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.
“The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
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