Sun 03 May 2020:
In March, India’s top court said that it was “difficult for prisoners to maintain social distancing” and ordered that detainees convicted of crimes with jail terms of no more than seven years be given parole. Many states started releasing thousands of inmates.
Although there are no official numbers on how many inmates have been infected by the virus, India’s correction facilities are slowly recording more infections and have temporarily banned visitors.
Health experts, however, fear that crowded facilities such as prisons can prove deadly, threatening the lives of detainees and guards, as well as the outside population.
The virus has spread rapidly in overcrowded prisons across the world, leading governments to release inmates en masse. United Nations experts and the World Health Organization have urged governments to reduce their prison populations during the pandemic.
In the Philippines, which has some of the most congested jails in the world, a Supreme Court justice said Saturday that nearly 10,000 poor inmates had been temporarily freed by reducing the amounts of their bails.
Some of the inmates, who could not afford to post bail, were released to the custody of local officials, underscoring the urgency to ease overcrowding in jails.
Indian prisons are highly overcrowded. According to the latest data by the National Crimes Record Bureau in 2018, India has some 450,000 prisoners, exceeding the country’s official prison capacity by about 17%. Prisons in New Delhi and neighboring Uttar Pradesh state have the highest occupancy rates, at over 50% above capacity.
Making matters worse, “the health facilities in prisons are not up to the mark,” said Dhanuka.
Majority prisoners are Muslims and Dalits
The figures are given in the Prison Statistics 2018, which was put in public domain, after skipping the details on religion and caste in the reports by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) of 2016 and 2017.
The 2018 figures for both convicts and undertrials – 33.49% OBCs, 20.68% Scheduled Castes, 11.56% Scheduled Tribes, 18.81% Muslims – are similar to the trend witnessed in the 2015 report.
When it comes to Muslim prisoners, Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of Muslim prisoners at 27,459 (31.31% of total Muslim prisoners in the country) followed by West Bengal (8,401). Karnataka has 2,798 such prisoners.
An analysis on the basis of caste showed that 1.56 lakh prisoners belonged to OBCs while 96,420 were Dalits and 53,916 were tribals. When it comes to educational qualifications, 66.51% were either illiterates (1.33 lakh) or those who have studied up to Class X (1.76 lakh).
Uttar Pradesh also have the highest number of prisoners from Scheduled Caste — 24,489 or 25.39% of such prisoners while Madhya Pradesh has 8,935 and Karnataka 2,803. Madhya Pradesh has the highest number of tribal prisoners at 15,500 followed by Chhattisgarh (6890). Karnataka has 1,254 prisoners belonging to Scheduled Tribes.
The official data shows that only 4% of total prison expenditure was spent on inmates’ medical needs in 2018. It also shows a 40% shortage of medical personnel in Indian prisons.
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