NCRB Report The state of Indian Prisons

Table of Contents

Q) Which Committee has recently been setup by Supreme Court to look into jail reforms?

A)- Bibek Debroy

B)- Amitava Roy

C)- Lodha committee

D)- Justice B. M Shah Committee

PRISON STATISTICS REPORT- 2016, RELEASED BY NCRB IN APRIL 2019

At the end of 2016, there were 4,33,033 people in prison.
Out of which 68% were undertrials.
India’s under-trial population remains among the highest in the world.
More than half of all undertrials were detained for less than six months in 2016.

This suggests that the high proportion of undertrials in the overall prison population may be the result of unnecessary arrests and ineffective legal aid during remand hearings.
In 2016, out of 1,557 undertrials found eligible for release under Section 436A, only 929 were released.
This may be due to prison officials are unaware of this section and unwilling to apply it.

300% rise in the number of people held under administrative (or ‘prevention’) detention laws in Jammu and Kashmir.
431 detainees in 2016, compared to 90 in 2015.

In UP where total sanctioned capacity is 58,000 in 70 jails, the actual number of inmates is almost double of that.
The State has only 4,000 warders as against the required staff strength of at least 9,000.
Thus managing such large number of prisoners is not always possible.

The 2016 prison statistics do not mention the number of prison visits by official and non-official visitors like DM, Judges, researchers etc.
This is essential to uncover torture and other forms of ill-treatment.
It can be seen from the fact that the number of “unnatural” deaths in prisons doubled between 2015 and 2016, from 115 to 231.
The rate of suicide among prisoners also increased by 28%, from 77 suicides in 2015 to 102 in 2016.
The National Human Rights Commission in 2014 had stated that on average, a person is one-and-a-half times more likely to commit suicide in prison than outside.
The NCRB report also states that there was only one mental health professional for every 21,650 prisoners in 2016.

NCRB report has not included demographic details of religion and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe status of prisoners.
This information was consistently published for the last 20 years and instrumental in revealing the problematic overrepresentation of Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis among under-trials in prisons.

The report of 2015, for instance, said that Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis accounted for 55% of the under-trial population even though they made up only 50% of the convict population and 38% of the total Indian population.

In 2017, the Law Commission of India had recommended that undertrials who have completed a third of their maximum sentence for offences attracting up to seven years of imprisonment be released on bail.
In 2018, Supreme Court constituted a three-member committee, headed by its former judge Justice Amitava Roy, to look into jail reforms across the country and suggest measures to deal with them.

Q) Which Committee has recently been setup by Supreme Court to look into jail reforms?

A)- Bibek Debroy

B)- Amitava Roy

C)- Lodha committee

D)- Justice B. M Shah Committee