A high powered delegation made a visit to Turkey earlier this month to inspect high security jails. Following this, the proposal by the Punjab government for the construction of a maximum security prison based on the Turkish model is problematic. On one hand, the country’s 150 year old prison system is in desperate need of an overhaul. In the past two years, the prison breaks at DI Khan and Bannu make the reformation especially imperative. But there are also complications that accompany the proposal.
There are two basic purposes of imprisonment. One, to make the rest of society safe. Two, punishment for the crime. But punitive action in a civilised justice system is also predicated on the ideas of rehabilitation and restitution. In principle, criminals that go into prison are supposed to come out reformed. But here, those that serve time become pariahs. First time offenders living for years in the same place as do hardened murderers, thieves, rapists and terrorists often come out armed with a more expansive criminal skill set and network. Most prisons in Pakistan are structured around the construction of barracks instead of individual cells for inmates. Apart from the threat inmates pose to each other, often ending in fatalities, these prisons become a den for the continuation of criminal activities, as well as providing hardened criminals and gangs a recruiting ground. Each prison becomes its own little parallel society, complete with power groups that seek to dominate the system through establishing their will across the board. Max security prisons might help this problem.
However, one can hope that the construction of a new prison, one that takes its design inspiration from Turkey, will not import that country’s abysmal prisoner rights record. High security jails in Turkey have been repeatedly put under the microscope by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty international and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman Degrading Punishment. Prisoners have described the cells in Turkish high security prisons (called F-type prisons) as “coffins” and have continuously alleged torture and severe ill-treatment, leading to some of them being closed down by human rights groups. Of course, no mention was made of the inhumanity inherent to the Turkish high security prison system.
A maximum security prison must not mean minimum transparency. As the life of the PPO has been further extended, one is inclined to believe the current government doesn’t place legal arrests very high up its priority list. It is important to ask if the new maximum security prison will potentially become a fortified black hole for illegal arrests, and for criminals and dissenters to simply vanish without accountability.