More than half of Punjab’s prison inmates involved in drugs cases, says jails minister

Of the 24,000 inmates lodged in jails, over 12,000 are either convicted or facing trial under NDPS Act, says Jails Minister S.S. Randhawa.

Ludhiana Central Jail | PTI

Chandigarh: Over half of the inmates lodged in Punjab’s prisons are convicted or standing trial in drugs cases, Jails Minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa said in the state assembly Tuesday.

Replying to a call attention motion moved by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Punjab Vidhan Sabha over lawlessness in the prison system, Randhawa admitted that the state’s jails were brimming with either drug addicts or those involved in drug-related crimes.

The minister said of the nearly 24,000 inmates lodged in the jails, over 12,000 are either convicted or facing trial under the National Drug and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. He added that of these 12,000, over 8,500 are undertrials.

Over 500 women are also in jails under the NDPS Act, said the minister.

He added that drugs were also recovered from at least 40 employees of the jails department over the last one year and a half. These employees were smuggling in drugs for the prisoners, he alleged.

There are nine central jails and 10 district jails in Punjab. The total authorised capacity of these jails is almost 23,500 but at present nearly 24,000 inmates are confined in them.

Violence as factories lying shut

The minister said one of the other reasons that inmates in these jails were resorting to violence among themselves and against the jail staff was due to factories lying almost closed for the past several years.

“Most of the convicted prisoners were sitting idle in jail due to no work,” he said, adding that he has proposed a policy, in collaboration with the industries department, to invite private companies to set up small sized units in jails to gainfully employ the inmates.

The minister said he had also proposed the creation of a separate intelligence wing for the jails department to keep a tab on the activities of not just the inmates but employees as well.

Randhawa also said almost 600 mobile phones were recovered from inmates in the jail in the past six months. “The mobile phones have been sent to the police department to investigate who these inmates are in touch with and what kind of activities they carry out with the phones,” he said.

The minister said he had proposed to the judiciary that dangerous criminals including gangsters lodged in jails should be made to appear in hearings from inside the jail through video-conferencing. “In many cases due to the shortage of security staff to accompany the undertrials, they could not attend hearings and this too led to delay in trials,” he said.