CAT/OP/MLI/1 prisons, juvenile prisons and a prison farm). Above all, together they account for approximately 60 per cent of the country’s total prison population. Material conditions 44. The conditions of detention in all the establishments visited are deplorable. Most are dilapidated, date from colonial times, and are poorly maintained and totally unfit for use as places for the deprivation of liberty. In most cases, the cells are poorly ventilated and can thus be extremely hot, especially where they have a metal roof. Not even a minimum of light, whether natural or artificial, is provided and the cells do not have adequate indoor sanitary facilities. Moreover, detainees sleep, at best, on simple mats or dirty old mattresses. The sole exception in this regard is Ségou prison, where, thanks to the initiative of a private individual, the material conditions have been improved with the installation of running water and toilets in each room and the construction of a veranda in the yard where inmates can shelter from the sun. 45. The provision of soap, the only hygiene product distributed to detainees, is insufficient and irregular. Some inmates spend weeks or even months without soap and can therefore neither wash themselves nor do their laundry properly. Indeed, afflictions such as scabies and other parasites and skin diseases are common among prison inmates. 46. It is a source of concern that the same shortcomings observed in older prisons affect even recently opened facilities like the new wing of Bougouni prison, which has been operational since 2009 and where the cells have no sanitary facilities and are poorly ventilated, the courtyard is too small for the number of inmates and the security installations are inadequate (there is no watchtower and the walls are too low). 47. At Koulikoro, the fact that two detention wings with vastly different material conditions can be found in the same penitentiary establishment is hard to justify. Rwandan prisoners convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda are housed in a wing with highly satisfactory material conditions, including individual cells with toilets and air conditioning, a sports room, shops for personal necessities, a library, an infirmary, a room set aside for religious services, and externally contracted cooks. At the same time, detention conditions in the other wing for ordinary Malian convicts are appalling. 48. The State party should, as a matter of urgency, make arrangements to inspect the country’s prisons with a view to drawing up and implementing a plan to improve and standardize conditions in all prison cells and thus ensure that the rights of all detainees to decent conditions as regards ventilation, sanitary facilities, lighting and other services are respected and eliminate opportunities for putting pressure on inmates or extorting money from them. As the initiative taken by the private individual at Ségou prison shows, relatively modest outlays can significantly improve conditions of detention, and the Subcommittee recommends that the State party increase and guarantee NGO access to prisons. Overcrowding 49. The rate of overcrowding is extremely high and the problem is endemic in all the establishments visited. For example, the population of Bamako Central Prison is 300 per cent of capacity, and the ratio exceeds even 400 per cent in other prisons. This situation is directly linked to the particularly high number of persons held in pretrial detention, sometimes for as long as several years just for minor offences. The Subcommittee considers that such a degree of overcrowding amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, or even a form of torture when it is prolonged for months or years and combined with the lack of minimum acceptable material conditions, especially in the case of pretrial detention. The overcrowding is made all the more intolerable by the fact that all the prisons visited contain GE.14-41827 11