But on the second floor of B Block, a group of former Socialist Party officials, sentenced or awaiting trial for corruption and abuse of power, had created their own mini-world within.

Their rooms were freshly painted. Mattresses were brand new along with refrigerators and private shower and toilets. Inspectors also found a gym, a well-equipped kitchen and a space for football games, courtesy of a donation by the Albanian Football Association.

“In that section, one of the cells had been repurposed to be used as a kitchen, equipped with, refrigerators, space to store food, a table and utensils,” the report reads.

These facilities have been set up to cater to the needs of several former officials, such as former minister Lefter Koka, who has been sentenced for corruption and money laundering, and former mayor of Durres Vangjush Dako, awaiting trial for abuse of power. Former MP Alqi Bllako who is facing several charges of corruption and abuse of power is also there. Within a system that should guarantee fair and nonincriminatory treatment for all inmates, Socialist Party ex-officials seemed more equal than the rest.

They are not the only privileged jailbirds, BIRN found.

Data obtained by BIRN through documents, emails and inspection reports show that prisoners are treated very unequally in many Albanian prisons and that former officials fallen from grace seem to form a prison elite, along with other notorious figures from the organised crime world.

The documents also show that this unequal treatment has raised serious concerns about prison safety and the unfair treatment of the rest of the prisoners in a country where overpopulation in the prison system is a constant issue.

Erinda Ballanca, Albania’s People’s Ombudswoman, told BIRN that the authorities had attempted to fix the situation, but face multiple challenges.

“The system needs to improve conditions for all prisoners and also needs to treat them equally,” Ballanca said, emphasising that some jail facilities are very old and “do not meet minimal safety criteria”.

The country’s prison system became topic of the day on 15 December when a prisoner in the high-security prison at Peqin murdered a fellow prisoner for unclear motives. It turned out that the suspected murderer who was serving a life sentence for a double murder had hidden a revolver in his cell for several weeks before firing it at Arben Lleshi, a convicted murderer sentenced in the UK to life and extradited to Albania in 2016 so serve his sentence.

However, BIRN found that measures undertaken to address these problems appear inadequate.

Admir Abrija, chief of the Prison Directorate, didn’t respond to BIRN’s request for comments by the time of publication. Minister of Justice Ulsi Manja refused to answer questions about unequal treatment of the prisoners, suggesting that such questions should be addressed to the Prison Directorate.

Prison was ‘turned into a type of hotel’

Albania had some 5,200 inmates as for November 2023 in 16 penitentiary institutions. Among them, 2,128 are serving time, having been convicted by courts while another 3,107 are in pretrial detention.

Peqin High Security Prison contains some 10 per cent of all inmates. It also operates under the 41 BIS Regime, a system conceived in Italy to deal with hardened criminals by totally isolating them, a practice copied a few years ago by Albania to rein in organised crime figures who apparently still do business while behind bars.

Unlike Durres prison, which houses white-collar prisoners, Peqin houses some of the most dangerous prisoners in the country. Data from November 2023 show that 66 per cent of the inmates there are serving life sentences while 64 per cent of criminals sentenced for participation in organised crime are also there.

On December 15, the prison’s security was severely breached when Sokol Mjacaj, while serving a life sentence, killed one of the inmates and injured a second one, while threatening the prison guards. He later told the authorities that he had kept a gun for about a month hidden in a milk container.

Information collected by BIRN shows that this event didn’t come out of the blue. A month earlier, in another security breach, some 30 inmates serving long sentences held a private party. BIRN saw a video that shows the party and a report from the prison internal control service about it.

In the video, tables seem full of food ordered from outside along with bottles of Coca Cola. A cell phone is registering the party, although prisoners are not allowed to have such means of communication. Plastic glasses are seen used to make a toast, believed to be filled with raki, a Balkan traditional alcoholic drink that is not allowed in prisons.

Following the party, the prison’s director, Artan Tabaku, was suspended on November 22. Kamber Hoxha took his place as a temporary appointment. Three weeks later, Hoxha and 11 of his staff were arrested following the murder committed by Mjacaj. They face charges of abuse of power.

Hoxha told the court that “Peqin prison had been transformed into a type of hotel”. Before the event, Hoxha had informed his boss, Admir Abrija, about the issues.

One of the letters that BIRN has seen, sent on November 30, reads: “The prisoners have been allowed to invest in their rooms (reconstruct and supply them with furniture) and now these rooms are privatized. Their intervention in the rooms had diminished the possibility to carry checks on security elements or forbidden items.” It adds that the prisoners now consider their rooms private ones, and assigning other prisoners to these rooms was “almost impossible”.

The report by Hoxha also stated that in his prison some 160 beds stood empty while 115 inmates were being housed in breach of legal acts and outside normal conditions of life and safety.

The list of forbidden items found within the prison is also long: refrigerators, air conditioners, ovens, microwaves, juicers, boxes for music.

‘Entire sections are never checked’

The murder in Peqin prison disturbed the life of the VIP prisoners of Durres, where a former minister, a former MP, five former mayors, a prosecutor and a former high police official are housed. They were temporarily transferred to Fier prison after an official acknowledged that they had been “treated in a preferential way and in breach of the internal prison rules”.

However, unequal treatment of prisoners doesn’t seem to be a recent phenomenon. An inspection report from June-July 2023 in all 16 penitentiary institutions, seen by BIRN, notes security breaches and widespread unequal and discriminatory treatments in most prisons.

In Jordan Misja prison in Tirana, the largest pretrial detention facility in the country, the inspection found a variety of concerning breaches. “There are not just rooms that goes unchecked but also sections that have not been touched or ever checked,” the report notes.

In Vlora prison, a double standard of treatment for prisoners was clearly visible. “There were inmates that has separate rooms with good furniture and others who were placed in rooms named ‘quarantine’, with no furniture at all or toilets, just beds,” the report said.

In Lushnja prison, inspectors found the space unequally distributed. In some rooms there were just two people while others “were full”, they wrote.

The inspectors also observed that in most prisons, the control of forbidden items was often fictitious. Night shift guards were found asleep.

“The survey of the procedure of the control of forbidden items found out that each check lasted just three minutes in a sector with 10-12 rooms, meaning that, on average, controllers spent 20 seconds in each room,” the report on Jordan Misja prison in Tirana said.