Nagpur jailbreak: What it tell us of corruption and violence in prisons

Maharashtra's chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis (who is also the home minister) and the additional director general of police and inspector general of prisons, Meeran Chadha Borwankar, have been releasing a stream of statements following the escape of five undertrial prisoners from Nagpur Central Prison on March 31, 2015. Their general tenor has been to blame the lower level jail officials for corruption and incompetence and to state a resolve to set things right.

Corruption bogey

The immediate scapegoat has been the jail superintendent, Vaibhav Kamble, an officer from the Scheduled Castes, who has been suspended. Media reports talk of the next scapegoat being the DIG (prisons) Shashikant Shinde, who had, in 2013, got the Maharashtra home secretary and DGP booked in a case of caste discrimination under the SC-ST Atrocities Act. Another scapegoat has been a jail guard who fed the media with facts of the goings-on in the jail. He was rewarded for his whistle-blowing with a police case registered against him by the jail authorities. Meanwhile the CM-cum-HM and the additional DG have absolved themselves of any responsibility whatsoever. 

All investigations by media and other independent sources, however, point to things much deeper and systemic than the higher-ups would be willing to acknowledge. Many press reports listed the rates charged by the jail staff for the various illegal services rendered by them and one report even claimed that the jail-break had been facilitated with payment of Rs 20 lakh to key people. The authors of this piece have spent several years in the Badi Gol of Nagpur Jail, which is the very same circle from which the jail-break took place. We can therefore vouch for the truth of the reports. Arun's book, Colours of the Cage, details, among other things, the varieties of corruption in the functioning of the prison administration.

But corruption, though all pervasive, is by no means the main problem of prisons and prison life. Political prisoner, Binayak Sen perceptively points out that corruption in jails even has its other side. He, in an interview, commented, "The jail system runs on corruption. In some ways, this corruption is almost positive because it brings a kind of humanising intervention that the system has completely shut out."

Convicts and professional criminals administer coercive machinery

More than corruption, it is the dehumanising violence embedded in the prison system that defines it. This violence is administered on a daily basis by jail officials and by convicts and professional criminal inmates, acting on the administration's behalf. Gangsters, particularly those with outside political support, have an important role in maintaining this coercive machinery that keeps the ordinary prisoner in a permanent state of fear and awe.

CM Fadnavis, who has had successive terms as MLA from Nagpur, is now keen to put on a show of cleaning up things and establishing rule of law in the Nagpur prison. But we, during our period in Nagpur, have seen many jail gangs who claimed proximity to him and who obtained privileges on that basis. One wonders whether he intends now to deploy his boys to bring about rule of law - his law.

As the details of the jail-break emerge it is quite clear that, more than the 20 lakh rupees that reportedly changed hands, it must have been the coercive power that the escaping gangsters wielded within the prison structure that helped them escape. The Barrack No 6 from which they escaped does not allow for any type of secrecy. It is always overcrowded and even on the night of the escape, the barrack reportedly had a total of 149 other prisoners. Such a large number of prisoners have to be packed close together and almost all would have been well aware of a week-long process of sawing through iron bars of a nine foot by four foot window through which the escape allegedly took place. Yet no one passed on this information. This can only mean that the average prisoner feared the escapees and considering them as part of the administration did not see any point in telling on them.

Today the same ordinary prisoners are being accused of connivance with those who escaped. They are at the receiving end of arbitrary punishments like mass beatings and torture, destruction of personal belongings, withdrawal of canteen facilities and the like. A system that feeds on violence must use a new round of violence to ensure that the mass of prisoners remain fearful and subservient.

Confronting coercion

There are however those among the prisoners who refuse to bow down and be overawed. The political prisoners in particular have always resisted the corruption and oppressiveness of the jail administration and stood up in defence of prisoner rights. An example of this occurred on the premises of the Nagpur Prison just ten days before the jail-break incident.

On March 20, 2015, Hem Mishra, a student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and undertrial Maoist political prisoner at Nagpur Central Prison was severely abused and beaten by Nagpur police when he was to be escorted to the Nagpur Medical Hospital for treatment. Hem's only "crime" was that he demanded that the police escort implement the Supreme Court directives and the Criminal Manual, Jail Manual and Police rules which prohibit the application of handcuffs on prisoners while being taken to hospital or court. 

The violence used on Hem was probably with the intention of teaching a lesson to Hem and anyone else who may have intended to follow his example of demanding implementation of prisoner rights. It has however had an opposite effect. Hem and his fellow political prisoners have refused to sit quiet and have raised the issue of Hem's beating in various fora. Other prisoners too are likely to follow in Hem's footsteps. As such numbers grow, they offer a more real hope for positive change than the pledges of Fadnavis and Borwankar to cleanse the jails of all corruption.