A/HRC/8/3 page 29 83. There are two basic approaches available to reduce crowding: the first is to build additional prisons; the second is to provide alternatives to incarceration. Bail for persons held on remand and parole for persons serving sentences are particularly useful measures. 84. Corruption by staff routinely subverts other measures for reducing prisoner-on-prisoner violence. The most obvious downside is that prisoners can gain access to weapons. However, corruption also permits prisoners to buy transfers to other cells or prisons, defeating classification and segregation schemes. 85. There are a number of approaches to reducing corruption. In many situations, higher salaries will be essential. However, especially if gang control has already become significant, financial temptation is likely to be accompanied by fear that failing to comply with prisoner demands would result in violent consequences. For this reason, training and discipline are also key factors. Prison staff should be trained to detect and avoid manipulation by inmates. Disciplinary rules should be rigidly enforced against even petty corruption to forestall the dynamic of escalating manipulation by inmates. 86. These are only preliminary observations which do more to identify the problem than provide a solution. The Special Rapporteur would note, however, that even a preliminary review reveals that the problem is critical and that the tools required to solve it are available. What is lacking is the political will to address violence and repression against an almost universally disdained group (convicted criminals), especially in countries in which the problem has grown to the point of appearing intractable. The other side of the balance sheet is, however, now becoming more apparent to Governments. The consequences for national security of abandoning control of prisons to prisoners are potentially dire. They include (a) turning prisons into training grounds for more effective violence to be unleashed upon the society by inmates when they are released; (b) enhancing gang recruitment by compelling previously unaffiliated prisoners to join and leaving them with no options upon release but to remain loyal to the gang, whose markings they will often have received in prison; and (c) turning prisons into well-protected and effective command centres for individuals running drug dealing, prostitution, extortion and other criminal enterprises or promoting terrorist activities from the security of their prison cells. 87. In summary, the practice of prisoners running prisons amounts to an abdication of the most basic responsibility of Governments to uphold human rights and is an issue that demands urgent attention. Where a Government insists that a regular prison system run by trained, disciplined and humane authorities is beyond its financial means, the alternatives are to revamp the criminal justice system to institute other forms of punishment, to place less reliance upon imprisonment and to instigate a more efficient court system which processes cases more rapidly. The State has no right to imprison a person in order to subject him or her to the caprices and arbitrariness of thugs, whether in the name of necessity, realism or efficiency. The human rights of individuals do not cease to exist when they pass through the prison gates. On the contrary, the State assumes a particular and demanding set of obligations by virtue of its decision to deprive a person of liberty through imprisonment.