In 2011, musician Gao Xiaosong was sentenced to 6 months in prison for dangerous driving and spent 184 days in the Dongcheng District Detention Center in Beijing. However, if you search the Internet casually, you can see articles such as "Gao Xiaosong recalls prison life". Probably many people regard prison as a general term for "the place where you should go if you commit a crime", but the prison and the prison are not the same thing at all!

 

一、Who is detained in the detention center?

When the Criminal Procedure Law was first amended in 1996, the presumption of guilt was transformed into the principle of the presumption of innocence, which allowed us to know the difference between criminal suspects and criminals. Simply put, the detention center mainly detains criminal suspects. In addition, criminals sentenced to criminal detention, sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment, and the remaining sentence of less than three months before being handed over to the sentence, shall also be executed by the detention center.

The prison is the execution organ of punishment, and the prisoners must be convicted criminals.

 

二、Who is in charge of the detention center?

Detention centers are managed by public security organs, while prisons are managed by judicial departments. Concerning the management system of the detention center, there is controversy among the academic circles, and they are worried that the public security organs will both investigate and detain them, which will lead to torture to extract confessions. But looking at the world, there is no uniform model for whether detention centers are managed by the police department or the judicial administration department. At present, in the public security organs at the city and county levels in China, different leaders are in charge of the work of the detention center and the investigation.

 

三、The functions and status of the detention center?

The function of a detention center is to detain, and the function of a prison is to execute sentences. A high-level keyword is to be introduced here: "Separation of police custody". To put it simply: the Ministry of Public Security's Prison Administration Bureau, which manages the detention center, does not have the function of investigation, and is solely responsible for the management. But this was not the case before 1998. Its predecessor, the Pre-Trial Bureau, had an investigative function.

Detention centers should be neutral, maintaining neutrality between the case-handling agency and the defendant, and equal guarantees for lawyers to meet with the case-handling agency for arraignment.

In the words of Zhao Chunguang, director of the Prison Administration Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, "The quality of the case handling department's handling of the case and whether the lawyer violated discipline during the meeting has nothing to do with the detention center. The detention center itself cannot break the law." For example, a lawyer meets a defendant. In human time, the detention center only monitors, but does not monitor, and monitoring is illegal.

 

四、How is life in the detention center?

1. From bed to bed

Gao Xiaosong once described his life in the detention center as follows: "There is a dim light on the six-meter-high roof... When I first went in, I couldn't sleep well. Everyone was based on seniority, and whoever stayed longer would slow down. Rubbing against the door, this one snores, that one has bad breath."

Looking at this description, Gao Xiaosong must have slept in the Chase shop. But now Beijing requires all new prison cells to implement the bed system. In the Tongzhou Detention Center, the female suspect's cell has been implemented for one person and one bed. But in many other detention centers, it's a long way from bed to bed.

 

2. Eat meat every day

For Li Zhu, a detainee at the Beijing No. 1 Detention Center, what impressed him most about the food here was "one egg per person every day, and meat every day". In the recipes of the canteen of the No. 1 Detention Center, you can see that the main dishes include stewed Chinese cabbage, fried shredded pork with eggplant, and fried zucchini with minced meat.

The detention center in Beijing has also introduced a supermarket chain to directly operate it, making it more convenient to buy daily necessities. Of course, the police comrade said that snacks and fruits are not bought as much as they want. How to buy? Tongzhou Office, which has entered the era of touch screen, will soon be able to swipe fingerprints for shopping.

Relevant personnel of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau's Prison Management Team revealed that Xue Manzi also specifically mentioned improving food and shopping in supermarkets in his letter of thanks to the detention center. In Xue's opinion, this move is very popular.

 

3. Also watch "The Voice of China"

The detainees get up at 6:30 in the morning, and spend one and a half hours in the morning and in the afternoon for "study and education, doctor's visit", and one hour for outdoor activities. A two-hour lunch break and an hour-and-a-half group discussion in the evening. In addition to summarizing the results of learning and transformation, this is also the time to “spit out” to resolve internal conflicts in the prison.

From 7:00 to 9:00 at night, it is the time when detainees watch TV programs collectively. They will watch Central News, Beijing News and entertainment programs together. Hao Tong, director of the Tongzhou District Detention Center, said that the entertainment programs that detainees watch the most are serials, "because serials can give them something to think about."

Li Zhu, who was detained at the No. 1 Detention Center, introduced that the programs he watched in the detention center included "Touching China", "Good People in China", "Our Good Place in Xinjiang", "Mao Zedong", "Long March", and "China Is Good" sound".

 

4. How to break the "prison tyrant"?

The head of the prison is a chronic disease. Think about the plot in the film and television drama. Although it is a bit exaggerated, it also reflects some practical problems. In the past, due to the serious shortage of police in the detention center, they used to rely on the so-called "trumpet captain" and "on-duty" to manage the affairs of the cell, and some people would use their power to bully others; ,lord it over.

2009 was a watershed year for the management of Chinese detention centers. This year, the "Hide and Seek" incident in Jinning County, Yunnan caused a national sensation - a young man who was about to get married in 4 days died mysteriously in the detention center. The official reason was that he died of injuries during the "Hide and Seek" game. The tyrant was officially exposed in the public eye. Detention centers across the country have also begun to upgrade their standardized management and technical construction.

Take the Tongzhou Detention Center as an example. The institute invested 16 million yuan to convert all monitoring into digital high-definition, and installed an "interaction platform for prison cells" in each cell, which is currently in the debugging stage. This high-tech gadget digitizes all information about detainees' conversation, education, medical treatment, violations, and arraignment. In case of emergencies, you can call the police in time. It also depends on the fingerprint consumption mentioned earlier.

Director Hao Tong said that fingerprint consumption can also avoid "economic disputes": "It turns out that I can take your card and swipe it, and this finger can be on my hand. If you take me over, the monitoring will be done immediately. It can be seen. In the past, there were cases of coercing others to leave the consumption card when they left the cell, but now that the person is gone, the fingers must be moved, and this situation is impossible." Officials will gradually change to fingerprint recognition.

Hao Tong said that the detention center mainly relies on direct management to avoid "heads of prisoners" and stipulates their life. Dining or even sleeping positions. Those who are most concerned are generally placed to bed in a location where the surveillance is obvious. "In the past, there have been cases where four people squeezed together, but one person slept all over the place, but now a large bed sleeps 9 or 6, we have all decided."

Of course, in order to completely solve the problem of "prison tyrants", I am afraid that we need to go deep into the system and the legal level. The public security organs are also actively promoting the legislative work of the Detention Center Law.

 

     Article source: Xinhua News Agency (with deletion and modification)