Life In Overpopulated Prisons

Improved Essays
India is one of the countries with the highest preventive detention, 249,796 people in overpopulated prisons. During police custody, they suffer beatings, sleep deprivation and electro-shock (all of this in violations of their constitutional rights). Subject to degrading and inhuman treatment, it is an example of large-scale human rights abuses. Every day, four people die in both police and judicial custody for these abuses. Many of these deaths could be avoided if the cases were resolved faster. However, every year more cases are brought to court that are even thrown away, creating a bottleneck in Indian justice. There are currently 26,752,193 cases pending resolution and could take thousands of years to resolve them all. Thanks to this, the …show more content…
Torture and ill-treatment are common, and cells are often demolished, poorly ventilated, and without natural light. A report made in 2015 by the General Audit and Comptroller of India on Tihar notes that the complex is staggering with a prison population more than double that expected and that it lacks 50 percent of the necessary personnel. The document details that the 10 prisons are heavily overcrowded with 14,209 prisoners, well above their capacity of 6,250. In addition, there are 51 prisoners who are still awaiting trial and who have already stayed longer than half of the maximum term foreseen for the crime for which they were arrested. Medical facilities are virtually non-existent and professionals are lacking, and the hospital is not equipped to handle emergency situations, despite having 150 beds. Bad locative conditions have consequences on the health of the inmates, both physically and psychologically, reported a former …show more content…
It is not surprising that prisons in Africa are in poor condition. The buildings are old, poorly ventilated, with inadequate sewage systems. These conditions are conducive to the transmission of contagious diseases. Prisoners often lack sufficient space to sleep or sit down, hygiene is poor and food and clothing are inadequate. Between such decay and deprivation, the overburdened prison staff find it difficult to supervise prisoners or provide them with higher levels of sanitation and

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