This is the final part of the three-part series on ‘safeguarding prisoners’ rights in India‘ as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The first and second part can be found here and here.
What must it feel like to live in a prison where you can see sunlight and feel the wind in your face whenever you desire? To be treated, not like a caged animal, but as a friend or community member deserving of dignity, kindness and respect?
For inmates in Halden prison, Norway, this life is a reality. When the country began to witness rapidly rising incidents of reoffending in the late 1970s, the Norwegian government decided to construct what is today dubbed the ‘most humane prison in the world.’ In Halden, jail officials are role models, coaches and mentors trained in psychology, physical safety, ethics and social work.
By imitating life elsewhere in the community, every feature ranging from the prison architecture to creating long-lasting inmate-staff relations, emphasises building trust, recognising humanity, and turning former prisoners into good neighbours.
While Norway managed to reduce reoffending rates, many of the ex-convicts I spoke to during my fieldwork in Kerala described how their feelings of hope and liberation after release were short-lived. As previously discussed here and here, re-entry programs for released inmates in India suffer from numerous shortcomings and require immediate attention.
Exploring Alternate Possibilities
A study documenting released inmates’ experiences in Kerala and Tamil Nadu showed how greater financial dependence among prisoners resulted in their families seeing them as a ‘burden’, thus decreasing prospects of successful reintegration.
Therefore, as an immediate measure, increasing the average money spent by prison departments per inmate after release is crucial to ensuring that they do not fall back into a life of crime. Designing a well-structured re-entry policy also requires the collection of first-hand prison-wise data in each district to identify the nature of institutional support inmates require.
Additionally, prison staff and probation officers play a significant role in the rehabilitation process by regularly visiting inmates after release to understand their unique rehabilitation needs and offer them customised assistance. In Telangana, for example, the prison department provides after-care services and interest-free loans to released inmates and their families and trains staff to stay motivated and earn the goodwill of prisoners.
Such programs have yielded positive results, with state prisons witnessing a drop in occupancy rates, prison violence and inmate illiteracy.
Reevaluating Current Support Mechanisms
At present, Indian prisons are grossly understaffed and disproportionately employ jail personnel in charge of inmate custody instead of correctional officers responsible for prisoner welfare.
Such staffing patterns prevent welfare officers from focussing on the distinct rehabilitation needs of individual inmates. Addressing these concerns requires state governments to urgently fill vacancies in correctional staff positions and increase the annual spending from the prison budget on rehabilitation programs. Measures must also be taken to create free-flowing communication channels between prison authorities, probation officers, social workers, counsellors and NGOs to efficiently monitor inmates after release and offer everyday assistance.
Contrary to the one-size-fits-all approach, India’s short-term, medium-term and long-term rehabilitation programs must acknowledge that offender participation varies depending on inmates’ experiences while incarcerated. These variations can affect inmates’ motivations to restore their lives, including how willingly they trust and participate in after-care programs.
One way to support inmates throughout the reintegration process is through external collaborations with educational institutions, government officials and social justice organisations. Such a pilot attempt achieved success in Maharashtra.
Social workers dedicated to prisoners’ welfare were appointed as ‘release facilitators’ to help inmates connect with families, identify the resources needed for personality development, and provide guidance on accessing healthcare, plus legal and financial aid.
Mangala Honawar, who leads this initiative, admits several problems that need to be overcome, especially in the initial phases. “Rehabilitation of prisoners into society is not a task the system can accomplish without outside help. This is full-time work, and it has to be embedded in the system,” they say.
Another innovative alternative to preparing prisoners for release is the open prison system in India.
In open prisons, inmates live in a community-like environment without bars that closely resemble the lives they left behind in the outside world. With minimal supervision of their everyday activities, open prisons create an atmosphere of self-responsibility, discipline, trust, and positive energy.
Prisoners can choose to live with family members and opt for their preferred employment outside the premises. Smita Chakraburtty, an Honorary Prison Commissioner and researcher, recommends the open prison system as an alternative to the ‘inhuman’ maximum security prisons. According to her, justice must not be retributive, violent, or repressive in an inclusive society. Instead, open prisons promote a life of dignity that gives prisoners a second chance.
Though open prisons require minimal staff and are cheaper overall functioning, they can be challenging to maintain without sustained political will. Unfortunately, despite judicial recommendations, many state governments in India have refused to set up such prisons, while other open jails have turned defunct due to poor management.
Yet, if constructively supervised, they present a feasible alternative. One example is Kerala’s open jail in Nettukaltheri, which allows interested inmates to spend their time engaging in agricultural cultivation across a sprawling green campus.
In addition to a conducive environment, educational opportunities are also critical to sustaining the re-entry efforts of ex-convicts, especially inmates convicted of violent crimes. For this reason, countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa are encouraging prison-college-pipeline programs to educate incarcerated populations by providing them with the skills they need to reduce barriers to employment and proactively contribute to the development of their communities.
In India, too, there is ample scope for initiating partnerships between prison departments, educational NGOs, and universities committed to prisoner rehabilitation. The Prayas Action Project at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences is one such innovative step.
Building Hope And Earning Second Chances
In an increasingly punitive society, our responses to the question ‘who is a criminal’ are dramatically shaped by stereotypes in public discourse that dehumanise prisoners, especially those from socioeconomic and religious minorities, thus distorting the gut-wrenching human realities of punishment.
Our self-righteous condonation of extrajudicial killings and cruel forms of punishment has dangerously normalised demonic perceptions of incarcerated individuals. It has deprived them of a right to be understood as full, complicated human beings.
Helping ex-prisoners re-enter society through meaningful initiatives is an opportunity to reconstruct these misguided narratives.
At the heart of rehabilitation is a genuine belief that all individuals can achieve personal transformation when given the proper care and opportunities. Dr Kunjumon Chacko, the founder of the Prison Fellowship India, echoes this thought while stressing the role of community members in assisting released inmates in their localities.
“Prisoners are people like any of us”, he says. “There are first time offenders, habitual, property-related and life-related offenders. Most of them can be brought back to normal life if given a second chance. They have anxieties, pains, and problems like us.” But all efforts do not necessarily have to start big.
Reny George, an ex-convict, released from Thiruvananthapuram Central Jail in 1995, started running a home to improve the living conditions and opportunities for the children of inmates. He observes how even such small, personal efforts can go a long way to de-stigmatise the lives of ex-convicts and create suitable social conditions for their reintegration.
Rehabilitation programmes for released prisoners will not work until all of us are a part of the process; until society views inmates as ‘one of us.’
As one legal scholar puts it, “[W]hen prisoners feel that they are not part of the ‘us’ of society, what motivation do they have to follow the laws and norms of the society that has rejected them? When we, as a society, see prisoners as ‘them,’ we see them as oppositional to ourselves and have no desire or need to help them.”
Unless a cultural shift in mindset occurs in India, wherein we attempt to humanise the experiences of prisoners and empathise with their life circumstances, efforts to revamp existing reintegration schemes for released inmates cannot succeed.
Rehabilitation programmes for released prisoners will not work until all of us are a part of the process; until society views inmates as ‘one of us.’