I resent their comments on Karaganda, but I wish they had mentioned the HIV rate BEFORE I went :-O
Here's an article about the prison that Mr. Abdullah finds himself in (from the Karaganda paper "Noviy Vestnik" (New Herald), link removed:
Barmysyn bauyrym? = "Brother, where are you?" (Kazakhstani language)...In Karabas, in the men's 'zone' to where our brigade headed right after Koksu, everything was different. At the entrance to AK 159/18, our eyes met a high, concrete barrier, crowned by large spirals with iron thorns. In contrast to the female penal colony, every building here is secured with iron bars and chicken-wire. Between these sets of metal-work there are narrow asphalted paths. One has the feeling that they are in some kind of a zoo. Only there are only no animals in the cages here, but people, all dressed the same in black.
The prison workers prepared for the journalists' visit much earlier. All the prisoners were sent to their barracks, and from the windows and balconies heads would pop out and shout something similar to greetings as we passed by. Sometimes something indecent, or they whistled and clucked their tongues.
We were first conducted to the dining room, then to the assembly hall. On the stage of this hangar-like building, a local vocal and instrumental ensemble was playing. From roaring speakers poured a lyrically composition about how a 'zehk' (criminal jargon: prisoner) will soon be released and return home to beg forgiveness of his mother for his sins. After listening to another three songs from this 'blatnoy' (criminal jargon: underworld) repertoire, we continued our excursion to the infirmary. The prison patients greeted us politely and settled onto their beds, allowing the cameraman to film them.
Under the letters Barmysyn bauyrym?*, we met with the prisoners on the sport grounds, through the center of which a volleyball net was stretched. Five men briefly told the Khabar TV crew about those whom they wished to find: father, daughter, mother. And they filled out forms that the television people held out to them. Only one, however, agreed to an in-depth interview.
In 1998, twenty-three year old Ruslan Kuriyev of Osakarovka beat someone badly. Back then he was charged under article 103 part 3, 'Causing grievous bodily harm'. "But I got scared, so I decided to go to Chechnya," Ruslan shyly smiles. "My mom lives there in Daragorsk village. In 2002, I went see my brother in Lipetsk, but while there the Russian police detained me and sent me on prison transport back to Kazakhstan. I tried to tell my brother about it, but I'm not sure that he got my message. It's possible that mom still doesn't know where I'm at and what happened. So here I decided to write a letter for the show."
At the end we looked in on one of the cellblocks. A broad-shouldered fellow with a black rosary in his hands met us.
"You couldn't make up on one of the bunks, could you?" a lady journalist asked him. "We need some pictures."
"Right away," the fellow turned and called to someone in an adjacent room. Within a minute, several men had turned the barracks into a hive of activity. Someone was making the bunks, someone was washing the floor, someone else was reading a letter from home. The prisoner with the rosary, very pleased with himself, watched them all from the threshold.
The men's barracks was very different from the women's. The rooms were much smaller. The order was somewhat ideal, but there was something missing, just like in a bachelor's apartment.
And the prisoners' faces. They were looking at us, as if we had arrived from another planet.
"Oh, you haven't seen the HIV patients yet. You go to them, and you'll want to run out of there as fast as you can. The appearance of a woman for them, it's like a holiday," the head of the UKUIS education department said to us later...