A lawyer-activist group has expressed extreme concern over the death of 24-year-old prisoner Mariappan Manivannan in Bentong Prison, Pahang on June 6 in yet another case of death in custody.

Lawyers for Liberty executive director Eric Paulsen said Mariappan’s death will be a test for the new Pakatan Harapan government’s reform agenda.

He called for the authorities, particularly the Home and Health Ministries to investigate the detention conditions in Bentong Prison and all other places of detention in the country.

"We were informed by the deceased’s family members that Mariappan had been unwell for up to a month prior to his death and for the past one week suffered from continuous vomiting and diarrhoea," Paulsen said in a statement.

"He was admitted to the prison clinic but was not checked by a doctor for a few days. It is unclear if he was ever sent to the hospital but he died at the prison clinic and the cause of death was attributed to severe acute gastroenteritis," Paulsen added.

Paulsen said he found it alarming that a prisoner was ill for an extended duration of time only to have his condition ignored, treated in the most minimal manner or sent to the hospital when it was too late.

Sadly, Mariappan’s death was not the exception but the norm, Paulsen claimed.

He cited statistics between January 2013 to April 2016 which showed the Prisons Department recorded a total of 721 deaths in prisons nationwide.

"That is a shocking 18 deaths per month, with the vast majority of them attributed to diseases and health problems," Paulsen said.

He further said that the statistics are an indictment of systemic problems in the prisons that have been ignored for far too long by the previous government.

These include cramped and overcrowded detention conditions, poor hygiene and sanitation, lack of clean drinking water and poor food and healthcare provisions.

'Willful neglect'

Paulsen said it was clear from the "staggering" number of deaths that the new Harapan government could no longer afford to turn a blind eye to these issues.

He urged the authorities to immediately improve access to medical treatment for all detainees including at police lockups, immigration detention centres and prisons.

"They must do this immediately lest another person needlessly loses his life to a treatable condition or due to willful neglect of the detention authorities," said Paulsen.

He also called for an inquiry to be held by the Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission or Suhakam into the death of Mariappan.

"This is to uncover the causes and circumstances surrounding his death including his detention conditions and his access to medical treatment," said Paulsen.

In April, within a span of a few weeks, a man died in custody in a prison in Perak while another prisoner died in a hospital in Shah Alam, Selangor.

Activists have long been urging the previous government to set up an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission to function as an independent and external oversight body to investigate complaints about police personnel and to make the police accountable for their conduct, including acts of negligence linked to deaths in custody.