JAMnews is playing the 2012 card again.
A prisoner alleges sexual abuse by guards in a de-escalation cell last December. That claim requires a full, independent investigation. Full stop. Anyone who committed a crime should face consequences.
What does not require another round of national trauma theater is treating this single unresolved allegation as signs of another Broomstick Revolution.
In 2012, graphic videos showed guards raping a prisoner with a broomstick while colleagues taunted him. That was the trigger. But the public already knew the problem well by then. It was an oingoing crisis of systematic abuse that we reported, involving torture and suspicious deaths, touching many families in the country. The footage helped sweep Georgian Dream to power with a mandate to clean up the prison system.
The clean-up was apparent in the subsequent reports by international inspectors. The UN Special Rapporteur in 2015 documented substantial improvement and noted roughly 8,000 pre-2012 torture complaints. More recently: UN monitors in 2023 and the Council of Europe’s CPT in 2024–25 received no allegations of physical ill-treatment by prison staff during their visits. None. Zero.
Serious problems remain, like prisoner hierarchies, intimidation, excessive isolation, but the system is an antirely different one from the one we helped expose in 2012.
JAMnews and its fellow travelers know this. They just prefer not to say it.
Instead they reach for the most emotionally loaded comparison available. TV Pirveli airs an activist warning that prison is an “active volcano” and that nothing has changed since 2012. An outlet called Sova describes the Davitadze case, a suicide, and unrest as an “eerily similar crisis”. The 2012 reference gets repeated until the public is supposed to feel the same outrage that once defeated an unpopular government at the ballot box.
This brings attention to a problem we have pointed out before: Grant-funded outlets and advocacy platforms need crises the way commercial media need clicks. Problems become funding arguments in the next grant application.
Georgia’s prisons still have problems, but they are not the prisons of 2012. But they can be made to look that way by papering over the last fourteen years and referencing a tragic suicide and rioting prisoners. That evokes the public outrage that once helped sweep an unpopular regime from power.
And maybe that’s the point.
