The Senior Assistant Commissioner of Prisons, Mr Cyrus Gacharia, on Friday had stern message for prison staff: There are laid down disciplinary procedures and laws: follow them. It would have been nice to hear Mr Gacharia specify the penalties for those who do not follow the law and persist in torturing inmates.

We believe such a punishment regime for errant warders and other prison staff is important if our jails are to be turned from homes of pestilence and brutality to modern institutions for rehabilitating criminals and miscreants.

The warning comes at a time when Amnesty International has released yet another damning report on Kenya's jails. Titled Kenya Prisons: Deaths due to Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Conditions , it is a telling indictment of the primitivity of Kenya's penology.

Ten prisoners were tortured to death last year, it says, including those believed to have been bludgeoned to death at Nyeri's King'ong'o Prison. It recommends the appointment of an independent body to investigate claims of torture to rectify what is obviously a national disgrace.

It is also pointed out that, quite apart from physical mistreatment, prisoners are poorly fed – the shortage of food in prisons smirks of deliberate starvation of inmates – are clothed in inadequate rags and have access neither to clean water nor to medical services. To cap it all, jails that were designed to hold 15,000 prisoners now hold 50,000. This overcrowding has created a "Hot Zone"; a place where communicable diseases, including Aids, are claiming the lives of inmates at an appalling rate.

We welcome the positive sentiments from the prisons authorities. All Kenyans appreciate the promise that the penal system will be more open and the efforts being made to drum into the heads of prisons staff that torture of inmates is completely unacceptable.

But we also feel that we have had enough of sweet words from the new Prison administration. What Kenyans now want to see is action: action to stop torture, action to allow investigators free access into the prisons, action to see that congestion is eased, action to ensure that prisoners have access to the necessities of life to which they are legally entitled.

Mr Gacharia's warning is welcome, but warnings alone rarely achieve much.