Makeshift shelters: Muzaffarabad jail – where even guards feel insecure

Lack of boundary walls, security arrangements leave officials feeling exposed; prisoners bemoan lack of facilities

MUZAFFARABAD: As night falls in Rada, some 10 kilometres from Muzaffarabad in Azad Jammu Kashmir, guards at the makeshift ‘central’ prison there start to get nervous.

The prisoners, on the other hand, huddle together to keep each other warm since their confines have no heating system.

In 2005, when the earthquake struck, the prison was severely damaged. Instead of moving inmates to other facilities in the region, including the jail in Mirpur or Kotli, officials had shifted the prisoners into makeshift shelters in Rada. With a new prison taking time to build, officials had declared the shelters as the central jail.

Even after a decade, no real measures have been taken to make the shelters secure or to build facilities for the prisoners

“We have over 100 prisoners here serving time for committing different crimes,” said a prison official while talking to The Express Tribune.

“As the sun sets, we feel insecure as the entire premises do not have a boundary wall,” the official said, adding that the facility also lacks other security arrangements.

Further, he said that most of the prisoners in the jail were locals.

The lack of facilities and infrastructure at the jail is not only a cause of concern for the guards, but also for the inmates.

Ramzan, an inmate at the jail, said that since their shelters do not have any cooling or heating systems, the extremes of weather make it very difficult to stay in the shelters.

“In the summer we cannot live in the shelters [because it gets too hot] and in the winter, the jails are too cold especially as night falls since the absence of a proper heating system means we cannot sit in the shelters,” the inmate says.

Another prisoner complained of overcrowding with 20 to 30 prisoners locked in a room which only has a capacity for five people.

Some visiting relatives of prisoners at the jail also demanded that the government ensure proper facilities and security at the prison.

A new prison has been under construction for a while in the area, however, it has not been completed yet. A prison official said that due to paucity of funds and delays in releasing payments on time, at least two contractors working on the new prison stopped work on the new facility.

Muzaffarabad’s Commissioner Muhammad Tayyab told The Express Tribune that the issue had been raised with AJK’s Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider Khan who had assured authorities that the requisite funds to complete the facility would be arranged on priority basis.

Asked about security at the facility, the commissioner assured that all areas were covered.

“Security at the prison remains on high alert around the clock to avert any untoward incident in the jail,” Tayyab said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2016.