ROUMIEH, Lebanon — The smell of Roumieh prison hits you as soon as the gates open. It's the unmistakable odor of thousands of unwashed bodies mingled with human excrement, and it clings stubbornly to the gray walls surrounding the dismal courtyard where prisoners congregate. This morning, a face appears briefly in one of the barred windows about three floors up -- it's a bearded sheikh holding a cell phone to his ear. He surveys the inmates, who are just beginning to gather in the sunlight; then he retreats out of sight.
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"This place is just like the rest of Lebanon, but inside four walls," says Georges, a neat, grandfatherly-looking man in his 60s. "It's almost better here than outside because we've become a kind of family."
Georges, whose name has been changed, has served 24 years of the life sentence he received after being convicted of murdering his wife, a crime that he denies. A Maronite Christian, he is one of the prisoners, known as shaweesh, who are assigned responsibility over the other inmates in his block.
"Every day, we have difficulties here," he says. "It's terrible. Too many people, bad food, no clean water to drink.… The food is a little better since two years ago, when some of the prisoners made a sort of intifada and burned down the kitchen. So the government bought us a new one."
Roumieh is the largest prison in Lebanon, housing around 3,700 inmates, and it has long had a reputation for human rights violations. Recently, however, it has been making headlines for another reason: The inmates seem to be running the prison. Since the beginning of the year, there have been three riots -- one in which 10 guards were taken hostage -- and two foiled jailbreak attempts. In an apparent effort to minimize such incidents, the state has largely abdicated responsibility for what goes on inside Roumieh.
In perhaps the most depressing way, Roumieh is a microcosm of Lebanese life outside the prison walls. Just as on the outside, political connections and money are the most powerful currencies, violence is used to solve disputes, and the state is virtually absent.
Block B, which houses suspected Sunni Islamist militants, is the focal point for the vast majority of security breaches inside Roumieh. Some of the Islamists belong to the militant Salafi organization Fatah al-Islam, which clashed with the Lebanese Army at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in 2007, leaving 168 soldiers dead. Some 215 Fatah al-Islam members were subsequently arrested, most of whom call Roumieh's Block B home. These Islamists have now assumed a position at the top of the prison's bizarre sociopolitical hierarchy.
According to Father Marwan Ghanem, former general chaplain of prisons in Lebanon and president of Nusroto, an NGO that works in Roumieh, the Islamists draw on a deep reservoir of resources not available to your average inmate.
"They're kind of an Islamic mafia," he says. "They have a lot of political support from the Lebanese government and from Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If the police want to raid Block B, they immediately get a phone call from someone telling them not to."
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