Horror behind bars

An exhaustive report based on inspection of Bihar’s 58 prisons tellingly brings to light the denial of the basic human rights of prisoners in the State and points to the need for prison reforms across the country. Prison is an opaque institution with a majority of its inmates being undertrial prisoners, which means that no one really knows whether most of them have committed any crime at all. When we know that they belong to extremely marginalised and deprived sections of society, shunned into confinement and forbidden from their right to liberty, it makes us wonder whether the much-touted tilt of our Constitution to the disadvantaged has helped them in reality.
Justice V.N. Sinha, one of the senior-most judges of the Patna High Court and Executive Chairman of the Bihar State Legal Services Authority (BSLSA), commissioned me to visit all the 58 prisons in Bihar. My mandate was to enter every ward of each prison and speak to every prisoner to see the conditions they were living under, hear from them about their specific problems, and directly report my finding to Justice Sinha and the BSLSA. For over six months, I travelled across the State and spoke to a total of 30,070 inmates (as on date of inspection). I compiled 58 interim reports on each of the prisons in the State. My final report, titled “Prisons of Bihar: Status Report-2015”, was released on November 15.
The most appalling finding recorded in the report is the near complete absence of medical facilities in the prisons. Owing to a dearth of permanent doctors, doctors on deputation from district hospitals visit prisons whenever required but not more than once a week. Therefore, no doctor is on call to handle a medical emergency. Hardly any prison has basic test kits or any proper medicine storage facility. Medical screening of the prisoner, an essential part of the legal procedure, is conducted as an empty formality in the absence of prison doctors. In the absence of medical test kits, prisoners are asked whether they have certain diseases and their verbal response is recorded as an official document, irrespective of their limited knowledge of the disease they may be afflicted with.
Women prisoners are the worst affected as there are only a handful of women doctors serving around five prisons. So, even if a male doctor occasionally visits a prison, female prisoners are hesitant to see them. This has resulted in extreme situations where some women have even given birth inside prison without any medical attention.
Moreover, during a health crisis, the procedure to send a prisoner to the district hospital is complicated and lengthy, leading to the missing out on the golden period, often resulting in loss of life. In prison, owing to negligence and delay, even a minor ailment can turn fatal. However, even major medical conditions fail to receive the required medical attention. One such case was encountered in the Beur Central Prison, where the undertrial prisoner Ramnath Mahato was completely paralysed. The prison administration could not provide him medical assistance. He was left to the mercy of the other inmates, who tried to nurse him informally. The inmates taking care of him informed the authorities that Mahato could neither move nor hear a word and that he was nearly in a state of coma.
Similar was the case of the undertrial Upender Kumar, who was in the prison for 11 days. He was lying unconscious, was bleeding and had bedsores, yet the Patna Medical College Hospital did not accept him for treatment. He was kept on a stretcher, and every day the prison administration would send him to the district hospital and the latter would send him back on the grounds that his court documents were not clear.
More shocking, there are no arrangements to separate prisoners suffering from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from those suffering from tuberculosis; they are kept in the same ward. If this is the condition in the Beur Central Prison, which is designated as a Model Prison, one can only shudder to imagine the kind of medical facilities provided in the other 57 prisons.
Bias against terror accused
Another shocking aspect of the prison system in Bihar is that undertrial prisoners accused of terrorism-related offences are given extrajudicial punishments. The six persons charged in connection with the Gandhi Maidan blast during the election rally of Narendra Modi (the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate then) in Patna in 2013, and lodged in the Beur prison, are subjected to extrajudicial punishments in the form of denial of entitlements such as basic medical facilities, family visits and access to copies of their case papers, including charge sheets. The prison administration beefed up their security after the National Investigation Agency took charge of the blast case. The six accused—Faqruddin, Umar Siddique, Md. Mojibullah Ansari, Md. Firoz Aslam, Azharuddin Qureshi and Haider Ali—have been kept in a separate ward with extra security.
During an interaction with them, it was found that their lawyers do not visit them either in court or in prison. They suffer a double jeopardy: bearing the burden of the terror tag and being extremely poor, which limits their capacity to hire a good lawyer. No lawyer wants to take up their cases.
No court order restrained the jail authorities from serving them a copy of their charge sheet or prohibited their lawyer from meeting them. Neither did the Inspector General of Prisons issue any such internal order. Haider Ali is suffering from a spinal injury, but he was not given medical treatment purely for security reasons, the prison staff explained. On reporting this particular case to the BSLSA, immediate action was taken to provide Hyder Ali with all necessities permissible under the law.
Forced Labour, a new form of slavery
Undertrials were found working in the kitchens of almost all the prisons of the State without remuneration. Kitchen labour is hard labour and can only be imposed on prisoners sentenced to rigorous imprisonment. According to the Supreme Court’s judgment in State of Gujarat vs Hon’ble High Court of Gujarat (1998), the superintendent and the staff of the prison who use undertrials as labourers are liable to be prosecuted for the offence of unlawful compulsory labour under Section 374 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). This provision states that whoever unlawfully compels any person to labour against the will of that person shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend up to one year, or with a fine, or with both.
Forced labour is a contemporary form of slavery; it was found in full practice in the prisons of Bihar. Some prison staff claimed that they were not aware of the IPC provisions prohibiting forced labour. Some even said that they had no option but to make undertrials work in the kitchen as there were not enough convicted prisoners to do the job. Even in such instances, it can be argued that undertrials who are made to work must be remunerated and under no circumstances can bonded labour be accepted as the norm. Also, ignorance of the law cannot be a justification for breaking the law.     —Frontline

Horror behind bars

An exhaustive report based on inspection of Bihars 58 prisons tellingly brings to light the denial of the basic human rights of prisoners in the State and points to the need for prison reforms across the country. Prison is an opaque institution with a majority of its inmates being undertrial prisoners, which means that no one really knows whether most of them have committed any crime at all. When we know that they belong to extremely marginalised and deprived sections of society, shunned into confinement and forbidden from their right to liberty, it makes us wonder whether the much-touted tilt of our Constitution to the disadvantaged has helped them in reality. Justice V.N. Sinha, one of the senior-most judges of the Patna High Court and Executive Chairman of the Bihar State Legal Services Authority (BSLSA), commissioned me to visit all the 58 prisons in Bihar. My mandate was to enter every ward of each prison and speak to every prisoner to see the conditions they were living under, hear from them about their specific problems, and directly report my finding to Justice Sinha and the BSLSA. For over six months, I travelled across the State and spoke to a total of 30,070 inmates (as on date of inspection). I compiled 58 interim reports on each of the prisons in the State. My final report, titled Prisons of Bihar: Status Report-2015, was released on November 15. The most appalling finding recorded in the report is the near complete absence of medical facilities in the prisons. Owing to a dearth of permanent doctors, doctors on deputation from district hospitals visit prisons whenever required but not more than once a week. Therefore, no doctor is on call to handle a medical emergency. Hardly any prison has basic test kits or any proper medicine storage facility. Medical screening of the prisoner, an essential part of the legal procedure, is conducted as an empty formality in the absence of prison doctors. In the absence of medical test kits, prisoners are asked whether they have certain diseases and their verbal response is recorded as an official document, irrespective of their limited knowledge of the disease they may be afflicted with. Women prisoners are the worst affected as there are only a handful of women doctors serving around five prisons. So, even if a male doctor occasionally visits a prison, female prisoners are hesitant to see them. This has resulted in extreme situations where some women have even given birth inside prison without any medical attention. Moreover, during a health crisis, the procedure to send a prisoner to the district hospital is complicated and lengthy, leading to the missing out on the golden period, often resulting in loss of life. In prison, owing to negligence and delay, even a minor ailment can turn fatal. However, even major medical conditions fail to receive the required medical attention. One such case was encountered in the Beur Central Prison, where the undertrial prisoner Ramnath Mahato was completely paralysed. The prison administration could not provide him medical assistance. He was left to the mercy of the other inmates, who tried to nurse him informally. The inmates taking care of him informed the authorities that Mahato could neither move nor hear a word and that he was nearly in a state of coma. Similar was the case of the undertrial Upender Kumar, who was in the prison for 11 days. He was lying unconscious, was bleeding and had bedsores, yet the Patna Medical College Hospital did not accept him for treatment. He was kept on a stretcher, and every day the prison administration would send him to the district hospital and the latter would send him back on the grounds that his court documents were not clear. More shocking, there are no arrangements to separate prisoners suffering from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from those suffering from tuberculosis; they are kept in the same ward. If this is the condition in the Beur Central Prison, which is designated as a Model Prison, one can only shudder to imagine the kind of medical facilities provided in the other 57 prisons. Bias against terror accused Another shocking aspect of the prison system in Bihar is that undertrial prisoners accused of terrorism-related offences are given extrajudicial punishments. The six persons charged in connection with the Gandhi Maidan blast during the election rally of Narendra Modi (the Bharatiya Janata Partys prime ministerial candidate then) in Patna in 2013, and lodged in the Beur prison, are subjected to extrajudicial punishments in the form of denial of entitlements such as basic medical facilities, family visits and access to copies of their case papers, including charge sheets. The prison administration beefed up their security after the National Investigation Agency took charge of the blast case. The six accusedFaqruddin, Umar Siddique, Md. Mojibullah Ansari, Md. Firoz Aslam, Azharuddin Qureshi and Haider Alihave been kept in a separate ward with extra security. During an interaction with them, it was found that their lawyers do not visit them either in court or in prison. They suffer a double jeopardy: bearing the burden of the terror tag and being extremely poor, which limits their capacity to hire a good lawyer. No lawyer wants to take up their cases. No court order restrained the jail authorities from serving them a copy of their charge sheet or prohibited their lawyer from meeting them. Neither did the Inspector General of Prisons issue any such internal order. Haider Ali is suffering from a spinal injury, but he was not given medical treatment purely for security reasons, the prison staff explained. On reporting this particular case to the BSLSA, immediate action was taken to provide Hyder Ali with all necessities permissible under the law. Forced Labour, a new form of slavery Undertrials were found working in the kitchens of almost all the prisons of the State without remuneration. Kitchen labour is hard labour and can only be imposed on prisoners sentenced to rigorous imprisonment. According to the Supreme Courts judgment in State of Gujarat vs Honble High Court of Gujarat (1998), the superintendent and the staff of the prison who use undertrials as labourers are liable to be prosecuted for the offence of unlawful compulsory labour under Section 374 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). This provision states that whoever unlawfully compels any person to labour against the will of that person shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend up to one year, or with a fine, or with both. Forced labour is a contemporary form of slavery; it was found in full practice in the prisons of Bihar. Some prison staff claimed that they were not aware of the IPC provisions prohibiting forced labour. Some even said that they had no option but to make undertrials work in the kitchen as there were not enough convicted prisoners to do the job. Even in such instances, it can be argued that undertrials who are made to work must be remunerated and under no circumstances can bonded labour be accepted as the norm. Also, ignorance of the law cannot be a justification for breaking the law. Frontline