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| M J Antony: Crimes & punishment | | The excessive expenditure on jails can be reduced by modifying punishments |
| M J Antony / New Delhi Jun 29, 2011, 00:40 IST |
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There seems to be something common between those who filled the Roman amphitheatres and the televiewers who watched celebrities undergo their recent ordeals in courts and prisons. Crime has become a spectator sport.
In this media-heavy age, judges also tend to jump on the bandwagon. Three decades ago, the Supreme Court had declared that “bail is the rule, jail the exception”. It had also stated that imprisonment should not turn into punishment before trial. However, judges neither follow those binding precepts nor overrule them. When the US Supreme Court did something like that recently, one of the dissenting judges, Antonin Scalia, criticised his brother judges for such “stealth overruling” and asserted that precedents should either be followed or explicitly overruled.
Since bail is not easily given, and a trial takes years to conclude, the 1,356 jails in the country house nearly three times their sanctioned strength. Out of 397,000 prisoners, an estimated 70 per cent are waiting for trial. The total expenditure per prisoner per day is officially put at Rs 66. The total sanctioned budget for 2007-08 was a staggering Rs 1,62,381 lakh and Rs 2,03,792 lakh the following year. The current figures might be much higher. During 2008-09, Uttar Pradesh allocated the highest sum among all states, Rs 41,293 lakh, followed by Bihar (Rs 20,952 lakh). UP doubled its allocation in 2008-09 from the previous year, 2007-08 (Rs 20,149 lakh).
The percentage of distribution of expenditure on prison inmates is 62.6 per cent on food; clothing 2.2; medical 7.2; vocational education 1; welfare activities 0.7; and others 26.4 per cent. This is a heavy burden on the tax payers. The lawmakers have given little thought to the colonial system of prison administration, leading to violence within the dark walls.
Only occasionally, the government wakes up to the problem. This year, it released some 700,000 undertrials in one go. But still there are thousands who wait for their dates with the court. Some of them have been abandoned in jail by their kin and have nowhere to go. The Supreme Court has long ago suggested reformative models, introduction of yoga and psychological help. The 78th report of the Law Commission also dealt with prison congestion. It proposed bail with easier conditions, and for more offences. But over the years, the list of non-bailable offences has lengthened. Though there are 32 open jails (where convicts can work, earn and spend time with family), the idea has not caught on.
An attempt to introduce community service as a substitute for incarceration was made by Parliament in 1978. An amendment was sought in the Indian Penal Code to provide for community service for crimes that attracted less than three years’ imprisonment, like offences against human body and property and defamation. But the move was abandoned and never revived.
Some criminal courts have sentenced convicts to do community service. Two youth in Delhi convicted for assaulting a girl were recently ordered to serve an old age home. A drunken driver was told to do community service at a temple for two months. But these are stray cases. The actual loss in terms of human resources and expenditure keeps mounting proportionate to the increase in the number of inmates mindlessly consigned to the cells. Instead of the prisoners paying their debt to society, they increase the debt of tax payers.
An old idea to ease this burden of injustice and avoid unproductive expenditure is to privatise jails. The concept was originally mooted by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the English thinker, who is said to have coined the name “cell” in jails. He said punishment should be as economical as possible. He proposed calling for tenders to run private prisons. The winning company should also follow strict specifications on the treatment of inmates. It would be penalised for violence and deaths inside. This would save monitoring costs and cut down state expenditure.
Bentham also proposed industrial activities around jails and outsourcing of food, education, transport and recreation. He even devised an architectural model for jails, described in an almost fictional work — Panopticon. It would be a circular building, with maximum visibility from all angles. The manager could see the activities inside the jail. However, Bentham’s obsession of 20 years did not materialise.
The idea should not be discarded with a smirk. The colonial prison architecture and penal procedures definitely require a second look. The only caveat is that officials and bidders for the new projects should not land in cells adjacent to the ones where the Commonwealth Games and other scamsters are lodged.
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