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The need for reformation in the worldwide prison systems can be symbolized in
immutability few can equal India's. A country that cast off British rule more than
40 years ago still administers its system under the 1894 Colonial Prisons Act.
Maybe because the act is such a relic of the past, or maybe because prison officials
choose the least transparency path, the various state prison manuals embodying
the 1894 provisions are collectors ' items, not just in short supply, but expensive
also. A number of prison committees have tried to update and amend the code,
but apart from a few states, legislative approval has not been granted for these
efforts. It is not only the rules and regulations but the day to day reality of India
In their 1991 report, the Human Right Watch found that the prison sanction
(which developed unabated with reform in the west) has not gained centrality
under British rule. Numbers often give a false sense of precision in India – “give
but they do delineate the boundaries of the prison world. As of December 31,
1980, the All India Committee on Jail Reform (under the chairmanship of the
former Supreme Court Justice, Anand Mulla), the most prominent and thorough
investigation of the jails, found 1220 facilities in the country, 822 (67 percent) of
which were lock-ups, and nearly all the others were state prisons; together they
housed some 160,000 prisoners. The Indian states, it is true, vary widely in their
commission inquiries. Yet, although the figure was off by a factor of two or three,
India would still have one of the world's lowest incarceration rates. That argument
is underpinned by the fact that India does not have the jail buildings to house that
many more prisoners, with all due consideration for overcrowding. Furthermore,
the average duration of jail stays are fairly short (again according to American
standards). Of the 160,000 prisoners 10 years ago, 92,000 were under trial, and
their periods of imprisonment were almost always shorter than a year (92 percent)
while awaiting their turn in court. Of the 59,000 prisoners already convicted of
crimes, 32 percent served less than one year; 16 percent served between one and
five years; 8 percent served five to ten years, and 44 percent served ten years.
phenomenon since Vedic period where the anti-social elements were kept in a
place identified by the rulers to protect the society against crime. Prisons were
John Locke, the great seventeenth-century English political theorist, said men
were basically good, but laws were still needed to keep down the ‘few desperate
men in society’. The aim of the society as articulated in its criminal law is to
preserve its own existence in order to maintain order and to enable all citizens to
live a better life, free from molestation by others. Society has given law
enforcement agencies the powers to restrict their citizen’s rights by placing them
punishment, people were taken into detention. Popular punishments at that time
from breaking the law. Many offenders have been punished for having the oars
However, English and French rulers kept their political enemies in such prisons
as the Tower of London and the Bastille in Paris. In addition, people who owed
offenders could stay with them in many such cases, and come and go as they
pleased. But the debtors have had to remain in jail until their debts have been
settled.
Many people including British Judge Sir William Blackstone criticized the use
prisons were gloomy, filthy, overcrowded. They locked together all sorts of
prisoners like men, women, children, dangerous criminals, debtors and the insane.
The British reformer John Howard toured Europe in the late 1700's to observe
conditions in prison. His book The State of the Prisons in England and Wales
(1777) influenced the passage of a law which led to the construction of the first
partly reformed British prisons. These prisons tried to make their inmates feel
Philadelphians, mostly Quakers. We believed that the hard work and meditation
criminals be kept separate from nonviolent offenders, and that inmates be kept
classifying and separating them on the basis of their crimes. As a result, the most
dangerous inmates were spending all their time in their cells alone. However, the
impossible.