somalia’s prison crisis. It made it visible. The World Health Organization warned that people in prisons and other places of detention live in close proximity to one another, conditions that facilitate the transmission of disease, and Somalia’s prisons had the conditions that warning describes. Detainees live in congested cells where even minimal distance is impossible. Toilets are shared, clean water is scarce, ventilation is limited and hygiene is poor. Unlike people outside, detainees cannot isolate at home, and once the virus enters a prison, containing it is extremely difficult.
Overcrowding. In some prisons inmates sleep in close proximity, sometimes sharing small spaces with dozens of others. If one prisoner or staff member is infected, the virus can move through a cell block within days. Quarantine and isolation are hard to arrange without space or medical infrastructure, and human rights organisations warned that prison outbreaks could become humanitarian disasters.
What was done. Several facilities in Mogadishu installed handwashing stations and briefed detainees and staff on prevention. A prisoner at Mogadishu Central Prison described awareness sessions in which detainees were taught to wash their hands before entering rooms and shared spaces. These measures mattered. But shortages of hygiene supplies and overcrowding continued, and in many prisons physical distancing was not merely difficult, it was impossible.
People moving in and out. New detainees arrive regularly, and officers, health workers and visitors move between prisons and surrounding communities. That is a second route for infection, into prisons and back out to neighbourhoods.
Family contact. Visits were suspended to reduce the risk. That protected public health, but it left detainees separated from relatives who often supply their food and medicine. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) worked with authorities so detainees could keep in touch with families by phone during and after the pandemic period. I set out the 2020 and 2021 detail in When the Virus Reached the Cells and A Second Year Behind Closed Doors.
Who was most at risk. Elderly detainees and those with underlying conditions faced the greatest danger: malnutrition, untreated illness and psychological stress already weaken immunity. Prisoners with disabilities, chronic respiratory illness, diabetes or heart disease were especially exposed. The psychological toll was serious as well. Fear of infection, cut visits, uncertainty about medical care and prolonged confinement produced anxiety and distress in a system with extremely limited mental health services.
International support. The ICRC distributed COVID-19 prevention information and hygiene items to detainees and staff in 22 places of detention across the country, including the central prisons in Mogadishu, Kismayo, Baidoa and Garowe, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) supplied hygiene commodities, masks, gloves and infection-control guidance to Mogadishu Central Prison, the Mogadishu Prison and Court Complex, and the central prisons in Baidoa, Garowe, Kismayo and Beledweyne. This help was meaningful and insufficient. External support can supplement government investment in prison infrastructure, medical staff and reduced overcrowding. It cannot replace it.
The test of a recovery is whether the conditions that made COVID dangerous had changed by the time it stopped being an emergency. The available record for 2022 says they had not.
The U.S. State Department’s 2022 report found that disease outbreaks, such as tuberculosis and cholera, continued to occur, particularly in overcrowded prisons such as the Mogadishu Central Prison, that such outbreaks could be life-threatening in the rainy season, and that information on death rates in prisons and pretrial detention centres was unavailable. It also found that most prisons had no ombudsperson, and that federal law did not specifically allow prisoners to submit complaints to judicial authorities without censorship, though Somaliland law did.
The data gap matters as much as the outbreaks. Two years after the pandemic began, there were still no public death figures for the prison system.
OPR’s own assessment for 2022 puts numbers on the crowding. A survey with the Ministry of Justice and the Custodial Corps (the prison service) counted 1,540 convicted prisoners at Mogadishu Central Prison (1,482 men, 17 women and 41 boys) and 270 at the Mogadishu Prison and Court Complex, with 1,134 people on remand at the central prison. The prison was designed for 400 to 500 people. OPR noted that populations rose in 2022 as the government launched a renewed campaign against al-Shabaab, and that young men arrested in Bay, Bakool and Lower Shabelle were often held far from families, with some receiving no visitors at all. Some prisoners had completed their sentences and were still held, though OPR gave no number for 2022. OPR’s August 2022 situation report estimated about one guard for every 150 prisoners.
Health conditions carried over from the pandemic years. OPR found no isolation and no medication for tuberculosis in Mogadishu’s prisons, cholera and diarrhoea outbreaks linked to seasonal heat that caused deaths and hospitalisations, no ambulance in any medical unit, and roughly 80 women held without gender-specific quarters. Across the facilities inspected in Mogadishu, Kismayo and Baidoa, 38 percent of observations found inmates lacking medicine or medical attention. A 2022 study cited by OPR found hygiene unacceptable in 24 percent of observed cells, and over 60 percent of facilities lacked sleeping amenities. Only 60 percent of those in custody received three meals a day. Prisoners depended heavily on relatives, clans and aid organisations, and OPR described disease as the leading cause of death in custody, with mortality data largely inaccessible.
OPR’s report does not give 2021 populations, so it cannot say by how much the numbers changed in a year. What it records is that the pandemic-era conditions were still in place, and that OPR staff, who had helped distribute masks and sanitiser in Mogadishu’s prisons during the pandemic, were by then documenting the same shortages.
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud returned to the presidency in May 2022, and Mahad Salad became director of NISA in August. Reform announcements were nothing new: in December 2018 the government said it would convert the Godka Jilacow prison into a training facility for intelligence officers, and reports of its continued use as a prison followed. In my assessment, promises to close or repurpose secret detention sites in this period moved personnel and locations without ending isolation.
Pressure on journalists continued alongside. In October 2022, NISA officers attacked Goobjoog television reporter Liban Abdi Warsame and camera operator Najib Farah Mohamed while they were conducting interviews in Mogadishu.
In Somaliland, the administration intensified its use of detention ahead of delayed elections. By late 2022, tensions in the Sool region led to a security crackdown, and I documented cases of local elders and youth organisers being rounded up and transferred to high-security cells in western Somaliland, far from their home regions. That separated them from clan-based legal protections and from familiar lawyers, and set the stage for the war of 2023.
By the end of 2022, three things were unchanged: the crowding that made COVID lethal, the absence of medical care that made it untreatable, and the absence of independent oversight that meant nobody could say how many people had been harmed. The pandemic had passed. The vulnerabilities had not.
The lesson of COVID-19 was not that prisons need hygiene campaigns. It was that prisons need to be reformed before the next crisis makes their failures visible again.
OPR calls for immediate and sustained investment in prison healthcare, including qualified medical personnel, disease screening, emergency response capacity and medical isolation facilities; reduction of overcrowding through mandatory time limits on pretrial detention, wider use of alternatives to prison, and release of elderly, ill and low-risk detainees; standing emergency health protocols for every detention facility, with independent oversight; restoration and maintenance of family contact as a human right and not a discretionary privilege; and long-term international investment in prison reform that goes beyond emergency response to address structural deficiencies.
How to cite this piece
Abukar, Ismail, for the Organization for Prisoners' Rights. (2022). The Pandemic Ended. The Cells Did Not Change: Somalia’s Prisons in 2022. Mogadishu: OPR. https://opr.org.so/news/covid-prisons-2022/