Some Strange Tales from Hungary's Jails

Sometime between 7:00 pm and midnight last Tuesday, as I and a half-dozen of my cronies sat playing poker in a suite in a local hotel, a member of Hungary's army of hoods and thieves burglarized a car belonging to one of our group, which had been parked smack dab in front of the hotel. I'd tell you the rest of the story, but my guess is you already know it. After a humiliating few hours in the local cop shop, my exhausted and exasperated friend went home, knowing he'll never get back what was stolen from him, and no doubt tried to get to sleep by thinking pleasant thoughts of the jerk who had ripped him off, or any random Budapest bandit, getting the tar beaten out of him by the cops before being dragged off to prison.

While I can't promise my friend that he'll ever get stuff back, I can report that the agreeable image of perps getting pounded by the police is not a fantasy. Last Thursday, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee - the local outpost of the international human-rights group - released a study on what happens to people when they are arrested in Hungary. And from what they have found, it sounds like Hungary's bad guys don't have it as good as you might think.

The study, which included 500 pre-trial detainees - roughly 10% of the country's not-yet-convicted jailbirds - resulted in some rather astounding findings and assertions. The most striking involves unlawful use of force by police, or what is more commonly known as "police brutality." According to the survey, almost one out of every five perps in Hungary suffers some sort of serious physical abuse while in custody.

"Our finding was that 17% of the people we talked to were subject what we would call police brutality," the author of the study, András Kádár, told me last Friday. "We found that most of the instances of police brutality take place around the time that the person is arrested. A smaller percent - around 5% - said they were mistreated during interrogation in a police facility."

Chill out: While most instances of police brutality in Hungary take place during arrests, pre-trial inmates face other, lengthier challenges.

According to Kádár, the study focused on three areas where Hungary's prisoners are often abused, or denied rights accorded perps in most other industrial democracies. The first two are heavy-handed tactics by policemen while making arrests and while interrogating prisoners, which Kádár stressed must be treated differently. While police brutality - such as taking a crack at a kid caught breaking into a car - is bad, it is generally done in the heat of the moment. Meanwhile, unlawful physical force and other extra-legal forms of pressure during interrogations are what he called "rational devices." Despite all the claims of abuse, less than a third of those who said they were knocked around sought any kind of official remedy. Most prisoners believe they are more likely to suffer retribution for filing a formal complaint than see justice served on over-zealous cops. Another problem is that the doctors who must verify that abuse has taken place are part of the police force.

To cut down on such abuse, the committee is urging the adoption of safeguards, including more training for policemen on the beat, and the mandatory videotaping of all arrests and interrogation, as well as a firm policy that a defense lawyer is present during formal interrogations. Apparently, a defense lawyer was on hand in only 30% of the cases the survey tracked.

Another issue relates to how defense lawyers are assigned to those who do not already have legal counsel of their own. Under the current "ex-officio" appointment system, a perp is automatically assigned a lawyer in certain cases, such as when the defendant is a juvenile, a foreigner, or when they are kept in custody because of the severity of the crime involved. But unless the defendant is declared indigent, the state only "fronts" the perp a lawyer; if they are found guilty, they are required to pay back the costs of their representation. (Not that it is that much; assigned defenders only get Ft 3,000 per hour.) And such lawyers are generally not around during the police investigation itself. Moreover, it's the police, and not the courts, that appoint the lawyer, and, as Kádár put it, "The police are not interested in having agile lawyers." Finally, a full third of those interviewed for the study said they had never even seen their appointed lawyer. Because of all this, the Helsinkites are proposing that the assigning and monitoring of such lawyers be handed over to an independent body.

Believe it or not, the one bright spot of the report involved prison itself, as only 1% of those in the study claimed to have been mistreated while locked down, at least by the authorities. (Many more complained of being abused by their fellow prisoners.)

But while the holding facilities for perps facing their day in court may be relatively benign, the amount of time spent behind bars by those awaiting trial is more than a bit sobering. On average, the subjects in the study were in pre-trial custody for nine months, while the longest had been inside for more than three years, which is even longer than I think my freshly victimized friend would have hoped for.

Despite these abuses and shortcomings, life in prison in Hungary is not entirely medieval. News portal index.hu recently ran an interesting story about a computer course being offered to jailbirds at Budapest's main prison.

Best of all, if you mess up, it doesn't knife you in the head

According to the piece, inmates with at least an elementary education are being allowed to attend a 20-hour-per-week course in computers, to earn something called a European Computer Driving License, or ECDL. Apparently, the cons are being schooled in a range of areas, from spreadsheets to multimedia and systems administration. While learning about bits and bytes, the inmates also have an opportunity to take the érettségi, the final exams Hungarians take before leaving high school.

The official spearheading the program, Major József Farkas, told Index that convicts receive a Ft 5,900 (€24) scholarship per course to motivate them. But one enrollee who is soon to be a parolee said the cash was incidental. "This money is not enough for anything anyway," said one inmate who is slated to get out in March after 12 years inside, adding that "at least people are not leaving this place being stupid."

Some expect that the course will lead to professional opportunities. Another convict, a programmer-mathematician doing time for car theft, is currently studying for an exam in Java, the much-in-demand programming language. "I received a programmer-mathematician degree from the University of Debrecen, then I finished the Java programmer training. But I didn't have time to take the state exam, because I was wanted." While the prison doesn't know to what extent students who are released get to use the high-tech skills they have learned, apparently 80%-90% of those who have attended the courses have stayed out of trouble.

Naturally, teaching criminals how to use computers is not an entirely risk-free proposition. "I'm going to be a hacker," said one felon with previous convictions for drug possession, embezzlement, blackmail and kidnapping, before quickly backtracking and saying he'll be sure to keep his nose clean when his regain his freedom, even if it means hauling boxes in a warehouse.

Finally, in other news involving computers and man's inhumanity to man, a royal ruckus was raised last Tuesday by the discovery of a computer game posted on the Internet in which players vied for the honor of killing as many Roma (Gypsies) as possible, with the ultimate goal of exterminating Hungary's Roma population. I didn't get a chance to check out the game before it was quickly taken down by the hosting service provider, but this is one of those rare things, like car-bombings or North Korean musical theater, that you really don't need to see firsthand to know is very, very bad.

What's interesting about the story is not that a few random dickheads ginned up a shoot-'em-up game with Europe's most reviled and persecuted minorities as fodder. Actually, I'm surprised such a game wasn't already a staple of the creepy netherworld Internet gaming, at least in Hungary. Moreover, given how raunchy and offensive some of the most popular commercially-available computer games out there are, the Gypsy-killing game isn't even all that shocking. (Note that in one of the most popular games over the past few years - Grand Theft Auto - you get points by stealing cars and shooting and running over random pedestrians.)

No, the shocking thing about the story is that a day after the hosting company yanked the game, they put it back up so that Hungary's two main commercial stations, TV2 and RTL Klub, could capture and broadcast screen shots of the vile thing. Apparently, 4,000 people had a chance to kill Gypsies while it was up on Tuesday, and another 1,200 came back for more racist slaughter in the hours that it was operational again on Wednesday. Now, thanks to the vivid TV exposure the thing has gotten, you can bet that people who never would have heard of the game are already swapping copies of the awful thing and are busy blasting away. And I thought the Internet was wicked.