Mara Kardas-Nelson writes for The Nation: Decades after independence, colonial-era laws have created a mass-incarceration crisis in Sierra Leone as poor citizens are thrown into prison for the smallest offenses.

A few summers ago, I met a young man in a prison in the center of Sierra Leone. The man was thin and tall, with a gentle demeanor and shy smile. His clothes were worn and smelled of stale sweat, which wasn’t surprising given that the prison, with its tin roof, small cells, and open courtyard, was baking in the mid-afternoon sun. Leaning in close, his voice quiet, the man explained that he had been in prison for a year and a half, although he hadn’t been found guilty of anything yet. He’d been waiting all that time just to have his case heard before a judge.

The man was accused of not paying off a $50 debt. He had taken on this debt, he explained, to pay an $80 traffic ticket the police had given him for not having a rearview mirror on his motorbike taxi, which he rode for a living. What poor luck, he mused: He had wanted to avoid jail time for the traffic ticket, so he took on the debt, but the debt had landed him in prison anyway. After 18 months, he still had no notion of when he might leave.

I met the man while visiting the Makeni Correctional Center, a busy prison for men housed in a low, whitewashed building just off the main highway at the edge of a bustling city. He was one of scores of prisoners accused of petty crimes—things like loitering, being a “public nuisance,” and traffic infractions. On the day I visited, around 15 percent of those at the facility had been detained for debt. Eighty percent had not yet had a trial.

With so many prisoners locked up for petty offenses and so many awaiting trial, the prison was severely overcrowded. The square building consisted of about a dozen cells, which surrounded a courtyard about the size of a small classroom. As I made my way inside, I was warned by a guard that it would be hot. (“Do you have water?” he asked.) But the combination of the tight, unshaded courtyard, the corrugated zinc roof, and the tiny number of cells housing scores of people made the prison not just hot but unbearably so. There was one clinic, a few “recreational areas,” a single bathroom, and one tiny kitchen. (I jotted in my notebook: “Looks awful. Smells awful. Food looks like it’s rotting. Everything awful.”) When I conducted interviews later that day, one prisoner told me, “They pack you like they pack fish in tins.” Another complained that the soup they had for dinner was “like empty water.” While the prison officially had space for 80 people, 184 were incarcerated there when I visited. All told, the prison was at 230 percent capacity.

Read the full article: The legacy of the British legal system continues to inflict misery in Sierra Leone