DOC/OS(XXXIII)/324c/I 10 Findings The prison system In Namibia there is a Ministry of Prisons and Correctional Services — Namibian Prison Service (NPS). Enshrined in the Constitution, NPS was created in 1995 and its aims are, among others, to reform the prison system inherited from the colonial regime, and the social rehabilitation of offenders. NPS has around 1500 staff, some of whom already held their positions before the independence of the country in 1990. The Ministry has a Permanent Secretary in charge of the general administration and finances. The prison administration is governed by the Prison Law of 1998. The prison administration manages 13 establishments: four maximum security prisons, two open prisons (prison farms), one juvenile centre and district prisons. There is no female prison, but special units within the bigger prisons. Some regions do not have any prisons and the inmates have to serve their sentence in prisons far from their homes (those originating from the Caprivi region, for example). As the E. Nepemba juvenile centre is under construction, at the moment it only receives a small number of juveniles. Other juveniles are being kept in special units while waiting to be transferred. All these establishments receive mainly convicted prisoners. It should be noted that at the time of the Special Rapporteur's visit, one prison (the prison of Grootfontein) was being used as a remand centre, having 125 detainees on remand from the Caprivi region who were allegedly involved in an attempted to secede that region from the rest of the country. The prison budget represents 1.6% of the country's total budget, which is of the order of 86 million Namibian dollars (NAD). It should be noted that sometimes prisoners are not all subjected to the same legal regime. In fact, some members of the prison administration consider — it is an incorrect interpretation, which is not shared by the Ombudsman's office — that prisoners sentenced before the Prison Law of 1998 came into force are not subject to that law. They are still subjected to the previous regime, namely, the prison law of 1959. This conflicting interpretation is the cause of misunderstandings regarding the application of parole in particular, with some staff subjecting prisoners sentenced before 1998 to the 1959 law and then retracting this after discovering that the 1998 law supersedes the former one. The Special Rapporteur recommended this should be corrected so that inmates are treated equally. Police stations are under the authority of the Ministry of Home Affairs. There are 154 of these, of which 18 are border posts, receiving the majority of people in police custody (48 hours as a rule) or on remand, whatever its duration. If there are too many prisoners and there are not enough police cells, those in excess may be transferred to the nearest prison, if it is not also already overcrowded. This is not without problems as in prisons, for instance, only certain inmates have the right to receive visits from their families whereas, in principle, all those on remand have this right in police stations. It has not been clearly established which regime is to apply. The General Policy Paper mentioned above recommends that in future prisons should receive people who have been remanded in custody. The Special Rapporteur seriously recommended that GPP recommendations are put in practice to assure uniformity. Conditions of detention Prison population It was not possible to establish a figure for the total population of convicted prisoners and those on remand. The figures for these two categories held in prison were