Mr. Tkachuk, who arrived in Afghanistan last summer, is on a one-year contract financed by the Canadian International Development Agency to help rebuild and reform Afghanistan's dilapidated prison system. He is the only foreign corrections adviser at the UN mission in Afghanistan.
It's a daunting task. The prisons here are overcrowded, crumbling, squalid and in urgent need of basic sanitation and water. And the situation is growing worse. More than 6,000 prisoners are crowded into Afghanistan's 34 main provincial prisons today, a dramatic tenfold increase from the 600 inmates in the same prisons when the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001.
The Taliban, who preferred to mete out rough justice in the streets with lashes and beatings, kept few people in its prison system and allowed the jails to deteriorate. Today, as the Afghan court system expands, the prison population is rising sharply. Yet the jails are falling apart.
"The physical infrastructure is essentially destroyed," Mr. Tkachuk said. "Most of the prisons are mud structures, and they erode very fast. The walls and towers are crumbling and collapsing."
Of the 34 major prisons in Afghanistan, 24 are considered to be overcrowded, with more detainees than their maximum capacity, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
One prison, in Logar province, was keeping its inmates in an underground chamber as recently as last year. The practice ended after foreign experts complained.
Some prisons are basically uninhabitable while others are so damaged they need major renovations. Some jails are rented from private landlords and were never designed to serve as prisons. "Only about five or six of the 34 main prisons in Afghanistan actually have secure walls and can adequately maintain their prisoners," Mr. Tkachuk said.
"It's a question of basic human rights. Without a functioning prison system, human-rights violations are inevitable. These violations do occur and will occur if we don't help them."
According to a consultant's report for the Afghan Ministry of Justice, most prisoners are feeling "despair" because of the shortage of food and medicine. In many cases, they are deprived of food as a method of punishment, the report said.
Female prisoners, along with their children, are often imprisoned in the same jail as male prisoners, without any separate facilities.
Mr. Tkachuk is hoping that the international community will donate funds to modernize or rebuild the prisons. But he admits it is a difficult struggle to catch the attention of donors.
"There's very much a shortage of countries willing to build prisons in Afghanistan," he said. "It becomes a marketing game. We're competing with the schools and hospitals."
