SC: Make prisons reformative, give women right to open jails

NEW DELHI: In an effort to transform India's punitive prison system into reformative centres, Supreme Court has mandated radical reforms and ruled that women inmates, like male prisoners, have a fundamental right to be lodged in open correctional institutions (OCIs), which must change character from labour camps to vocational training centres and allow inmates' to have regular access to their families.

Penning a 138-page magnum opus of a judgment on what ails the Indian prison system and the judicially devised antidotes, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta appointed former SC judge S R Bhat as chairperson of a high powered committee with a honorarium of Rs 10 lakh per month along with other facilities to frame within six months a nationally consistent common minimum standards for "Reforms and Governance of Open Correctional Institutions". It asked states, which do not have open jails, to establish these institutions and mandated setting up of multi-layered monitoring systems to ensure that its series of directions are scrupulously complied with in a time bound manner. It posted the next hearing on the matter on Sep 1. It directed state committees to file quarterly reports on implementation of SC directed reforms in open prisons before the jurisdictional HCs, which in turn will file yearly reports before SC every March 31.

Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Mehta said, "Exclusion of women from OCIs, or failure to transfer them despite being eligible for transfer from closed prisons to OCIs, amounts to blatant gender discrimination, violative of Articles 14 and 15(1) of the Constitution, and also infringes upon their right to live with dignity as guaranteed under Article 21."

He said, "Denial of access to OCIs deprives women prisoners of equal opportunity for rehabilitation and cannot be sustained in a constitutional order committed to equality, dignity and the transformative promise of justice. Immediate and effective corrective measures are, therefore, imperative in this regard."

The bench frowned at the long wait for a person lodged in closed jails - varying between 4 to 21 years in different states - to become eligible for shifting to an open jail.


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