They’re talking about privatising prisons... I say, privatise the courts and even the judges!

Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Dean of IIPM)

Recently, the Delhi High Court ordered the Tihar Jail authorities to release 600 odd inmates (who had been detained on account of preventive detention) terming it the ‘first small step’ towards easing the overcrowding of jails. No doubt, it is a commendable step, as this way, at least these 600 plus detainees are saved from becoming hardened criminals! But what I am still wondering is what happens to those thousands of undertrial prisoners who are still languishing in jails without any verdict!?!

It is a known secret that overcrowding of our jails has been less on account of increasing criminalization of the society and more due to our slow justice delivery mechanism. A few years back, a National Crime Research Bureau study on almost 220,000 cases showed that a case takes on an average a staggering three years to reach even the first hearing in courts, which automatically means that those many people languish in jails without even being heard once! And for those who manage to get a hearing (around 26,500 ‘lucky’ few of them), it takes almost a killing decade for the case to come to a conclusion! As a result of this ‘supreme’ efficiency, an unprecedented pressure has been created on jail infrastructure (for information, of 3,60,000 jailed prisoners, a numbing 2,50,000 are under-trials).

It is incredible that on an average, jails in the country are housing 140% more than their capacity. Delhi, with 250% overcapacity (Tihar alone has 13,712 prisoners against a capacity of 6,250) and Jharkhand with 300%, lead the pack. What is even more appalling is that of all the undertrials, almost 14,000 are women, and of them, around 12.5% are pregnant! Obviously, in the given environment, one cannot expect an undertrial to remain sane for long. Ironically, our jails have become less of correction centers and more of breeding grounds for hardened criminals. Imagine the emotional state of the likes of Machan Lalung and Khulilur Rehman who spent 54 and 35 years of their lives in jail as undertrials for crimes where the maximum sentence, if convicted, would have been between 5 to 10 years!

As if the current mental exploitation of the undertrials were not enough, rather than acknowledging the real problem, now our bureaucrats and politicians have suddenly felt the need to follow the US model of privatising prisons to allow even the physical exploitation of prisoners. In the US, it is a known fact that prisoners for long have been exploited by the private enterprise as a cheap source of labour (interestingly, companies like Microsoft , McDonald’s and Starbucks have been outsourcing some job or the other from time to time to cut costs). Even before you reach the debate of whether this practice is ethical or not, you’ll have to understand the fact that in America, their ‘prisoners’ are ‘convicts’ and not ‘undertrials’. Rather than blindly replicating the American model, we need to actually learn from their efficient justice delivery system. Why can’t our bureaucrats immediately partly privatise the justice delivery mechanism, that is, hire part-time judges (say, temporarily promote extremely qualified lawyers) and set up special benches and start reducing the pending cases at a fast pace? Won’t that allow innocents to lead a rightfully dignified life? Well, I’m not waiting for an answer. It might well take ten years for them to reach a decision...

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative