CJI Surya Kant bats for tech-enabled jail reforms, UK-style monitoring

CHANDIGARH: In a significant push for modernising the country's prison ecosystem, CJI Surya Kant has advocated bold, tech-integrated reforms, ranging from digital-skills training to UK-style inmate-monitoring systems, aimed at transforming prisons from punitive spaces into "engines of reintegration".

Highlighting the need to align prison training with the "economy of tomorrow", the CJI stressed that inmates must be equipped with digital competencies, logistics expertise, & modern vocational skills. He urged deeper industry collaboration, proposing a model where companies "adopt" prisons, offer apprenticeships, & eventually recruit trained inmates, turning ability into opportunity.


CJI Kant was speaking on correctional reforms in Gurgaon on Saturday while inaugurating skill development and polytechnic courses inside Haryana jails.

While giving one of his four "thoughtful proposals" to strengthen correctional justice framework, the CJI said that the suggestion is regarding opening or establishing either the open jails or just following paradigm shift that has taken place in the United Kingdom with the help of a software company based in Bangalore, where a chip is provided to the convicts, who are allowed to stay at homes within defined radius.

"Their movements are monitored through advanced software, ensuring compliance while allowing individuals to maintain family life, emotional bonds, financial stability, and continuity for their children, often the 'invisible victims' of incarceration," the CJI said.

The CJI also pushed for creating or expanding open prisons in India as part of this humane rethinking of criminal justice.

He concluded by reminding that data-driven reforms are essential. "A modern incarceration system must track behavioural progress and post-release trajectories, ensuring that rehabilitation is measurable, accountable, and effective. Such a system, he said, would help measure the real effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes and reduce recidivism," he said.

The CJI said that when individuals step out of prison and return to society without adequate support, their reintegration becomes not only difficult but dangerously uncertain. Without guidance, many are pulled back into a cycle of marginalisation and renewed conflict with the law. He said that in the absence of education, skills, psychological support, and structured reintegration, a prison, what he prefers to call a "correctional home", can unintentionally become a place where disadvantages deepen and custodial cycles repeat.

Reformative justice today demands clear thinking, coordinated action, and systems designed for renewal rather than return, he said.

CJI Kant has long been known for championing correctional reforms for jail inmates. Even during his tenure as a judge of Punjab and Haryana high court, he delivered a landmark judgment in the Jasbir Singh case, holding that the right of convicts or jail inmates to have conjugal visits - or alternatively to seek artificial insemination for progeny - is a Fundamental Right.

Justices Ahsanuddin Amanullah, Rajesh Bindal and Augustine George Masih of SC and Sheel Nagu, chief justice of Punjab and Haryana HC, HC judge Justice Lisa Gill and executive chairperson, Haryana State Legal Services Authority, along with Judges of HC and other dignitaries from the state administration, attended the programme.

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