‘THE FIRST STEP: MORE PRISONS FOR WOMEN’
“If a man is in prison, women pool in money to bail them out, but if a woman is behind bars, she is effortlessly replaced as a wife or mother. Instead of prison reform, we should focus on getting quicker bail for undertrials,” she says.
For large chunks of inmates, the struggle begins anew once they step out of jail.
Aparajita Basu, 48, from Kolkata, who was acquitted of her husband’s murder after 12 years, found no one would give her a job and her son shunned her.
For her, government support and rehabilitation is the only answer.
“Many women I knew in jail died of lack of medicines when they were released. Others are still struggling for money or food. The government must help them,” she says.
MAKE ROOM
One way out of this is creating more women-only prisons, like the one in Delhi’s Tihar jail, the largest such facility, built in 2000.
Central Jail Number 6 is a simple structure with lots of greenery, a gym, an openair theatre, a beauty parlour run by inmates, and a canteen, says Sunil Gupta, a prison reform expert and former legal adviser to Tihar jail for almost four decades. “Women are in distress when they come to jails. To help them, we built this kind of a structure,” he says.
Essentially, the problem isn’t so much about prison administration as it is about inter-departmental coordination,” says Vijay Raghavan.
“Given the nature of the major problems affecting women prisoners – physical and mental health, hygiene and sanitation, lack of staff – it’s the joint responsibility of the state departments of health, women and child welfare, home affairs, and education to step up. Prisoners aren’t constituencies for governments because they cannot mobilise to ask for their rights. But they are citizens, and have basic human rights, just like everybody else.”
Trapped within a system bursting at the seams, they tend to shoulder most of the blame for the ills of a sluggish criminal justice system and a prison environment stuck in the 19th century.
But India’s prison staff, wardens and superintendents say their efforts to make prisons more livable are often stymied by archaic rules that are either overly harsh or silent on rehabilitation, correction and prisoner welfare.
A male superintendent of a women’s jail says most officials are so focused on preventing violence in the cramped, overcrowded spaces that serve as women’s jails, there is no one left to focus on reform.
“It would be a good start to have more women’s jails rather than confining women prisoners to a small room within a men’s prison. A women’s jail allows us to run more vocational courses – cake making, sanitary napkin making. There is even theatre and singing. And because there are no men, inmates get better access to officers for grievance redressal,” he says, refusing to be named because he is not authorised to talk to the media.
Experts agree, blaming an overburdened system for the pitiable condition of inmates – India has just 597 correctional staff (the term used for a prison’s psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and welfare officers) for 1,401 prisons.
“In the absence of adequate staff, inmates are locked up for long hours. This increases the possibility of clashes. By not filling staff shortages and training them, the government is risking the lives of inmates and prison guards,” says Raja Bagga, programme officer at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
Without infrastructure, the jail superintendent adds, even the flu can become lifethreatening. “A woman inmate was once brought in around 10 pm in an ambulance, with a soaring fever. She was rushed to the biggest government hospital in the city, but they refused admission. At 2am, I remember driving across the city, knocking at every hospital’s door, begging them to take the patient,” he says. “We struck luck only at the fourth hospital. Such challenges are commonplace.”