Bursting at the seams

Published September 7, 2014
Women and juvenile jails are relatively less over-crowded
Women and juvenile jails are relatively less over-crowded

Waiting at the police station to lodge an FIR about a burglary at home one gets to witness the goings on there. A cell phone thief with a toy pistol is brought in and slapped around before being taken away. A drug addict bothering people outside a restaurant is also dragged in. More incoming traffic includes a pickpocket, a bus driver, a beggar … one by one all are taken away to the lockup, a triangular room with no windows, light or fan. The men stand huddled together near the iron barred door to be able to breathe some fresh air from the open air verandah in the centre of the police station. “They are all criminals, they deserve no better,” says the SHO of the police station when questioned about the conditions the men will have to face until someone comes to take responsibility for them or till they are moved to a proper prison or jail.

Graves or prison cells?

But in prison, too, they won’t be any better off. Pakistani jails, unless they happen to be women or juvenile prisons, are bursting at the seams. The population in our prisons is almost five times more than the capacity with the prisoners in the barracks in the evenings at closing time not even being able to turn if they lie alongside each other in the tight space. So most just sit or squat on the floor until they can be let out in the morning to carry out their chores. This goes against prison rule no 745, which states that each inmate must get at least 18 square metres in a barrack and 31 square metres in a cell, if placed there.

According to a two-year-old research carried out by the International Centre of Prison Studies (ICPS), Pakistan had 97 prisons and the combined prisoner population in them was 75,568.

Of course, all the prisoners don’t have to be huddled together in their cells. According to Prison’s Act (1894) prisoners are classified according to the nature of their crimes, sex, age and health. For instance, political convicts, terrorists and common criminals are kept separate and categorised as ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’ class prisoners. Things such as whether the offender is a first-time offender or a habitual one, is his offense serious or not and his financial status and education are also taken into consideration during classification.


No place for felons in society and no space for them inside the prisons


However, this procedure isn’t always carried out. When the Legal Aid Office (LAO), a committee formed for the welfare of prisoners, carried out a survey in the prisons, recently, they found under-trial prisoners (UTPs), convicted prisoners, a few juvenile and hardened prisoners all mixed up.

“Of the 17 prisons visited, seven had detained UTPs and convicted prisoners in the same barracks, five of the prisons had not segregated juvenile prisoners from the adult prisoners, 12 prisons in Sindh had not segregated hardened/repeat offenders from UTPs and four prisons had not segregated civil prisoners from persons imprisoned for a criminal offense. Fifteen UTPs were not segregated from prisoners suffering from infectious diseases, too,” read the survey report.

Women and juvenile prisons

Women prisons are a different story altogether as they are under-populated. This is because the law is generally more lenient towards women and children. After doing six months in prison here, the women, according to an amendment in the criminal laws shall be released on bail.

Meanwhile, Youthful Offenders Industrial Schools (YOIS) may not be overpopulated but still they are most often just a barrack built near the adult prisoners’ barracks leaving them vulnerable to bullying and even sexual abuse.

Spreading of illnesses

Overcrowding in prisons leads to other serious problems such as hygiene, sanitation and the spreading of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, Hepatitis C, HIV and skin infections. As most part of the budget is spent in buying medicines for the inmates and other medicare needs, the budget for jails falls short.

With the budget falling short, the diet, too, is affected. Instead of getting the prescribed balanced diet including vegetables, lentils, meat, eggs and milk, the prisoners are fed lentils mostly.

Also, there are long queues outside the toilets and very little privacy due to the overcrowding.

Court appearances

Another issue, due to having too many prisoners to manage, is lack of transport and escorts to take the UTPs to the courts for appearances during their individual trials. Not appearing in court leads to delays in trials of prisoners whose cases could be disposed off swiftly. One often comes across one or two policemen chaperoning eight to 10 UTPs shackled together in the courts, especially the city courts. All are taken together to one court even though some may have their hearings at other courts at the same time. That’s how the cases drag on and they languish behind bars

A failed experiment

The Badin open jail, an idea conceived in 1958 for some 500 prisoners, was to have no walls, locks, bars or gates on 2,800 acres of farmland. It was a place to allow sufficient space to the ‘good behaviour’ prisoners who had served one-third of their sentences there to prove to the authorities that they were capable of resisting temptations of running away and hence could be trusted. It was more a passage to their being led back into society as they could develop various job-related skills such as farming, bee-keeping, fishery, poultry, gardening, etc., there under a stress-free environment. There was also an option of calling over family members of the prisoners to allow them to spend time with them to make up for the lost time between them while they were in jail. After Badin, open jails were to be set up in Thatta, Haripur, Multan, Jhang and Faisalabad but the pilot project itself failed.

The reasons given for its failure included lack of funds as calling prisoners’ families over meant providing privacy for them and building separate huts on the land. But another reason was the unwillingness of jail superintendents to let the good-behaviour prisoners go. They said it was a high-risk proposition to let the prisoners live freely like this under minimum guard but people suspect they didn’t want to let go of them as they needed them as domestic servants in their own houses, a practice that apparently was widespread at the time.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 7th, 2014

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