Report of the HRD on the activities of the National Preventive Mechanism in Poland in 2011 their country of origin and persons remaining in guarded detention centres for foreigners needs to be constantly monitored. 3. Recommendations of the National Preventive Mechanism Having carried out preventive visits in 2011, the Human Rights Defender, acting in the capacity of the National Preventive Mechanism239, issued recommendations which are aimed at the proper implementation of standards stipulated in international and national legislation. Below, the most important and most frequent recommendations issued for specific types of establishments have been presented, broken down into recommendations issued due to the fact that the Polish legal system lacks proper guarantees for observing the rights of persons deprived of their liberty or due to insufficient funding from the State’s budget (systemic recommendations), and recommendations whose implementation lies within competencies of the management of individual establishments. 3.1. Prisons and pre-trial detention centres Systemic recommendations ✓✓ Changing penal policy so that the judges would more often adjudicate alternative means of punishment than custodial sentences; ✓✓ Ensuring appropriate sanitary and hygienic conditions in cells housing more than a dozen persons; ✓✓ Ensuring without delay appropriate living conditions for prisoners, in accordance with national legal provisions and with accepted international standards or abandon the practice of placing detainees in pavilions which do not meet requirements related to proper standard of living; ✓✓ Providing health care services out of sight and hearing range of Prison Service officers; ✓✓ Restoring the original function of recreation rooms which are used as cells; ✓✓ Using medical rooms in accordance with their purpose, and excluding them from the list of rooms accounted for in assessing whether or not the facility is overpopulated; ✓✓ Informing detainees, e.g. as a part of cultural and educational activities or via the radio broadcasting system, about legal and practical consequences of judgments of the Constitutional Tribunal and of the European Court of Human Rights in cases which directly concern the detainees; ✓✓ Adapting some living cells to the needs of disabled prisoners; ✓✓ Equipping bunk beds with ladders and safety rails or exchange them for other beds whose design ensures safety for prisoners.  Hereinafter referred to as: “NPM” or “Mechanism.” 239 132