Saturday, 05 Oct, 2024
By: Yash Gupte
In Uttar Pradesh, 77 percent prisons had an occupancy of more than 150 percent. Image Source: IANS
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime classifies 120 percent overcrowding as ‘critical’ and 150 percent as ‘extreme.’ At the end of 2021, the average occupancy rates in 13 states/UTs were critical.
According to the India Justice Report 2022, the Tamil Nadu Prison Department has bagged the first place as the condition of prisons in the state of Tamil Nadu has been found better as compared to other states. The southern state scored 6.24 on the scale of 10 in which the score of 10 is awarded to the best performing state whereas the poor performing states are close to the mark of ‘0.’ Tamil Nadu was followed by Karnataka with a score of 6.01 and Telangana with 5.35. Telangana was followed by Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. This shows that all the five southern states are among top five when it comes to prison statistics. On the other side, the northern states of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh ranked the lowest with the scores of 2.05 and 3.55 respectively. This ranking was in the case of large and mid-sized states. The report identifies the states as large and small on the basis of their population. States having a population of more than 10 million or 1 crore were considered as large states while the states with the population up to 10 million were identified as small states.
Among the small states, Arunachal Pradesh topped the chart and performed the best with a score of 5.32 followed by Himachal Pradesh scoring 4.23. Goa and Meghalaya performed the worst and ranked at the bottom with the scores of 2.62 and 3.49. Goa was ranked at the top in ‘prison’ category in India Justice Report 2019.’ The India Justice Report further reveals that in all the states of India, the share of under trials is more than 60 percent. This means that more than half of the prisoners are lodged in jail without their conviction. An under trial prisoner is an accused person who is kept in judicial custody during the time their case is being heard in the court. The number of under-trials doubled between 2010 and 2021, going from 2.4 lakh to 4.3 lakh. This also reflects the slow pace of the Indian Judiciary and highlights the pendency of the cases. Therefore, it wouldn’t be incorrect to mark that the low number of judges and increase in pendency of cases is the reason behind overcrowding of prisons in India and also the reason for high number of under trials in prison.
Source: India Justice Report 2022
Talking about the overall ranking of the states based on Police, Prisons, Judiciary and Legal Aid, Karnataka topped the chart among the large states with a score of 6.38 followed by Tamil Nadu with 6.11 and Telangana with a score of 6.11. Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal were ranked at the bottom with the scores of 3.78 and 3.88 respectively. In case of the small states, Sikkim was ranked at the top with a score of 5.01 whereas Goa performed the worst with a score of 3.42.
In case of the number of women in prison staff, Karnataka has the maximum number of women as prison staff. Out of the total prison staff in Karnataka, 32 percent are women. The state is followed by Bihar with a prison staff consisting of 21.5 percent women. Uttarakhand has the lowest number of women in prison staff. In case of small states, Mizoram has the highest percentage of women in prison staff at 25 percent followed by Sikkim (23.2 percent). Goa has the lowest representation of women in prison staff.
Coming over to the vacancies in prison staff, in case of the vacancy of officers, Uttarakhand performed the worst as 77.1 percent of the positions of officers are lying vacant across the prisons in Uttarakhand. It was followed by Jharkhand where 67.6 percent position for officers are vacant. The least vacancy of officers was recorded in the states of Kerala and Telangana as only 6.9 and 8.0 percent positions of officers are lying vacant respectively. It can be said that the higher vacancy of officers in prisons of Uttarakhand is the reason for poor performance of the state when it comes to the category of ‘prisons.’ In terms of vacancy of correctional staff in prisons, there was 100 percent vacancy in case of prisons in Punjab and Haryana. The lowest vacancy of correctional staff was found in Telangana at 0 percent followed by Kerala with a vacancy of 3.6 percent.
In Uttar Pradesh, 77 percent prisons had an occupancy of more than 150 percent. In fact, as per India Justice Report 2022, 391 of the 1314 prisons in India had an occupancy above 150 percent last year. The district jail in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh has an average of 4,963 percent occupancy—nearly 50 times more than its capacity. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime classifies 120 percent overcrowding as ‘critical’ and 150 percent as ‘extreme.’ At the end of 2021, the average occupancy rates in 13 states/UTs were critical. In six, it had crossed 150 percent. Uttarakhand, with 6,921 inmates across 11 jails, records only 1 doctor against 10 sanctioned posts.
