British festival attendees who have spent months incarcerated in a Romanian prison have spoken of the “hellish” circumstances there, including aggressive inmates fighting with knives and infested quarters with rats and insects.
Up to twelve British nationals were detained as they went to the Sunwaves music festival in April of last year, and they are currently being held captive in a jail located in the east coast city of Constanta.
Among them is 29-year-old Ethan Gill, who was found guilty of narcotics trafficking and sentenced to six years in prison.
The former Birmingham tool design engineer claims that the jail system treats him and the other prisoners like “animals.”
Images from within depict squalid and claustrophobic circumstances, with convicts sharing small, antiquated bunk beds and unclean bathrooms and toilets.
Ethan said from prison, ‘It’s appalling. The only toilet is a hole in the ground, which is rarely cleaned.
‘For breakfast, we get a single slice of salami; for lunch, we get soup, which is just water and carrots; our calorie intake is minimal.
‘The lights are on 24 hours a day, you have to cover your eyes just to sleep, the water comes out of the tap brown.
‘There’s bed lice everywhere and we only get two showers per week.’
Ethan worked as a tool design engineer at top car companies, but he says his life has been turned upside down since the arrest, and there is no end in sight.
He says that when he was in Constanta, he was with another guy who supplied narcotics to someone.
Moments afterwards, armed cops stormed their hotel, which made him think the buyer was an undercover cop.
According to Ethan, twelve Britons were taken into custody, among them Jay Anthony Cabrera Fletcher, a resident of north London.
Jay’s brother Jordan said, ‘They are all trying to keep their spirits up, but it’s very hard.
‘Jay says there are rats and cockroaches, and it’s so cold at night they have to sleep with jackets on.’
Ethan added, ‘It’s all been so traumatic; the first three months here, I was just in a state of shock.
‘There have been knife fights, stabbings, there’s also a lot of self-harm; one guy slit his own throat, it’s so common.’
Ethan has forked out £20,000 on legal fees for their lawyer, while his mother, despite being 63, has gone back to working full-time in sales support to support him.
Life choices do have consequences, but they have to be done humanely, with proper drinking water, not water that comes out of the tapes brown in colour.
It must have come as a shock to these youths to see how the other half live, no wonder these people want to come to the UK to live.
But you’d be mistaken if you thought dining in prison was a five-star experience—it’s definitely neither opulent nor healthful, but then it’s prison; it’s not supposed to be 5 stars, but then people shouldn’t have to sleep with lice or bed bugs in their beds—it’s called humanity, and if we don’t have that, then we may as well go back to being apes in the jungle.
Whatever their form, drugs are drugs, whether they come from alcohol, cannabis, or smoking, and they should all be illegal. It is impossible to have two sets of morals; if you are against drugs, you should also be against alcohol and everything else. However, some individuals choose not to recognise this.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 