Shuffling Papers

In three weeks, we are hosting another Pepperdine Prison Project in Uganda. We will host US law students and lawyers who will work with members of the Ugandan Judiciary to fast-track high court (felony) and magistrate (misdemeanor) cases inside two prisons in north western Uganda.

My job during this time is to serve in the “Secretariate” which essentially manages the prison files. We log in each file, check them out to teams of lawyers/students to work up each case, log them back in and make sure they are passed along to the prosecutor’s office as they manage the files through the conclusion of each remandee’s case.

These files are gold. Each remandee has one file. Nothing is digital. If this file is lost, caught in the rain or an office fire (recently, a small prosecutor’s office in western Uganda burned down. 175 files were destroyed. I won’t ask who/what caused the fire.) If a file is lost or destroyed and can’t be recreated (nearly impossible) than the case will be delayed (sometimes for months while the remandee remains in custody) or eventually dismissed.

An inmate’s file is a collection of papers cataloguing the charges against him/her. Most forms are hand written. Crime scene diagrams include stick figures and lots of arrows, lines and dots with crude pictures of “house,” “road,” “ditch,”“field,” or "plantains" as in the sketch above. Sometimes there are photos of witnesses, victims or items from the scene.

In Rwanda, each file is digitized. Uganda (with a significantly higher population) has yet to do this. If a multinational organization or foreign government (like the US AID) wanted to make a huge impact in streamlining the Ugandan Judicial system and reducing the overcrowding in the prisons – they could invest in a system for moving Uganda into the digital age.

As of today, there simply hasn’t been the collective will, funding or incentive to move this forward. So in three weeks, this is a sample of what I get to work with!