Being Tethered to Bars during a Pandemic

Context: In India, COVID-19 must lead to an immediate review of the vulnerability of prisoners and the issue of decongestion as inmates.

Issues in Indian prisons:

• Over-crowded prisons: Around 1,400 prisons are ‘housing’ over 4.5 lakh prisoners as per National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)’s report for 2019; (breeding grounds for the covid-19 virus)
• Issue of Under-trial Prisoners (UTP): About 3.3 lakh are ‘under-trial prisoners’, against whom investigation or trial is supposed to be ‘in progress’.
  • Detained under Section 167 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) which provides for “Procedure when investigation cannot be completed in 24 hours”.
    • Originally maximum detention was 15 days which later extended up to 90 days.
  • Violation of the basic human rights: worsened by overcrowding, poor living conditions, inadequate healthcare facilities and torture by other rowdy prisoners.
  • Huge injustice to families of UNPs: by denying them a normal childhood, proper education, etc., which often push them to the path of crime.
  • Double punishments: One, being immobilized unjustly (as a majority of them are likely to be found to be innocent), and Two, being tethered to the risk of infection.
• Lack of quality statistics in the public domain: on the effects of pandemic on jail inmates.

Learning from other countries: While in the USA, Concerned criminal justice ‘activists’ influence policy-making (unlike in India), England conducted a mass testing programme starting with symptomatic prisoners.

Way forward:

• Repeated covid-19 testing and prioritization in vaccination: along with arrangement for the isolating and hospitalization of those testing positive.
• Decongestion of the prisons:
  • By effectively implementing the Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act, 2005 that aims to ensure de-congestion and fairness in the justice system.
  • Section 436-A: provides for UTPs to be released on a personal bond, with or without sureties if they have served half the maximum imprisonment prescribed (excluding capital punishments.)
• Centre’s responsibility: While ‘Prisons’ is in the ‘State List’ (under The Prisons Act of 1894), as is ‘Public Health’, the constitutional responsibility of handling infectious and contagious diseases figures in the Concurrent List.
  • It is the Centre that must show the States its concern in this and lead from the front.