#undertrials

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data on prisons show that Dalits and Tribals continue to be jailed in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population, unlike OBCs and those belonging to the general category. According to the National Crime Record Bureau report titled ‘Prison Statistics India 2021’, around 30 per cent of all the convicts, 29.54 per cent of undertrials and 37 per cent of detenues in Tamil Nadu’s prison are Dalits who constitute 21 per cent of the state’s population. At the end of 2019, tribals made up 3.20 per cent of all convicts in jails across the country. The share of Scheduled Tribes among undertrials languishing in jails stood at 2.97 per cent. The 2011 census put the tribal population in the state at 1.10 per cent.

We were lucky, we had access to good lawyers and our case had media attention. But most prisoners are from marginalised sections, many of them have little education and no access to lawyers. And officials have absolute power over their lives and they don't treat them as human beings.

With no substantive response from central or state governments, Swamy and Turi put together a research team to map the state of undertrials in Jharkhand’s prisons. Travelling across the state, and filing right-to-information requests with the police in each district—most went unanswered—the team released a report in 2016 with the life histories of 102 UAPA undertrials statewide. The undertrials were overwhelmingly Adivasis and Dalits, whose cases languished in the criminal-justice system for up to 10 years. For example, the report had the story of Shobha Munda, a woman with eight pending cases in a court in the southern Jharkhand town of Ghatsila. She had not been able to appoint a “reliable lawyer” for her defense, though she had been in jail for “not less than four years already”. About 59% of households of undertrials in the report earned less than Rs 3,000 per month and were forced to sell assets, such as goats, to meet bail conditions or legal expenses.

Since we were cut off from the outside world and couldn't meet our families, we ended up building intense friendships in prison. We were in a ward where there were children, many of them were born in prison, and it was heartening to see many of them being brought up collectively. It's not that there were no conflicts and fights, but there was also a sense of being in it together. Women were always braiding each other's hair, we played ludo [a popular board game], we learnt so many different ways of braiding hair.

Supreme Court orders release of undertrials languishing in jails