Spread of Covid-19 in India's notoriously crowded prisons prompts authorities to impose jail lockdowns and release thousands of pretrial detainees on parole
The spread of the coronavirus in India's notoriously crowded prisons has prompted authorities to impose jail lockdowns and release thousands of pretrial detainees on parole, as health experts worry that the cramped facilities are serving as breeding grounds for the disease.
It was the eighth prison in Maharashtra to be locked down. The move came after 19 inmates in Indore Central Jail in central Madhya Pradesh state tested positive for the virus on Tuesday. Around 250 others who came in contact with them were shifted to a temporary jail. Health experts, however, fear that crowded facilities such as prisons can prove deadly, threatening the lives of detainees and guards, as well as the outside population.
In the Philippines, which has some of the most congested jails in the world, a Supreme Court justice said Saturday that nearly 10,000 poor inmates had been temporarily freed by reducing the amounts of their bails. Indian prisons are highly overcrowded. According to the latest data by the National Crimes Record Bureau in 2018, India has some 450,000 prisoners, exceeding the country's official prison capacity by about 17 percent. Prisons in New Delhi and neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state have the highest occupancy rates, at over 50 percent above capacity.The official data shows that only 4 percent of total prison expenditure was spent on inmates' medical needs in 2018.
In April, the family of Mian Qayoom, a 73-year-old human rights lawyer from disputed Kashmir who is locked up in New Delhi’s Tihar jail, wrote to authorities to urge them to release him on parole due to his ailing health. The family said that Qayoom was a diabetic with a serious heart condition.
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