In Indian prisons, hell is other people
Pieces about working in prisons, on Rohingya refugees in detention, and a statistical study on the fate of children with parents in jails redeem this collection of essays
Prisons in India still operate under the 1894 Prisons Act. That the Act has not yet been updated tells you much about the way prisons are governed, or not. Post-Independence, the key moments of prison reform came nearly 40 years ago, when Sunil Batra, an inmate with a chequered record, filed a series of petitions in the Supreme Court. One of the outcomes was the Anand Narain Mulla committee on jail reforms, and the Justice Krishna Iyer committee on women prisoners and the reform of women’s jails.
No inquiry or committee of that magnitude has appeared since. Such is our condescension for criminals that people, including inmates, are surprised when they hear that prisoners have rights and deserve dignity and wages for their labour. Given that one of the editors, Sanjoy Hazarika, is the international director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and the other, Madhurima Dhanuka, heads the international NGO’s prison reforms programme, this book could have made a more forceful assertion of that claim.
Hope Behind Bars is a compilation of essays dealing with a variety of topics, some of which are purely prescriptive. Although it claims that “this essential collection brings prisoners’ lives and liberties to the heart of public debate and policies”, in fact it largely rehashes some old pieces.
Amrita Paul’s Voices from Detention about Rohingya refugees in detention, researchers Sugandha Shankar and
Sabika Abbas’s essay about working in prisons, and KR Raja’s statistical study of the fate of children with parents in jails in Tamil Nadu are the redeeming pieces in this otherwise pallid collection. The best survey in the book, nearly 15 years old now, comes from Chaman Lal, a former police officer who worked for 10 years until 2007 with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) as coordinator of the Criminal Justice Cell. His profile states he is the only police officer in the country to be awarded the Nani Palkhiwala Award for Civil Liberties. If true, this is a telling comment.
As part of his work, Lal conducted surveys on several aspects of prisoners’ lives in different jails across India. His report shows in detail how stipulations for accommodation, toilets, food and healthcare remain unfulfilled. As per the provisions of Sections 328 to 339 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the trial of a mentally ill prisoner is suspended because of his inability to defend himself. However,
Lal found several mentally ill under-trials languishing. There were many prisoners who had spent more than 14 years incarcerated, but their trials remained suspended. In one startling case, an inmate named Lalung Machung from Arunachal Pradesh, who was first admitted in
1951, remained in prison for 54 years.
As for deaths inside prisons, nearly five inmates die every day in prisons across India. Lal finds that the NHRC has “totally failed in ensuring punishment to the negligent or corrupt jail officials held responsible for these deaths”. The jail manuals of different states provide for the setting up of a Board of Visitors comprising official and non-official members and headed by a district collector. A properly functioning Board can play a vital role in improving prisons, as observed by the effect of vigilant judicial authorities and the positive correlation between the “seriousness and regularity of such visits and the efficient working of the jails”.
Predictably, Chaman Lal found conditions to be better in the southern states, especially Tamil Nadu. However, most jails in India do not have a working Board of Visitors. Similarly, vocational training suffers even in places that run thriving factories and can even make profits, because of delays in the supply of raw material. Wages owed to inmates are often not paid in full. Between 25% and 50% of a convict’s wage is deducted towards a Victim’s Compensation Fund, whereby the state is supposed to compensate the families of victims. But in an affidavit submitted to the Delhi high court, the Delhi jail department admitted that “out of a total amount of 15 crores collected from the prisoner’s wages under rule 96 of the Delhi Prison Rules, 2018,
only 1 crore has been utilised and 14 crore is lying unspent.”
When Jean Paul Sartre had a character in No Exit proclaim that hell is other people, he perhaps didn’t know how especially true this was for prisons. Given the overcrowding in Indian prisons it is literally the mass of people upon an inmate that make their life unbearable.
The slang for prison in America is “doing time”. It is an apposite description of what inmates do inside. They do time as they have little else to do. Occupation in prison, whether as instructor, clerk or manual worker, is a prerequisite for survival because that is how one tackles time and, therefore, many are willing to work free. Jail time is eternal wait time and the ancient Arabic proverb for waiting sums up their torture: “Intezar al ashd min al maut (An endless wait is more tortuous than death).”
Here is the Indian prison conundrum in a nutshell: most inmates inside begin their punishment long before their trial concludes. Most inmates also don’t know how to kill time inside. If we could make educational or skill improvement compulsory and hitch bail to the attainment of proficiency in a life skill, it might make prisons more productive. It would also make jail a more meaningful experience. Or this could just be an inmate’s fantasy.