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Manama: A social activist has urged the Bahraini authorities to speed up procedures to allow conjugal visits in prison, saying that they would help prisoners keep their sanity and preserve them from immoral deviations.
"Moral depravations exist in every prison in the world. The low moral and religious ethics and the non-existence of special places for private conjugal visits thus depriving married inmates from intimate moments with their wives often result in prisoners engaging in ominous sexual deviations," Lamees Dhaif yesterday told Gulf News.
Conjugal visits maintain family bonds and subsequently strengthen the inmate's chances for rehabilitation and lessen rates of problems both inside and outside the prison, she explained.
"We must not allow this descend into immoral behaviour to take place simply because we do not have enough foresight and cannot learn from the experience of other societies," Lamees said.
"Our jail officials need to emulate the example of Western and Arab countries in allowing prisoners to spend private moments with their wives and ward off any risks of behavioural deviation or moral depravation. Couples need to be together alone and away from others. Any attempt to resist this natural tendency in fact transforms the individual punishment into a collective sentence that includes the wives," she said.
Scholars from Al Azhar, one of the most important religious institutions in the Muslim world, have waded into controversy after they called for regular "conjugal times", arguing that the prison sentence should not also be against the innocent spouse.
Bahrain last year said that it would build four villas to allow prisoners with "satisfactory behaviour records" to spend time with their wives as part of a prisoner's family day. Morocco has been facilitating marriages between male and female inmates sentenced to long prison terms after the authorities discovered a high rate of Aids among prisoners, according to the activist.
"Recently, the Moroccan authorities allowed the marriage of a man and woman sentenced to life in prison. I can also cite the Saudi example in which the authorities have built special places to allow prisoners to spend a few hours in private with their wives at least once a month," Lamees said.
Incentive: Jordan, Kuwait has plans
Jordan in March and Kuwait in April said that they were looking into allowing conjugal visits as an incentive for better social re-integration and the preservation of family bonds. In the US, conjugal visitation programmes, known as the 'extended family visit,' are exercised within set out regulations under the rules of detention. Inmates, for instance, must be in a low or medium security prison, must not have recent rule violations and must go through a mandatory health screening.
To qualify for the visit, the spouse must be on the prisoner's approved visitor list, provide proof of relation, pass a background check, submit to a search and dress appropriately.
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