Employees of Tunisian prisons engage in drug dealing in prison

Many Tunisian and international reports and delegations asserted that Tunisian prisons violate all international standards, notably overcrowded as some of them at 200% of their real capacity, while authorities say one third of the inmates are there only for marijuana use.Under Tunisia’s Law 52, authorities can carry out random urine tests that can lead to convictions for marijuana use or possession and an automatic one-year prison sentence. Law 52 convictions have been on the rise, going from just a few hundred to several thousand over the last 15 years. But parliament is set to debate reforms that could cut down on overcrowding. Overcrowding remains a major problem in Tunisian prisons and preventive detention centres, a report of the Office of the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Human Rights concluded.According to local and international reports, alcohol, cigarettes and drugs are surreptitiously exchanged inside prisons, but that many of the prisons employees are involved in the drug dealing network in prisons, and they are in charge of selling drugs to prisoners for huge sums of money.