In a cramped steel shipping container that once trucked smuggled goods to Afghanistan, Ghulam Sanai and about a dozen other prisoners sip tea and await their fates.

Some, like Mr. Sanai, are accused car thieves waiting for trial. Some are convicted murderers and rapists serving time. At least one is an insane man whose right hand has been chopped off for previous thefts. All live in conditions that even local prison officials admit are appalling.

Sanai, their self-appointed spokesman, hands a visitor a list of demands, which includes better food, ventilation, and a speedy trial. "We are all here in this container, and it is getting hotter and hotter day by day," says Sanai, who proclaims his innocence in the car-theft caper. "We ask from the central government and from you and from international embassies to help us."

Accused drug-smuggler Mohammad Shah Pahwan tugs the chains around his legs. "This is democracy in Afghanistan," he says, as the other men chuckle. But Mr. Pahwan is serious. "Is this democracy? No. It's just oppression."

The jail-prison-madhouse here in Logar Province is by no means the worst in the country, but it is a small window into the extraordinary task that Afghanistan faces in rebuilding its judicial and penal system. Across the country, prison guards work without pay, police arrest individuals without evidence, and Afghans serve time without appeal or adequate representation. But, lacking money, the Afghan government and its international backers say they have no choice but to accept the current penal system - even private prisons under the control of a local warlord - as it is.

"We don't have good staff. We don't have good healthcare in the jails. We don't have food for the prisoners or the guards. We don't have educated people to run the jails," says Mohammad Ashraf Rasooli, deputy minister of justice. "By our own laws, it's illegal to put juveniles together with adults, but we don't have a choice."

"We have a plan to bring new laws and to make changes, but we don't have [the money] to do anything about it," adds Mr. Rasooli, who among his other tasks must chair a committee to rewrite the Afghan constitution. "It all depends on the international donors."

United Nations officials say the task of rebuilding Afghanistan's legal and penal system is so vast that nobody quite knows where to start. Most public buildings in this country have been destroyed or badly damaged by two decades of war. Since jails were often used as interrogation and torture centers during the Soviet occupation and afterward, they were often among the first to be targeted by vengeful Islamic guerrillas.

Add the tendency of Afghan police to accept bribes to release those prisoners, and this has left the four post-Soviet governments in Afghanistan with few resources to maintain a semblance of law and order.

"There is a lot to do, sometimes it's hard to know just where to start," says Ana Katrina Gronholm, the UN's adviser to the Afghan government on penal reform. "The Afghans don't even know how many prisoners they have, so at first you have to get some idea of what kind of prisoners they have and how many." In the meantime, the UN Development Program has put forward $3 million to build seven or eight regional jails in Afghanistan's major cities.

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