SC: Make prisons reformative, give women right to open jails | India News
NEW DELHI: In a bid to transform India’s penal prison system into a reformatory centre, the Supreme Court has mandated radical reforms and ruled that women prisoners, like male prisoners, have a fundamental right to stay in open correctional institutions (OCIs), which must change character from labor camps to vocational training centers and allow regular access to their families.A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta appointed a former, penning a voluminous 138-page judgment on what ails the Indian prison system and judicial remedies. Sc Justice S R Bhat as Chairperson of a high-powered committee to frame a nationally harmonized common minimum standard for “reform and governance of open correctional institutions” within six months with an honorarium of Rs 10 lakh per month and other benefits. It mandates states, which do not have open prisons, to establish these bodies and set up multi-level monitoring systems to ensure that its series of directives are duly complied with over a period of time. It posted the next hearing on the matter on September 1 It directed the State Committees to submit quarterly reports on implementation of reforms directed by the SC before the Judicial High Court on open prisons, which would result in submission of annual reports before the SC every March 31.Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Mehta said, “Exclusion of women from OCI, or failure to transfer them from closed prisons to OCI despite being eligible for transfer, amounts to clear gender discrimination, violation of Articles 14 and 15(1) of the Constitution, and violation of their right to life under Article 2.”He said, “Denial of access to OCI deprives women prisoners of equal opportunity for rehabilitation and cannot be sustained in a constitutional order committed to transformative promises of equality, dignity and justice. Immediate and effective remedial action in this regard is therefore imperative.”The bench frowned on the long wait for people imprisoned in closed prisons – varying from 4 to 21 years in different states – to be eligible to be transferred to an open prison.
