Smiling as he strolled into a police station in Georgia this week, speedboat killer Jack Shepherd appeared not to have a care in the world.

But when he awakes tomorrow morning after his first night in jail, the 31-year-old may not feel so secure.

The fugitive, who was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in his absence after the deadly crash which killed 24-year-old Charlotte Brown on the River Thames, could spend up to nine months locked up in the former Soviet state as he fights his extradition to the UK.

Today a judge ruled that Shepherd will remain in a Georgian jail for three months while British authorities try to haul him back to the UK to face justice.

Shepherd tried to portray himself as a victim and revealed he will fight his extradition to the UK, claiming he could be murdered if he goes to jail over the death of Charlotte Brown.

The 31-year-old web designer appeared in a Tbilisi courtroom on Friday morning, telling a judge he has regrets over the deadly crash and fleeing the UK before his trial.

With the chilling reputation of Georgia’s prisons, including claims of systematic violence and torture, crowded cells and squalid conditions, Shepherd may soon be wishing he had never left his home country.

Former prisoners who have survived the country’s archaic jails recount harrowing stories of beatings, simulated drownings, and the deliberate breaking of bones, at the hands of guards and other officials.

The Rustavi high-security prison, near the capital Tbilisi (
Image:
InterPressNews)

And a video made by a whistleblower which shocked the country in 2012 showed inmates being kicked and beaten by guards, including one man crying out as he was sodomised by a broom. 

After its secession from the Soviet Union in 1991, Georgia’s crackdown on criminals filled its creaking prisons to bursting, leading to the small eastern European nation of 4.5million people to have the fourth-highest incarceration levels in the world.

More and more NGOs began to report on the appalling conditions in the country’s prisons, including the use of harsh treatment and torture to extract confessions.

In 2010, a report by the International Society of Human Rights (ISHR) condemned the country for its prison system, which it claimed “amount to an offence against international standards for correctional facilities.”

Overcrowded cell in Georgia's prison (
Image:
InterPressNews)

The organisation, which visited Georgia’s prisons with the support of the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commission, singled out five of the worst, claiming “the name ‘correctional facility’ cannot be applied to these prisons, since the inmates there are stripped of even the vestiges of human dignity”.

At one jail, the No7 prison in Ksani, it highlighted “the lack of medical care as well as the horrifying hygienic conditions. 

"The inside walls of prison cells there are covered with rough mortar. They are as cold as ice, they are so dirty and rough that touching them  can cause festering skin lacerations. It is quite impossible to sleep in bunks close to a cell wall.

Nadim Tsetskhladze died after torture in the Tbilisi prison in February 2010
Inmates of the Gldani prison in Tbilisi

“The toilets there are extremely primitive. There is an asphyxiating stench all over the prison environment. They are a dangerous source of infection for anyone who enters them.”

Some prisons, it reported, had no water supply, electric light in the cells or heating system, while inmates were not allowed visits or even to contact their relatives by telephone or in writing.

Then, in 2012, Georgian society was shocked when graphic video footage emerged showing prisoners being humiliated and abused by staff at Gladani Prison in the suburbs of the capital, Tbilisi.

The video, aired by the opposition television channel TV9, showed prisoners waiting in line before being escorted one by one to a stairwell, where guards rained punches and kicks down on them.

Part of the footage also appeared to show a half-naked man weeping and begging for mercy as two guards kicked and slapped him, before reportedly raping him with a broomstick.

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"Please don't film this, I will do anything," the inmate is reported to have said.

Later, another prisoner is seen being forced to smoke a cigarette that has been placed in his anus.

The video triggered outrage and mass protests on the streets of Tbilisi, while the country's prisons minister was forced to resign. 

Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili called the incident "a horrific affront to human rights and dignity" and vowed to bring the guilty to justice.

But despite promises to eradicate torture from its prisons, a year later two Georgian lawyers claimed inmates were still being subjected to beatings and torture.

One, Tea Khurtsilava, told how a 22-year-old called Mirza Giglemiani was left with concussion, haemorrhage and multiple bruises after asking to be let allowed time in the sun.

Medical care in Georgia's prisons is said to grossly inadequate
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He claimed he was taken to the Deputy Warden’s room and beaten with a water-filled polyethylene bottle.

And a year-long study by the Open Society Foundation in 2014 found that “the scrutiny of parliament and civil society has been lacking” in ensuring prison reform and called for “greater oversight and robustness of response from the international community.”

After the organisation surveyed 1,199 prisoners, 75 per cent claimed they had been tortured physically, and 39 per cent alleged that this happened almost every day.

Seventy-two per cent said they had developed a long-term health problem as a result of their imprisonment.

Among the testimonies of inmates who claimed they had been tortured, 57-year-old Shota described being lined up against a wall at the Ksani Prison and told to salute and sweat allegiance to the Georgian state.

He said: “If you swore the oath, they would only hit you lightly, but if you would refuse, then they would almost kill you.

Inmates have continued to report torture and maltreatment inside Georgia's jails (
Image:
X01222)

“The prison’s deputy director was a young man, only 26 years old. I don’t know what made him so bitter, so evil. I never found out. 

“His technique was to hang prisoners by their arms, beat them with truncheons until they bled, and break some of their bones. I myself experienced this ‘treatment’ of his."

He also described receiving a beating from the prison’s deputy director: "He stood up and approached me. I was facing the wall, and he gave me a blow to the kidneys with a truncheon. Then he kicked me between my legs.

"I needed an operation later, and my left testicle was removed. My kidneys are still damaged - they are too low -and I no longer have any teeth left in my mouth.”

Another former inmate, Mikheil, 59, recalled: “When I arrived, they beat me so violently that they broke my forehead and some teeth. I didn’t understand what they wanted. I felt totally helpless.

“I could never have imagined that someone could be beaten the way I was. I remember when my forehead was broken: it made such a noise that they took fright and stopped beating me.”

The speedboat owned by Shepherd (
Image:
PA)

And 37-year-old Nugzari, who was sent to Gldani Prison, said: “It was like a shock. I’ve never seen such torture in my life… the inhumane screams of prisoners.

"If a prisoner refused to sign and co-operate with them, they would treat them very brutally in the cells.

"This 'quarantine' was like a circle, and everybody had to walk through it. Every prisoner would be beaten, especially those who were sentenced for murder or robbery.

Shepherd speaks to police in London following his initial arrest for the speedboat death (
Image:
PA)

“They would enter the cell for the slightest noise, and would beat us and intimidate us, forcing us under our beds. They had different ways of punishing us: making prisoners kneel for hours on end, forcing them to swallow pieces of soap, and beating them on their spines.”

Little has has emerged from Georgia’s notorious prisons since the disturbing accounts of abuse and torture in 2014.

As he starts what could be a long stretch as a member of Georgia’s prison population himself, Jack Shepherd is about to find out if anything has changed.