That a large share of India's prisoners are undertrials is shocking, but relatively well known. What surprised me in my colleague Ameya Bokil's work on India's prison population, however, was how it looks over time.
To recap: at the end of 2023, India's prisons held over 530,000 incarcerated persons. Prison inmates in India are categorised in four ways:
- convicts are those found guilty of a crime and punished by a period of imprisonment;
- undertrials are those awaiting the completion of their trial and are yet to be found guilty;
- detenues are those detained to prevent them from committing a crime; and
- others, who are inmates other than the three categories mentioned above.
At the end of 2023, three out of four such inmates were undertrials, with convicts making up most of the rest.
India's prison population grew steadily over time, and then we see tragedy unfolding over the pandemic. Judges at various levels gave directions to release convicts on parole during the pandemic to prevent covid outbreaks in jails, and the convict population briefly dipped. But without cases being heard, the undertrial population ballooned and the ratio of undertrials to convicts became the worst it had ever been. With the restarting of regular court functioning from 2023 onwards, this number fell to a more expected number.
But if what we want is for the arc of justice to bend towards prisons being largely a place for those convicted of crime, we're not close to seeing a big shift yet. Judicial pendency, as I pointed out in an earlier edition of this newsletter, appears to be getting no better, and without some intentional changes in pre-trial arrest jurisprudence, including the granting of bail, India's prisons will continue to be, for the most part, home to undertrials. There are some big shifts that seem to be propelled by the sheer force of growth and development. Others will need a concerted effort, and the undertrial problem is one of them.
