Aitchison, Andy. "Global meets local: International participation in prison reform and restructuring in Bosnia and Herzegovina". Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol.10, No.1 (2010): 77-94.

Aitchison, Andy. "Global meets local: International participation in prison reform and restructuring in Bosnia and Herzegovina". Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol.10, No.1 (2010): 77-94.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided between the unitary Respublika Sprsk in the North and the heavily decentralized Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the remainder of the country. In addition there is also a specialized government in the multiethnic Brčko district, a weak federal government, and a High Commissioner appointed by the UN with legislative authority (79-80).
• Immediately following the end of the conflict, defense and security institutions did not exist at the state level, operating only in local cantons or under control of the two federal entities. The introduction of institutions with these competences at the state level is recent, with Ministers only being established in 2003 and prisons being entirely under the control of the Federation and Respublika Sprsk until 1999 (80).
• Part of the issue appears to be that the Bosnian government did not have its own courts until 2000, previously they had been separate in the entities. In 2002, the powers of this court were expanded to include war crimes, economic crimes, and organized crime -- all of which entities were failing to effectively punish (81).
• The decentralized nature of the prison system made it extremely difficult to implement reform or for the authorities to effectively utilize their pre-war resources. This was especially true for special populations, as the country's only juvenile, female, and psychiatric prisons are all in Respublika Sprsk, which does not have the resources to operate them  in their constructed intent (81).
• This has led to an ineffective use of resources and an inability of Bosnia to met the needs of juvenile and female prisoners, to say nothing of those suffering from psychiatric conditions. The solution of the Federation has been slapdash, constructing makeshift separate areas for female prisoners and juvenile prisoners, resulting in worsened overcrowding for other prisoners and in the special cells (81-82).
• Respublika Sprsk had a single facility for psychiatric prisoners in Sokolac, but there was no similar institution in the Federation, which instead established a 'temporary' area in Zenica prison for psychiatric cases. The Council of Europe mission found that this situation was inadequate (86).
• Like Soviet penology, the criminal system of Yugoslavia was informed by Communist conceptions about the reformative power of work, reflected in the construction of a prison system based around the labour of convicts, often in industrial or agricultural activity (82).
• Both prisoners and corrective officers believed that the system was considered progressive and rehabilitory, especially because it allowed prisoners with high quotas and good behavior to spend so much time with family (83).
• The collapse of Yugoslavia during the 1990s left the legacy of the Yugoslav system exposed to outside intervention, reform, and ideology as governance was internationalized under the UN and other international organizations. Despite these new outside influence, officials report the same commitments to corrective and rehabilitory labour as during the Yugoslav era (83).
• In the independent era, the emphasis on progressive and rehabilitory work might have other motivators, such as a perceived need to keep prisoners occupied due to the lack of resources to placate them or supply guards in the case of insurrection (83).
• In April 1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina applied to join the Council of Europe. Although not admitted until 2002, cooperation began in 1996, including a review of prisons in the Federation and Respublika Sprsk. In 2000, using the review as an agenda, the Council of Europe met with authorities in the entities to improve local prison function (86).
• In 2001, the second meeting of the joint group on prison reform established a working group to look into the issue of psychiatric prisoners in Bosnia. The group agreed that the situation should be resolved, but broke down over infighting (86).
• Specifically Respublika Sprsk was willing to take psychiatric prisoners from the Federation, but requested €1 million to help rebuild the Sokolac facility from wartime damage, which the Federation was unwilling to pay. They also rejected the idea of hiring staff from the Federation. The Federation announced that it would instead focus on internal reform (86-87).
• The entire time, the Respublika Sprsk military had been using a significant part of the Sokolac facility as a field hospital and has shown no indication to cede the facility to any civilian authority or repair the building. As of 2005, neither of these issues had been solved (87).
• A further review of psychiatric facilities in 2003 in Respublika Sprsk and the Federation found a number of deficiencies in both systems. The 'temporary' facilities in Federation Zenica were still in place and overcrowded, and the Sprsk Sokolac facility had an unqualified staff overly depended on drug treatments (88).
• The situation in the Zenica facility in the Federation was eventually the subject of a lawsuit in 2005 when Fikret Hadžić sued the Bosnian government for poor prison conditions in the European Court of Human Rights. He won the case and the Bosnian government was ordered to create separate facilities for the psychiatric ward, which it still failed to do (88).
• The court case really got the national Ministry of Justice involved in the issue, as it created a working group with the entities in 2006 to resolve this issue. By agreeing to all share costs, the Bosnian government managed to convince everyone to move psychiatric prisoners to Sokolac, but the agreement was held up by financial issues of the Respublika Sprsk and the Sokolac municipality (89).
• Attempts to solve the issue of funding new facilities for psychiatric prisoners has been complicated by a number of features of the Bosnian criminal justice system. Every level of the Bosnian government competes for resources, while at the same time being too disorganized to attract donor funding, meaning that funding is always a contentious issue. On top of this, the national Ministry of Justice does not have control over its counterparts in the entities, meaning the national government cannot force the Federation or Respublika Sprsk to conform to national obligations under international law (89-90).
• Even when all levels of the Bosnian government can agree on what they want to do, as they did with the Council of Europe over the treatment of psychiatric prisoners, they are unable to agree on the financial means of accomplishing that goal, frustrating efforts (90).
• The experience of the project to institute a common solution to the care of psychiatric prisoners in Bosnia indicates that the problem lies in the federated and centralized nature of the Bosnian criminal justice system, indicating that attempts to centralize all prison administrations under the national Ministry of Justice are a good strategy (91).