Did the JVA Aichach want to thwart critical reporting? – Bavaria

The reporting of a nationwide prisoner newspaper on the situation in the correctional facility (JVA) Aichach will soon occupy the Bavarian state parliament. In particular, it is a question of whether the detention center took possibly dubious steps to counteract a critical report. For example, the question arises as to whether signatures were forged for this purpose. The Landtag Greens now want to take up the matter – the requests that have already been submitted have been submitted to the SZ.

The background: In the Aichach prison, the strict corona requirements apparently aroused displeasure among some women at the height of the corona crisis. For example, the promotion of contact with families was “insufficiently pursued”. Psychological support fell by the wayside. The prisoner newspaper found out about this the bright spot and published a detailed article. As a result, the editorial office in Tegel JVA received mail. First of all, at the beginning of July those booklets came back from Aichach that contained the critical article – with the note that the addressees could not be identified in the prison. The women still sat there.

The signature comparison showed inconsistencies

This was followed by two letters denying the content of the article, one of which was provided with a list of signatures. But what was missing every time: the sender. “Without it, such a letter from a prison would not go out”, says Andreas Bach, the spokesman for the editorial community, on the phone. That struck him and his colleagues as suspicious: They compared the signatures on the list with the typefaces that they had found on other letters from the Aichach prison. Again and again women from there had met with each other bright spot reported on personals to take up pen pals. The comparison resulted in some very different lettering. The editorial staff of the bright spot consequently sought contact with the Bavarian State Parliament Greens.

“That needs to be clarified. We are investigating,” says Toni Schuberl, the legal policy spokesman for the Green Group. It is also about the prison conditions in the Corona crisis. Schuberl wants to know whether and in what way the women received compensation for the fact that their work opportunities in custody were lost due to the pandemic. “The State Ministry of Justice has announced that this should be compensated for as far as possible,” emphasizes Schuberl. In the bright spot but it says to Aichach: “There was no continued payment of wages.”

Further questions from Schuberl aim to determine whether the protest letters to the editorial team were actually written by women imprisoned in Aichach. The question is also whether prison staff may have asked the prisoners to write to the editorial staff of the bright spot to turn. The editors in Tegel read the riot act vigorously in the letters. In the first letter of July 11, it says, for example, “To write an article about too small, double-occupied cells is nonsense”. Editorial spokesman Andreas Bach believes, however, that this letter has been tampered with.

The sender must be recognizable for the recipient

The handwritten letter of July 18 is no less clear. “Many imprisoned women from Aichach perceived your article with indignation and amazement,” it says. The corona-related restrictions have long since become less. And: “The efforts of the civil servants and the social services in this house usually go beyond the scope of the obligations.” Attached to this letter is a list of signatures with more than 50 names of women imprisoned. In the meantime, according to Bach, a letter had been leaked to him from the Aichach prison confirming the conditions described by the editorial team. This will be printed in the December issue. It says: “Chicane and repression, two words that reflect what is really going on behind these walls.”

But Bach still asks himself: How could the letters of protest from Aichach get to him without a sender? The Ministry of Justice explains: “In the case of outgoing letters from prisoners in the Aichach prison, the sender must be recognizable to the recipient.” But that does not mean “that the sender must be noted on the outside of the envelope”. And as for the origin of the protest letters: They were written by imprisoned women “according to the information available to us”. Before being sent, they were “shown to a servant”.

The charge of influencing prisoners so that the women of the bright spot-According to the representation, the Aichach prison staff reject it, according to the ministry. Likewise, no one was asked to sign the list. “What surprises me,” says Toni Schuberl, “is the fact that one of the women signed the bright spot-The representations are said to have been described as faulty, although she did not have the booklet at the time. “She is one of those whose subscription copy was sent back from the Aichach prison at the beginning of July.

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