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HISTORICAL BCKGROUND OF INDIAN PRISON SYSTEM

“Overall, we need bold change

In our criminal justice system.

A good first step forward is

To start treating prisoners as

Human beings, not profiting

From their incarceration.

Our emphasis must be on

Rehabilitation not incarceration

And longer prison sentences”

Prison System in India – An Overview

The need for reformation in the worldwide prison systems can be symbolized in

quotation above, while persistence marks prison systems everywhere, in practice

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

prisons which is so obsolete.

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

within India; imprisonment is probably no more widespread now than it was

under British rule. Numbers often give a false sense of precision in India – “give

or take a few million,” is a frequent and appropriate qualifier to any estimate –

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

record-keeping skills and are notoriously lackadaisical about answering national

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.

Historical Review of Prisons in India

Broadly speaking, the existence of prisons in our society is an ancient

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

considered as a ‘House of Captives’ where prisoners were kept for retributory

and deterrent punishment.

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

in detention in accordance with their deviant behavior. Up to the 1700's, states

rarely sentenced for punishment offenders. Instead, while awaiting trial or

punishment, people were taken into detention. Popular punishments at that time

included branding, fining, beating and (execution) capital punishment. Some


criminals were prosecuted in public by the government to prevent other citizens

from breaking the law. Many offenders have been punished for having the oars

rowed on ships called galleys.

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

money and defaulted on payments were held in debtor’s prisons. Families of

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

of executions and other harsh punishments during the 1700's. Consequently,

governments gradually turned to imprisonment as a form of punishment. Modern

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

penitent and became known as penitentiaries.


In 1787 the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons

(now Pennsylvania Prison Society) was formed by a group of influential

Philadelphians, mostly Quakers. We believed that the hard work and meditation

could change some offenders. The Quakers recommended that dangerous

criminals be kept separate from nonviolent offenders, and that inmates be kept

separate from men and women.

The Pennsylvania System was the first attempt to rehabilitate criminals by

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

system failed in time, mainly because overcrowding made such separation

impossible.

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