Despite the Punjab prisons authorities' complaints of understaffing, hundreds of its employees are reportedly performing non-essential or protocol duties.
The chief minister had taken notice of the issue and asked the jail authorities to submit a report and summon the staff deputed at the houses or other places with senior officers.
The inspector general Punjab prisons, while disseminating the orders, asked all the superintendents of prisons in Punjab to inform him about the warders appointed on protocol duties. It came forth that their number was in hundreds.
In Lahore, over 200 jail staffers had been appointed to serve senior officers of the home or prisons departments.
At least 145 staffers of Camp Jail and over 60 from Central Jail had been deputed at places other than their or designated duty points.
The IG prisons has called for deputing the warders back at their essential duty points.
According to an officer, the prisons department is short of around 4,000 staff members.
He also referred to a commission report submitted to Islamabad High Court last year that had confined that the prisons in the country were overcrowded. The prison population in Pakistan was approximately 77,000, while they had the capacity to host only 56,634 inmates. The report revealed that in Punjab 29 out of 41 jails were overcrowded.
It asserted that the overcrowding was the root cause many rights violations.
Considering the gravity of the issue, report also included recommendations for police reforms.
The recommendations included training of prison staff, immediate filling of vacant posts with trained and qualified staff, reduction in overcrowding of prisons by releasing deserving prisoners on probation, parole and remission, digitisation of prison data, creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) to expedite the process of seeking government approval to transfer sick prisoners to hospitals and ensuring their right to health and adequate medical treatment.
The report also proposed external audits of prisons after allocation of adequate budgets for them.
Besides overcrowding and understaffing, the report prepared by the commission of the Ministry of Human Rights also stressed that the jail rules did not refer to any training of the staff.
Another gap related to the staff of jails and human rights violations, pointed out by the report, was that the prisons jails did not have a proper management system.
Efforts were made to contact Minister for Prisons Punjab Fayyazul Hassan Chohan and IG Prisons Shahid Saleem but they did not respond.
However, Punjab Minister for Law and Cooperatives Basharat Raja said that the Punjab government was planning to introduce a major reforms package for the employees of jails and common prisoners across the province which would significantly improve the entire prison system. He was visiting the office of Inspector General (IG) Prisons Punjab.
Basharat Raja said he was on a mission on proposed prison reforms on the instructions of Chief Minister Usman Buzdar.
He said for the first time any chief minister had thought of the helpless prisoners instead of rich ones. He said that the proposed package would provide quality facilities to the prisoners through legal, financial, social and administrative changes.
"A proposal to increase the salaries and allowances of prison staff will also be considered," he added.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 28th, 2021.
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