BS READS: Are corporate-run prisons an answer to India's rotting jails?

By allowing corporate entities to manage separate jails for undertrials, state governments could free up to 70 per cent capacity in India's notoriously overcrowded prisons

Between March 21 and 23, the Dum Dum jail in West Bengal, one of the 144 central jails in the country, saw India’s worst prison violence in recent times. Hundreds of the 3,900-odd inmates believed to be lodged in this high-security prison, grabbed cooking gas cylinders and triggered explosions. Improvised guns were fired on prison personnel, and jail inmates and staff were slashed with knives.

The trigger for the violence, it was reported, were restrictions on movement imposed in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. These were enough to set the Dum Dum jail, surrounded by residential areas, on fire. And, before the carnage could be brought under control, four inmates had died and several others injured.

Dum Dum is a symptom not just of West Bengal’s but also India’s rotting jail systems. Housing almost 3,900 inmates against a capacity of around 2,500, the over-packed Dum Dum jail was a tinderbox waiting to catch fire when the news of the virus spread and restrictions were imposed.

India currently has 1,339 jails housing over 460,000 prisoners. In 2018, the country had 48 fewer jails than in 2014, but they housed almost 48,000 more prisoners. Grossly overcrowded, jails across the country have consistently had an occupancy rate of 119 per cent or more during this period.

District jails, which comprise almost a third of all jails in the country, are most notorious for overcrowding. They usually have three prisoners housed in the space typically allocated for a single inmate in district jails. Out of the 36 states and Union Territories in India, 18 have jails that are bursting at the seams.

Incidents like Dum Dum and various other prisons where violence has erupted in the past are an indicator that jail staff per inmate has declined. In 2014, there were eight prison staffers for every inmate. In 2018, this number came down to seven. Suicides and jail breaks increased exponentially during the period. And amid all this, even as states increased their budgetary allocations for prisons, crores of rupees still remain unspent by authorities.

So, how could India mitigate its rotting prison systems? Is privatisation the answer?

Privatisation of prisons

"Some facilities in prisons can be privatised or given to responsible non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Nowhere in the world do prisoners cook their own food like they do in India. Food services, medical facilities, and vocational training can be privatised. In addition, a large number of prisoners remain in jail because they could not be taken to courts by the police, who had “other important duties”. Escorting prisoners to courts on dates of hearing so that some of them get bail, and reduce overcrowding of prisons thereby, can also be outsourced to private enterprises,” suggests Sankar Sen, former director of the National Police Academy.

The Narendra Modi government at the Centre has been considering introducing private prisons. In 2017, NITI Aayog Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Amitabh Kant, while speaking at a Ficci summit in New Delhi, had called for giving out “jails, schools and colleges” to the private sector. But, since prisons are a state subject under the Indian constitution, the Union government has not yet made a move on the proposal. Kant was unavailable for comment till the time of publication of this report.

Some of the most overcrowded jails are in the states currently ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Possibly, incentives could be given in these states for establishing private prisons. Uttar Pradesh, for instance, has India’s most overcrowded prisons, with an occupancy rate of 177 per cent. Other BJP-ruled states like Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat also accommodate more prisoners in their jails than their capacity. The national capital of Delhi, which also has the largest number of central jails in the country, has an occupancy rate of over 150 per cent.

In the past few years, the different state governments’ strategy for dealing with the rising inmate population has been to renovate and expand sub-jails with lower capacities into district and central jails. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data show that the decline in the number of prisons has largely been due to sub-jails getting converted into district and central jails across most states.

The capability of states to stay ahead of the rising inmate population – and avoid overcrowding and its deleterious consequences – has been questionable. From 2014 to 2018, India’s states managed to increase the capacity of their prisons by 11 per cent – the same rate at which inmate population grew during the period. So, the decades-old problem of overcrowded prisons remained just so, as capacities were not enhanced.

Shortage of manpower across Indian prisons

A manifestation of states’ inefficiency in managing prisons is also visible in the gross understaffing of overcrowded prisons often leading to allegations of mismanagement. In India, the most important functional officer-level posts are those of superintendents and jailors, along with their deputies. Together, these officers account for the bulk of officer-level staff and are trusted with running the prisons. While the sanctioned strength of such middle-level jail officials is almost 4,900 across India, more than a third of these posts remain vacant.

Besides, there is also a critical shortage of manpower when it comes to junior-level staff across prisons. Warders, who are tasked with watching over prisoners and all matters related to prison security, are the most crucial human resource in this category. They are the "eyes and the ears" of the jailer. Three out of ten warder posts in jails across the country remain unmanned.

While more warders, jailers, and superintendents have been recruited in the past few years, there has not been a paradigm shift in the number of prisoners overseen by a jailor or warder. Curiously, the expenses on inmates as a proportion of total prison expenditure has stagnated since 2014, despite the number of inmates and certain jail officers and staff increasing.

Much of the increasing expenditure on jails, therefore, seems to be going elsewhere, other than on food, medical supplies, clothing, or vocational training of inmates. India spends Rs 1.3 lakh on average per prisoner per year.

"The resources spent on managing prisons shouldn’t be seen as an expenditure on ‘housing’ prisoners. Prisons are a part of the criminal justice system, and the ultimate end point of the justice delivery system, which serves not only the victim of a crime but also the perpetrator by subjecting them to just punishment,” says Siddharth Lamba of Commonwealth Human Rights Institute (CHRI). In privately governed prisons, he fears, “the fundamental rights of prisoners will be lost and poor prisoners would be exploited”.

Private prisons in the US

The US was one of the first nations to experiment with private prisons in the 1980s in the wake of that country’s aggressive "war on drugs" campaign. Over the years, a handful of corporations have come to control the private prison business there. The US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. At 2.3 million, the US has five times as many prisoners as India, even as its population is only a fourth of India’s. Nine per cent of these inmates are held in private prisons.

The business model involves US states signing contracts under which they pay corporate players running prisons a specified amount on a per-prisoner-per-day basis. The private contractor is then free to work within that limit to run the prison.

What could potentially make private prisons a lucrative business opportunity for companies in India is the excruciatingly inefficient criminal justice system, which has led to burgeoning pre-trial detentions over the years. While just about 24 per cent of prisoners in the US are undertrials, their share in India stands at a whopping 70 per cent. If state governments can outsource housing of undertrials to private companies, it could inarguably improve conditions and free up space in existing jails. “Right now, undertrails and convicts live cheek and jowl in Indian prisons. This critically raises the risk of the undertrial being criminally contaminated by convicts” says Sankar Sen.

Possibilities in India

In the past couple of years, the number of undertrials in Indian prisons has grown at a much faster pace than that of convicted prisoners. While there have been various suggestions to speed up judicial processes, nothing has changed in this regard over decades.

“I don’t favour privatisation because the problem of undertrials in large numbers will anyway be reduced if the criminal justice system is reformed. This will reduce infrastructural and financial burden of running prisons. However, there can be a corporate entity created within prisons to sell the products manufactured by inmates and distribute revenues. At present, most of the money from their productive work goes to the treasury,” says AP Srivastava, former Director General of Police (DGP) of Punjab.

While corporatising prison produce is an attractive business model (already in place in central prisons like Tihar), private companies into manufacturing and other businesses could also productively use inmates as subsidised labour in their operations. India at present spends Rs 357 a day on every single prisoner. That’s higher than the highest Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) wage being paid in the country.

The turnover from sale of products made in the country’s prisons in 2018 was Rs 463 crore – almost twice the limit set in India to be classified as a medium and small enterprise (MSME). Can a corporate player unleash the business potential of India’s prisons, imbibe efficient management, improve inmate welfare and at the same time make running prisons a profitable business with multiple benefits to the society at large?

Madhurima Dhanuka of CHRI says, “Prisons are governed well when the person governing them at the top is proactive and interested in the welfare of prisoners. Whether private or state-owned, who heads the prison is what impacts the quality of incarceration and opportunities for vocational training, rehabilitation, etc. In my opinion, India should not venture into the privatisation of prisons at all – that might just make things even worse than what they are at present.”