FOREWORD Since 2001, the Public Defender of Rights has been visiting prisons and addressing complaints against the conditions of remand in custody and imprisonment, and the actions of the Prison Service of the Czech Republic. In the past ten years, the Defender has also carried out systematic visits in the sense of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. In this period, the Defender issued a number of important reports concerning prisons. This  includes especially the 2006 report on visits to prisons in which the Defender summarised his findings obtained in high security and maximum security prisons, and the 2010 report on visits in remand prisons. The collected standpoints titled “Prisons”, published in 2010, was another milestone. In the foreword, JUDr. Otakar Motejl, the first Defender, recommended to let the Prison Service of the Czech Republic decide on the type of prison where a convict will serve his/her sentence, instead of this being determined by the court. He did not expect that his idea would become reality sooner than in a couple of years, but he felt compelled to reiterate it, with an increased sense of urgency. I support his recommendations. The Report you have before you summarises the findings from visits carried out by my colleagues in 2014 and 2015. We have visited seven facilities for men, predominantly classified in the category of medium and high security prisons. One could say that this is just an ordinary summary of multiple systematic visits, such as those published in the past. However, several facts indicate that there is nothing ordinary about the latest report. Experts and interested stakeholders have long known that the Czech prison system has been stagnant for a long period of time. In the 1990s, a significant progress was made in the prison system. Unfortunately, the pace of change has ground to a halt in the decades that followed. The Czech Republic’s prison population index has long been among the highest in Europe; Czech prisons have long been very overcrowded and even the artificial reduction of the number of prisoners after the presidential amnesty in 2013 did not reverse the unfavourable trend of growing prison populations. Czech prisons are designed to hold large numbers of prisoners in shared accommodation, which does not correspond to the modern approach to imprisonment. The remuneration of prisoners who work was set by a Government regulation in 1999 and has /3/ Mgr. Anna Šabatová, Ph.D. the Public Defender of Rights