By Dina-Perla Portnaar

A society reveals its moral temperature through the order it imposes when the guilty are placed behind bars. Justice doesn’t rise from the ashes of neglected responsibility.

Cyprus is now being asked to look at an image it would rather quickly pass on. A police detention facility built for 40 holding around double. Men sleeping on floors. Cells kept shut because there’s no safe way to let detainees into the exercise yard. Fire evacuation plans that need updating. Regulations repeatedly violated. Warnings recorded in logbooks, passed upwards through the chain of command, and answered by the slowest reaction in public life, namely nothing.

The overcrowding at the Central Prison has spilled into police stations across the island. Police facilities are hosting convicted prisoners and those awaiting trial. Overcrowding is pressure converted into human behaviour. It breeds humiliation, resentment, violence and despair. It endangers detainees and officers alike. Mostly, it threatens public safety when people are let out of prison too early because of capacity issues.

Cyprus must urgently build new prisons before the next emergency makes the decision for it. Some will insist that money should be spent on rehabilitation, mental health, education and alternatives to custody. But prison still needs walls. A serious rehabilitation programme still needs a place in which it can operate. Compassion without capacity becomes improvisation, and improvisation in a prison is simply another name for danger.

A prison tells victims that the state has heard what happened to them. It tells offenders that their actions have consequences. It tells the public that liberty is precious because it isn’t limitless. It protects the public. When all of that collapses, the moral order becomes strangely inverted. The offender receives an improvised form of protection from the state, while the victim is left to live with the consequences alone.

This inversion is becoming one of Europe’s most problematic habits. Across the continent, governments have allowed prison capacity to lag behind the realities of crime, migration, organised criminal networks, and overloaded courts.

There’s nothing enlightened about a punishment so low that it cannot interrupt a pattern of harm. Nor is there anything progressive about a system that protects the comfort of the offender more carefully than the safety of the citizen. Justice is measured by whether people can walk home without fear, whether witnesses trust the courts, whether victims believe their suffering has entered the public conscience, and whether those who commit serious crimes understand that society hasn’t surrendered its right to defend itself!

Besides, prison must be firm enough to protect society and intelligent enough not to manufacture the next generation of offenders. Moving convicted prisoners into police cells doesn’t do that.

The question is whether the government will act while a larger crisis is still preventable, or wait until tragedy supplies the urgency that evidence failed to produce.

Cyprus isn’t condemned to repeat Europe’s errors. It can build enough capacity to make sentences credible, enough safeguards to make confinement lawful, and enough rehabilitation to make release meaningful. But it must begin. A state that knows its prison is full and waits for police cells to overflow is postponing responsibility and sending the bill to officers, detainees, victims and the public.

The question is not whether Cyprus can afford to build new prisons; the question is whether it can afford to let the old ones dictate the morality of the future. If Cyprus builds wisely now, its new prisons will not be monuments to a harsher society, but foundations for a safer and more honest one.