“No one truly knows a nation unless one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizen but its lowest ones” — Nelson Mandela.
(Note: This is the fourth writing focusing on the three sub-systems of the criminal justice system; namely the police, the courts and the prisons. This newspaper has already carried my thoughts on the police, and the courts. This piece will be followed by my take on the role of the media as a major player in L&O.)
If ever it was to be decided to format a ‘civilization index’ to evaluate the quality of decency, empathy, and fair-play in national society, one of the key tests would be to evaluate how that nation treats its mental defectives, its physically-handicapped, and its prisoners. These three groups have no power to create lobbies for a better deal. They are at the mercy of the government, institutions, and the civil society. Look at it anyways; the treatment meted out to the above-cited groups in Pakistan is one of callous indifference. Regrettably, we are a third-rate society. Do you have any argument to the contrary? I don’t think so.
Because this article focuses on the state of the prison system in Pakistan, a deeper analysis is as follows:
Historically, the institution of the prison has its roots in the Middle Ages in Europe, where penitentiaries were established by certain Christian sects to ‘cleanse’ sinners. The transgressors of the Ten Commandments were forced to live, usually in segregated areas of cathedrals, and were administered physical and spiritual ‘corrections’ to atone for their ‘sins’. This system continued till the 18th Century, when the state decided to implement secular philosophies of governance, and adopted imprisonment as a distinct sanction of the law. But the religious and moral undertone in corrections still echoes. In the USA, many states call their prisons ‘penitentiaries’ to this day.
Although in the Holy Quran prisons are mentioned as state institutions (Sura Yusuf) the Islamic system of criminal justice does not enjoin imprisonment as a punishment for criminal offences. In Islam, an offender is to be punished by a one-time physical visitation. There is great emphasis in the Quran on forgiveness, and on fines to be paid to the victims of offences. In this country there has not been much research in this area which needs to be done. The Islamic code has high regard for the human rights of both the victim, and the offender too, and orders a fair disposal of each matter; the offender pays, and thus the victim is compensated.
Let’s fast forward to the present. We inherited a complex system of criminal law from the British in 1947, of which the prison was an integral part. They also left behind hundreds of jails full of ‘natives’. Present-day Pakistan inherited 90 prisons to which we have added nine or ten. Their total bed capacity is 45,000 beds. In these are housed 80,000 criminals, ranging from petty thieves to serial rapists and target killers. The cramped conditions are easy to imagine. Of these, only ten percent are convicted and serving their sentence. The other 90 percent are under trial or awaiting decisions on their appeals. Nearly all, with a countable exception, belong to the fifth economic class, born into and wallowing in poverty.
There are a large number of prisoners who are mentally ill, and need specialized medical attention. With the near collapse of the medical care system in this country, the psychiatrically disturbed are in any case at the back of the queue. Many poor families just dump their mentally sick members in the prisons. Drug addiction is another major evil. During the frequent time-to-time inspections, large quantities of hard drugs have been recovered which gives credence to the public perception that the drug trade is a well-organized business within the prison system. Needles to say, this cannot happen without the active participation of the jail staff.
The plight of women and juvenile prisoners is probably even more heart-rending. Because there are no formal studies and research papers available to this author, one can only surmise that these are bound to be inhuman, cruel, and unjust vis-à-vis their constitutional rights. This understanding is borne out by our lawyer fraternity which is willy-nilly involved in criminal law practice.
Politically and socially there is no great interest in prison reform. Our broken court system, where the district judiciary needs to keep an eagle eye on the local jail, only wakes up when there is jail riot, where again, a lot of rioting prisoners get the short end of the stick, irrespective of the reasons why they revolted in the first place.
The Prime Minister, as one of the cardinal objectives of governances, wishes to use the model of the Prophets’ (PBUH) Medina for Pakistan. So, one of the most practiced Sunnah, the PM must take a compassionate view of the weakest rung in society, which are the blighted prisoners of this unjust nation. He needs to create a national commission made up of administrators, ulema, and criminal law lawyers, headed by the PM himself.
The TORs should broadly be: a study of the demography of our prisons; under-trials who need legal assistance to pursue their case; prisoners illegally detained; social evils in the system, with particular focus on criminal behavior among staff; basic facilities needed and shortfall make-up; devising a foolproof system of prison inspections, preferably by senior media anchors, etc.etc,
Criminologists of the left have averred for generations that the world-wide prison system is used, not for dispensation of justice, but by the elite of that society, to lock up and keep away the most despised class of that society based on race, creed, and economic class. Based on empirical research these experts are fixed that there are only five classes of criminals who need to be jailed for they are a threat to society at large in a compulsive-obsessive mindset. The terrorist, the violent offender, the sexual psychopath, organized property thieves, and the arsonist must be locked up and the key thrown away. All others should be under varying degrees of official control, ranging from open prisons to parole and probation.
At test is the quality of our civilization as per the great Nelson Mandela, quoted above.
