RIGHTS-INDIA: Boy Prisoners Face Long Jail Terms Before Trial

By Keya Acharya Reprint | | Print |

Keya Acharya

BANGALORE, India, Oct 16 1999 (IPS) - Sixteen-year-old Mohanna says he made under 10 rupees (one quarter US dollar) a day cleaning motorbikes in city parking lots and begging a tip from the owners.

“I would then run to the nearest eating-place, fill my stomach the best I could, and not worry about anything else,” he reminisces.

Nine months ago, Mohanna was jailed by the police for ‘illegal demand’ of parking fees, a euphemism for refusing to pay the beat constables to turn a blind eye.

Mohanna is now an undertrial in Bangalore Central Jail, waiting for his case to come up in court. He has neither money, family, home nor lawyer to help him.

Mahadesh, an eleventh-class student, is a runaway from the agricultural Raichur district in Karnataka state. He admits he stole a camera while roving Bangalore’s railway station. “I wanted to see how it worked,” he says.

Inside jail for 6 months now, Mahadesh is thorors in Bangalore’s Central Jail, could stay in jail for months and years waiting for their case to come up in court. And even when it does, procedural delays could hold up the hearing further.

“There is no police escort to take us to the court when our cases come up,” is a common refrain. The hearing thus gets further postponed in a judicial system that is overburdened with pending cases.

Though jail Superintendent B.S. Abbai of Centra police Additional Director-General H.T. Sangliana, till recently head of Karnataka’s prisons and credited with improving prison- conditions in the state to being amongst the best in India.

Bangalore’s Police Commissioner Revanna Siddaiah says delays can be minimised somewhat by proper management of cases by the courts, instead of the haphazard allotment of undertrial hearings.

“The problem of staff shortages is another cou0 staff positions lying vacant in the overcrowded jail, built in 1867 to house 700 inmates, but now holding 2,200 prisoners

The space crunch in the generally colonial British-built jails across the country is acute, with hardened criminals and first- timers thrown together, negatively influencing the new entrants in crime.

“We are actually increasing crime in the post-jail period because of space-constraints,” observes Sangliana, of India’s prison-system which in spite of being better than ons”, pioneered in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail by the 1996 Magasaysay-award winner Kiran Bedi, a police woman, is still rare in India.

In Bangalore, Father George of Prison Ministry-India, a national network of volunteers who offer emotional and rehabilitation help to prisoners, says the boys urgently need therapy for reform.

Their rapport with prison-service staff extends to the boys’ jailer E. Mohanan, a tall, iron-framed, baton-wieltty charges, then being identified as accomplices by associates and thereafter being taken into custody by policemen who recognise them is “their entrance to crime”.

Their legal plight is then exploited by ‘crime dons’ who bail them out and use them in various crimes thereafter, says Merle D’Souza of Friends of Prisoners, a CCF (Children’s Christian Fund) affiliate.

Friends of Prisoners, which has been providinmainly through occupational therapy, but we are not equipped to offer that,” says D’Souza.

Superintendent Abbai is now discussing self-help schemes, like carpentry or mechanical-repair skills, with NABARD (a national rural development bank that extends loans) and Janodaya, an organisation helping to rehabilitate women out of prisons.

Janodaya’s Santosh Vaz agrees that the police aTXACK prisons.

Janodaya’s Santosh Vaz agrees that the poli