
The jail in Swabi is built for 125 inmates. It currently houses 640. The majority are suffering from sarcoptic mange as a result of overcrowding. There are 12 prisoners with HIV/AIDS and 50 suffering from Hepatitis A, B or C. The central jail in Peshawar houses 5,000, several times the designed capacity. Women are held with their children — who have committed no crime — and no facility to educate or care for them. Medical facilities are sparse to non-existent. In short the same, or worse, conditions exist in the jails of Pakistan as existed in England in the 1700s. Men and women are kept like animals in conditions that do nothing to reform or improve them and contribute to a growth in criminality as well as the spread of disease.
There is no tradition of campaigning reform such as that undertaken by Fry and Howard, who championed the cause of those at the bottom of society and in truth there is unlikely to be an emergence of such individuals. If there is to be reform at all it has to be driven from the top, prisons and the penal system generally must refocus on the rehabilitation of those confined. Some may never be fit to be back in society again, but many could live useful and diligent lives if they were trained in vocational skills. The numbers in our rotten prisons is only set to rise, and prison reform can no longer be deferred.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 6th, 2018.
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