PRIORITY AREA
Governance and Local Development Improvement of the Real Situation of Overcrowding in Prisons in Bangladesh
Reducing Overcrowding in Bangladesh’s Prisons
At the heart of the project is a cadre of paralegals who have been trained to work as a bridge between prisoners and the courts, prisons, police, and the legal profession.
A senior official in the Ministry of Home Affairs, who today oversees the development activities of Bangladesh’s 68 prisons, knew what the prisons were like already during his university days. “As a student activist, there was only one thing I was afraid of,” he recalls, “and that was being put in jail. Everybody knew how dangerous the prisons were. It was my nightmare.” Today, this official knows a lot more about the difficulties that prisons face. Bangladesh’s prisons are hopelessly overcrowded: they house around 70,000 people in facilities designed for only 30,610. The situation in several individual prisons is far worse: Dhaka Central Jail, for example, holds around 10,000 prisoners in a facility designed for 2700, including around 600 women in a space designed for 134. The prisons are attempting to deal with a problem that is not of their making. Too many people are arrested; too few are granted bail. Investigations and courts procedures take too much time, and most prisoners have no access to legal aid. Two-thirds of Bangladesh’s prisoners are awaiting trial – meaning that they are legally innocent –
and many will stay in prison for far longer than the sentence they would have served if they had been convicted of their crime. Women and girls are detained in prison under “safe custody,” simply because Bangladesh social services have no facilities in which to protect them from abusive situations. Juveniles are incarcerated alongside adults, although the law strictly forbids this. The massive overcrowding makes it impossible for Bangladesh’s prisons to provide prisoners with UN defined minimum standards for adequate light, air, decency, and privacy. Not only do prisoners in some of Bangladesh’s jails have to wait their turn to sleep, but such overcrowding creates ideal breeding ground for violence, crime, and the explosion of diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. There is little scope for retraining and rehabilitation. Leading Bangladeshi legal experts have long been concerned with the violations of human rights that occur when people, especially poor people – who are by