India has a criminal justice mechanism, which is regulated and empowered under the Criminal Procedure Code, the CrPC.
The familiarity with the criminal justice process is an open process and frequently the newspapers and media carry news of persons arrested and granted bail. Those poor souls who cannot afford bail are then sent to jails and housed there until the trial or formal prosecution process starts. They are called undertrials.
It is frequently mentioned that in India jails are overcrowded. There are more people in the jails than what the jails can physically accommodate and hence overcrowded. For example, if the capacity of the jail is 1200 and there are 1763 prisoners inside, then that jail is called overcrowded. The facilities are granted, but the physical accommodation is something that a convict or an undertrial can experience.
The Indian cinema has portrayed the inside of a jail in many ways. However, to see the inside of a jail is not difficult for a citizen. The jailer is kind enough to grant permission for well-meaning citizens to go around. Convicts can be visited by friends and relatives; undertrials can be visited by family and lawyers or their lawyer’s assistants.
The purpose of this writing is for the Government of India to have a programme to separate the term — Convicts and Undertrials. This process is very important that convicts are to serve their sentences for some time, for a specific duration that can be as low as 30 days or even less, or as high as life imprisonment, which means a certain duration. If the convict is 63 years old and is serving life imprisonment, then it would mean different from a 33-year-old serving life imprisonment.
The term life imprisonment signifies that the person is not fit for normal social life. In India, it is time to expand the physical facilities by building high quality, highly secure and comfortable prisons.
But the public observance is that people who are acting against society deserve harsh punishment. India has a debate going on, on whether death sentences deserve to be in the law at all. But as and when death sentences are pronounced, according to CrPC, hanging is the method of execution in the civilian court system. https://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/cpds1.pdf
A democratic country allows the procedures for appeals and occasionally the process is quick but sometimes the process is lengthy too, depending on the person’s capacity or the person’s supporters who try to save the life of the person.
The basic presumption here is that a person who is not guilty is to be allowed the maximum recourse in the law and that there should not be a manipulation of the justice system for a not guilty person to be pronounced guilty.
However, the normal practice in India is, a person who is guilty and even if the person accepts it, the lawyers persuade him to say ‘not guilty’ and then the manipulations begin. This is not a rule but an exception.
The justice process consists of judges and lawyers. Rarely, individuals get to participate. In many instances, individuals have argued for themselves, not with a manipulation purpose or avoiding fees or avoiding lawyers, but the fact that they know the law and want to defend themselves in the case.
Indian history, even before the British system is full of stories of how the law was administered and justice was delivered. In different monarchies, different kinds of law and justice prevailed.
India had 700 kingdoms and the process of law was individualistic to that kingdom – there were corporal or normal punishments, imprisonments, or flogging. Death by trampling under an elephant’s foot was one of the visible demonstrations of showing the public that wrongdoing would not go unpunished and served as a deterrent.
There were also pronouncements of banishing from the kingdom. The person was free to go and settle outside the kingdom or migrate to the Himalayas and merge into the anonymous and the unknown, repenting for life.
There was a newspaper article from 2015, which wrote that the United Kingdom had 407 Indian citizens who were held prisoners and the UK wanted to deport them to India so that the Indian government could take care of them for the rest of their terms. This would be under a government-to-government arrangement. It also mentioned the cost of maintaining a prisoner in the UK was around £ 25,900 a year. In today’s terms, it would be more than 22 lakhs a year.
In India, the cost of having a prisoner who is a convict in any jail has not been studied and computed. Perhaps it is an assignment to the Indian Institute of Public Administration, to study the conditions of various jails to determine the cost to the taxpayer.
However, the proposal now is that India should build at least 1600 jails to host only convicts. The current jails can be administered for undertrials till they are released or convicted, as the legal system is familiar with these jails and therefore more visibility will be there as a distinction between convicts and prisoners who are awaiting or undergoing trial.
