Speaking to FMT, Kua said mistreated prisoners could end up being a bigger threat to society after their release.
He said prisons were institutions for the rehabilitation of criminals, not for punishment.
Punishment, he added, could turn a prisoner into a worse person than he was before incarceration.
Kua’s call came after Adeeba Kamarulzaman, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Universiti Malaya, stated that prison inmates risked contracting chronic diseases because of poor nutrition and other factors associated with a poor environment.
She made the statement at a roundtable discussion on enhancing the health of prisoners and improving the outcomes of criminal justice in Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries.
Kua said imprisonment itself was punishment enough and it would be wrong to see prisons as places where punitive measures should be routinely carried out.
“When I was a detainee under the ISA (Internal Security Act),” he said, “we were put in a rehabilitation centre, and that’s what prisons are for – to rehabilitate prisoners.”
He praised Sweden for its respect for prisoners’ rights, noting that prisoners in that country are not locked up.
“They’re put on an island and they are free to cycle around and do stuff like that. The idea is to ensure that they come out of prison as rehabilitated people who are not going to do any more harm.”
He said “countries like Sweden” had fewer prisoners than other countries in ratio to population.
Kua noted that prisoners’ rights were embedded not only in international conventions but in internal laws as well.
“You’ve got things like the prison rules and not many people realise this,” he said. “They think that mistreated prisoners are getting what they deserve.
“Under our laws, even under the abolished ISA, there are strict rules about how much meat a detainee is supposed to have, how much vegetables, how much rice.
“These are basic human rights, but they are also rights that are regulated by local laws.”