New Delhi: The Uttarakhand high court has held that police personnel can’t serve as jail superintendents in state prisons – a significant order for prisoners’ rights.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice Raghvendra Singh Chauhan and Justice Alok Kumar Verma held that “we have come to the age of reformation and rehabilitation of prisoners”, LiveLaw reported, and police officials and jail superintendents have extremely different roles.
“The purpose of the Police is not to reform, or to rehabilitate, but to prevent the occurrence of crime, and to punish the criminals. Therefore, the very training of a police personnel is carried out with a different purpose in mind, and with different goals prescribed by law. Thus, there is a vast difference in the philosophy that permeates the police administration, and the jail administration. Hence, even their training and the psychology of the police personnel and prison personnel are poles apart,” the order noted.
As The Wire had reported before, a public interest litigation had been filed against the Uttarakhand home secretary’s order posting five Indian Police Service (IPS) officers as superintendents of central, district and sub jails. Petitioner Sanjeev Kumar, a practicing lawyer and rights activist based in Udham Singh Nagar district, said the action infringed upon both the legal and fundamental rights of those incarcerated.
While saying the home secretary’s order was illegal, the division bench also stated that prison employees needed to be chosen very carefully and trained rigourously. “It is only when these factors are inculcated in the prison administration that the prison system succeeds in protecting, reforming and rehabilitating the prisoners. Otherwise, it is a self-defeating proposition,” the bench observed.
The bench also talked about various recommendations made by committees in the past, on training required for prison staff if the Indian criminal justice system is to meet its rehabilitative ideals. It also quoted international rules – the UN’s Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, better known as the ‘Nelson Mandela Rules’ – to drive home the importance of a full-time, well-trained, empathetic prison staff.
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According to LiveLaw, the bench specifically referred to Rule 75(2) which states that “before entering on duty, all prison staff shall be provided with training tailored to their general and specific duties, which shall be reflective of contemporary evidence-based best practice in penal sciences”.
As Kumar’s petition had pointed out, the operations and deputations of both police and the prison department are kept separate on purpose. In jails, the prisoner is under judicial or a magistrate’s custody, and is ought to be kept away from police interference. If the police’s primary objective is to ensure law and order in the region, the prison officials are responsible for the rights, reformation and rehabilitation of those incarcerated. “Thus, the very object of appointment of both the officers, their duties and responsibilities and their training travelled into different concept of jurisprudence (sic),” Kumar pointed out in his petition.
Uttarakhand has a total of 11 prisons, with a capacity for 3,540 prisoners. However, as per the National Crime Records Bureau data of 2019, around 5,629 prisoners were lodged across different prisons in the state, taking the occupancy rate to 159% – the third highest after Delhi (174.9%) and Uttar Pradesh (167.9%). Uttarakhand has also reported the highest female occupancy rate (170.1%), followed by Chhattisgarh (136.1%) and Uttar Pradesh (127.3%).
