Behind the Bars!

    As John F. Kennedy says, “The right of everyman is diminished when the rights of one man is threatened.” Human rights is a commonly discussed matter. There are institutions like The National Human Rights Commission of India, National Commission for Women, National Commission for Minorities and so on. These work to ensure that people are not denied their rights anymore, but there is a category of people we often forget who are also denied their rights. They are the one who are behind the bars, the prisoners who are in under trial jails. Prisons are important as they as the ultimate tenderness, as the curtailment of liberty, it has a way for the state to isolate those actors which pose threat to society and performs its part of the social contract of maintaining security. Prison life is an open secret, everyone has a vague idea of what happens in a prison but no one is sure and there is hardly any conversation about it. The four walls of a prison today serve double purpose, they protect the law-abiding society from the criminals and they also protect the punishment apparatus from unregulated surveillance by civil society. All these are justifiable under circumstances where the prisoners are literally guilty. But what if the judicial system stays ignorant of the lives of several prisoners who have not even got a chance to express themselves and stays under the darkness of prisons without being given a chance for the legal proceedings and are bound to live as prisoners even when they have not undergone judicial trials?

    India is the largest democracy in the world. Free elections, a multi-party parliamentary system, a vibrant and outspoken free press, an independent judiciary. And an abundance of independent non-governmental organizations assist to create a vibrant society in this country. However, if democratic checks and balances are meant to prevent government lawlessness, something has failed in India. According to Indian law, every individual who is detained in custody after being arrested must appear before a magistrate no later than 24 hours after being detained, except the time required for transportation to court. To allow for police detention to last longer, a court must issue a suspect to police custody not longer than fourteen days. A subsequent order from a magistrate is necessary if it is to be extended. According to the legislation, time spent in police custody cannot last longer than 90 days. In situations where if the sentence is less than ten years, the amount of time spent in police custody cannot exceed 60 days. But at the same time in India, under trial prisoners are denied their right to legal support many times. Under trials are people whose cases are still going on in court but nonetheless they are in prison so that they could be kept away from society as a prevention measure or to prevent them from tampering with evidence or causing difficulties in investigation. But how long they will be kept in prisons without determining whether they really are culprits or not is the worst part that can be discussed. As examining the prison system from the ancient times onwards, loneliness and isolation are the main factor the authority try to put forward. There are two types of isolation in prisons, one is the isolation from the members of civil society to protect them from criminals and the other one is isolation from other prisoners to avoid the harmful consequences of bringing together different convicts in one place. This was introduced because without it prison would be a factory of people who would work together and then retire to their cells. The element of punishment and reformation would be missing, moreover if criminals are free to communicate they may form gangs and be a potential threat to the hierarchy of power established within a prison. Actually when isolation was introduced there is this concept of moral reform, when someone is isolated in this cell the concept is that they will be forced to introspect and think about the crime which is supposed to rise remorse. So this whole model rests on the theory that everyone in prison has something in the first place to regret and this is simply not true especially in the case of India. India has a large under trial population and this include potentially innocent people who in a lot of cases just don’t have the financial ability to even secure bill and therefore have nothing to regret and have remorse about.

    Literature is something that informs our opinions and helps us form perceptions of this world and prisons form an integral part of the criminal justice system and indeed the state, so when these two come together it gives us a vivid view on the reality. All nations have judicial system and there are rules on how to deal with the prisoners in jail. Most of the time these rules are not followed. Some prisoners who has suffered from injustice speaks about their experiences in interviews and sometimes through writing a book. There is also another category, people who are interested in these prisoner’s life collect information and write about it. Thus a literary genre which focus on the lives in jail has emerged. This is known as prison literature. It is clear through some news and these works, how prisoners are treated inside jail. They face so many tortures. The reason for these tortures may differ. Sometimes it may be because they are poor and not able to bribe the people who hold power in such an institution. These prisoners are harmed physically, abused with words and some are even raped. All these things are clearly described in works which come under prison literature. The main point is that even when these victims come forward to talk about the tortures, the authorities never hear them. They just leave these complaints as they are normal. These tortures are done towards each category in a different way. Some like the poor are asked to be slaves for the powerful one. Some are sexually abused, no matter their gender identity. The case of trans-genders are worse. They are people who are highly tortured even outside the jail and the matter continues inside. Now by the influence of media and public the system has improved a lot but looking back to history the case was different, for example people were put into jail because of their gender identity, their political views etc. For example, Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for the case of indecency. He had a relation with Lord Alfred Douglas and was imprisoned because of his sexual identity. His De Profundis which was written for Lord Alfred Douglas comes under prison literature. Now the case is different, people are not put in prisons because of their sexual identity, they are on the other hand given protection by the court. Even though people and law have changed a lot there is injustice happening around, and this is mainly happening to the downtrodden people who can’t even afford to pay for their lawyer or the authorities in order to get justice. Under trial prisoners in India mostly come under this category, who belongs to lower caste, who are financially unstable and who even are unschooled. Prisoners who could not even read and understand the papers given by the court are the majority. Prison literature gives a light on these prisoners' life helping us understand what really is happening to them.