Index – Domestic – Prison business, what is it?

The Hungarian judicial system has been struggling for decades with the problems of poor prison accommodation and overcrowding.

The number of crimes has decreased significantly in recent years. While in 2010 more than 400,000 crimes were registered, in 2019 “only” 165,000 crimes were registered. The other issue is that, according to criminologists, half of the crimes committed remain hidden and do not appear in crime statistics. But at the same time, given that a significant proportion of cases may have remained hidden even ten years ago, the pressure on prisons has eased somewhat.

Fewer inmates, more inmates

According to the Alexandra Véger study, it is important to distinguish between overcrowding and overcrowding in relation to detention. Overcrowding shows that more detainees have been placed in a given institution than places, but congestion is a measure of the number of places in each district and, consequently, not the number of places but the way they are located.

The degree of saturation depends on the jurisprudence and the evolution of the number of places. The sanctions system of the new Penal Code has been clearly oriented towards tougher penalties. Related to this, as confirmed by the latest data from the Penitentiary Statistics Review, is that in addition to the declining prison population, detainees are serving their sentences in increasingly severe degrees and for longer periods of time.

This means, among other things, that the majority of those convicted do not feel in prison but in prison or in prison. The number of prisoners has increased particularly significantly in the last five years, from 3,869 in 2014 to 4,844 in 2019. The number of people serving life sentences has also increased from 283 to 382. At the same time, the number of detainees o unconvicted dropped from 4,610 to 2,709.

Some features of the national penitentiary application:

• the deprivation of liberty shall be carried out to the extent prescribed by the court, preferably in the institution closest to the place of residence of the convicted person;
• prison is a stricter method of execution than prison, prison is stricter than prison;
• imprisonment, after fines, is the second most common type of punishment;
• most of the national penitentiary institutions are in the 19-20. It was built at the beginning of the century.

Orientation of Strasbourg

In a 2011 ruling, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg dealt with the merits of the detention in Hungary. Subsequently, the court was almost inundated with cases of domestic detainees, which in turn resulted in the Strasbourg judges ruling in 2015 that the Hungarian state must take measures that comply with the European Convention on Human Rights and provide a solution to the prison system. existing structural problems.

On the basis of the Strasbourg guidelines, the regulations on detainees were amended in 2016. The new provisions provided, on the one hand, for the possibility of taking action against offenses and for compensation and, on the other, they sought to remedy the reported detention conditions by the court of Strasbourg.

Under recently introduced regulations, the detainee was compensated for detention conditions that violated fundamental rights.

It was deemed required by law

• lack of provision of the so-called living space (6 cubic meters / person),
• any other location related to the prohibition of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,
• in particular, the lack of separation from the toilet,
• damage caused by improper ventilation, lighting, heating, or insecticides.

In terms of infrastructure, in 2019 the 472-seat Kiskunhalas National Penitentiary was delivered as part of the capacity expansion program, followed by the new wings of the building last summer, which increased penitentiary capacity by a total of 2,750 in ten institutions.

Compensation for lack of hot water

According to the information of the Minister of Justice Judit Varga in February of last year, in the cases of compensation for prison conditions between 2017 and 2019:

• 12 680 decisions were made,
• which charged HUF 8.6 billion to the budget,
• 10 percent of the amounts awarded went only to the victims,
• 61 percent went to escrow accounts at law firms.

The fact that two of the Italian lynchers also received multi-million florins compensation sparked a huge response. The defendant in the first degree, Dezső H., for example, considered the state of the toilet in the prison, the lack of hot water and the fact that it was not adequately ventilated, unworthy. The court awarded almost five million florins in the case.

The other issue is that Dezső H. was not released with millions in his pocket, because the compensation was received by the family of Lajos Szögi’s teacher from Tiszavasvár. (As a reminder, Lajos Szögi was beaten to death in front of his two daughters on October 15, 2006 in Olaszliszka, Borsod County, for robbing an 11-year-old local girl with her car. condemned all).

Orban against the prison business

The bomb exploded a year ago. In an international press conference on January 9, 2020, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told a journalist: It is a matter that is very disturbing for the sense of justice of the people who

convicted criminals take millions of guilders from the Hungarian state, tax-paying citizens, as a result of the attachment of Hungarian lawyers, according to the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union. This is impossible. Yesterday I consulted the Minister of Justice, saying that we should not pay a penny, let’s restart because it is an impossible situation. We are not willing to pay the criminals.

Three weeks later, in his regular Friday morning interview with Kossuth Radio, the prime minister commented harshly on the reporter’s comment that, for example, György Magyar’s law firm had sued prisoners totaling 500 million of HUF in 420 cases:

I’ve been in politics for thirty years, and I’ve been prime minister for 14 years, I thought they couldn’t show me anything new, but I haven’t seen one like that before. Here’s this prison thing. People, calling themselves lawyers, build a business and file 12,000 lawsuits against their own country in a thoroughly proverbial case. Under the pretext of torture, sentences are squeezed out and money is shared with criminals, with 60 percent of the money going to these lawyers. I don’t know how these people got their degrees, but they definitely want to take action against the prison business.

Later, Parliament suspended the payment of the sums awarded in the compensation procedures with immediate effect in March, and also asked the government to develop a new regulatory system.

How much is that?

On his blog, György Magyar responded to what was said in Orbán’s interview:

Disclosure of such information is, by law, a major concern and illegal. This is not a matter of public concern, and it is not even possible to reveal which law firm represents which client. […] On the other hand, how much IM was forced to pay in general for the benefit of our clients based on court orders in accordance with the law passed by two-thirds of Fidesz is certainly a public interest figure. If the government is forced to pay due to misapplication of a law, which may be contrary to international treaties, it wastes taxpayers’ money. But listing which attorney has been involved in such lawsuits is extremely illegal.

János Bánáti, President of the Hungarian Bar Association In a world in motion In his published interview, he tried to pour clean water into the glass:

In compilations […] The amounts awarded are included, giving the false impression that it is entirely attorney’s income. The reality, on the other hand, is that the amount owed to the state or the victim is discounted first and only the rest goes to the client for the deposit of an attorney; From this, the attorney can account for the pre-set success rate of 20 to 30 percent. And this remuneration is not outrageously exaggerated, because if we count the large numbers up to one case, it turns out that we can count on a maximum of one and a half million forints per detainee; the condemned received roughly that amount of money per head. According to the news, we unfortunately do not have reliable data, the lawyer’s success rate is approximately 20 to 30 percent. I should add that at most one in two cases can be successful because, in practice, judges do not always award damages. So if we round it up and take the two million damages for the sake of simplicity, the 600 thousand HUF collected in one case is compared to the zero guilder income in the other case, which means an average of 300 thousand HUF per case.

Focus on compensation for victims

The government presented T / 13954 at the end of November last year. number “On the modification of certain laws necessary to eliminate abuses in compensation for prison congestion” adopted by Parliament on December 16.

Pál Völner, parliamentary secretary of state in the Justice Ministry, told the MTI that the new law will finally put an end to the prison business, which is turning into a multi-billion dollar industry, because the new regulation prioritizes the needs of victims. According to him, the reform of the law comprehensively improves the possibility of enforcing the rights of victims, at the same time that it offers the possibility of paying other claims against the convicted.

From the compensation of the sentences, the claims of the victim must first be addressed, followed by other debts. The compensation amounts cannot be transferred to the attorneys’ accounts; In the case of detained convicts, they can only be transferred to the escrow accounts of the convicted persons and, once released, to a payment account of which the convicted person is the sole account holder.

András Kristóf Kádár, co-chair of Hungary’s Helsinki Committee, called the end of prison overcrowding a major achievement for the Index:

With the prison compensation, the government came under heavy pressure and billions of guilders had to be paid to the detainees. Unlike the government communication, the amount was not because it was someone’s “business”, but because the Hungarian prison system was unable to guarantee the fundamental rights of many people for a long time. Light structure prisons were built this summer, which means 2-3 thousand new places, so it seems that the capacity of the Hungarian prison system will finally be adequate compared to the number of prisoners. We consider this to be an absolute success, because despite government claims to the contrary, our goal was not to pay as much money as possible as compensation to the Hungarian state, but to end decades of prison overcrowding..

(Cover image: Solti object of the National Penitentiary Institute of the State on October 26, 2016. Photo: Sándor Ujvári / MTI)