My time behind bars: A first-person account

At Presidency Jail, Kolkata, women were confined to one ward until 2008, with little access to the rest of the facility. A former inmate spoke to HT about her time there, her relief at being moved to a women’s prison, and the many innocents like her who r

As per Supreme Court guidelines, a separate food / diet scale is to be fixed for pregnant and lactating women prisoners. Special provisions should be arranged for pregnant women prisoners seeking parole.

But the queue for parole is so long that the child has often long been born by the time a woman’s plea comes up for hearing.

“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.”

I went to Presidency Jail in June 2000 on charges of murdering my husband. I feared I would never get out.

Everything changed in 2008, when we moved to a women-only facility in Alipore. Here, we had a kitchen where we could get better food. Sometimes, we even got delicacies like dal-er bora.

Women were restricted to one ward. We had little access to the entire facility.

The next year, during Pujo, we got two printed saris instead of plain – that little touch of colour made all the difference.

There was one kitchen for around 2,500 prisoners.

On Day 1, what I saw shocked me. There was one light and one fan. There was one room and 45 women in it.

But there was a shock waiting for me. I couldn’t get a job... everyone thought of me as a criminal. Even my own son severed all contact. I was lucky. I had a supportive brother and a great lawyer.

The medical facilities were better: Many women could get even expensive medicines their families couldn’t afford.

I was acquitted in December 2013 and walked out of jail.

I’m free, but many women don’t know anything about the case against them. They spend a lifetime inside jail.