Thread: Is this the best jail in the world?

April 12, 2004

Times 2, Reportage

Is this the best jail in the world?
By Amrit Dhillon
At Tihar prison in Delhi, meditation and a holistic vision help inmates to cope



TIHAR JAIL used to be like Dante’s ninth circle of Hell, a place of depravity, brutality and corruption. The biggest and meanest prison in Asia, built on 400 acres in west Delhi, it used to inspire wild-eyed fear because of the killers, drug addicts and swindlers who ran fiefdoms inside with the collusion of venal wardens.
Stroll through the grounds now, though, and you could be at a county garden fête. Immaculate lawns, flower beds arrayed with phlox, dahlias, cineraria and nasturtiums, palm trees swaying in the breeze, tidy hedgerows. The paths are clean, devoid of the filth on Delhi roads. Once inside, out of sight of the perimeter walls and watchtowers, it’s easy to forget that this is a high-security prison.



Apart from birdsong, nothing disturbs the silence in the courtyard of Ward No 7, Jail No 1 (Tihar comprises six jails). Prisoners sit cross-legged on the ground in the bright spring sunshine doing breathing exercises. Others sit in rows inside the barracks, eyes closed in total concentration, inhaling and exhaling.

From medieval hellhole to model prison: that transformation is why prison reformers from all over the world come to study how Tihar has been turned around.

The jail’s holistic approach keeps prisoners busy, gives them new skills, keeps them fit and keeps them connected to the outside world. It provides education and training in computers, weaving, baking, painting, carpentry, sewing and beauty treatment (the women in Jail No 6 run their own beauty parlour).

Prisoners play cricket, football, basketball, chess, Scrabble. Foreign prisoners are allowed to e-mail their families to compensate for lack of visitors, a facility soon to be extended to Indians, too. Potato chips and snacks made by convicts are marketed outside as TJ (Tihar Jail) Specials. So are carrier bags and envelopes made with handmade paper. Paintings are exhibited and sold. The jail also has its own website, created by prisoners.

Every winter the number of inmates rises by about 10 per cent — Indians committing minor but culpable offences in the hope of being thrown inside Tihar with its thick blankets, good food and medical attention. Drug addicts get themselves sent to Tihar because of its detoxification and rehabiliation programme. “They come in, eat well, gain weight, feel better and leave,” says jail superintendent O.P. Mishra, “only to return a few months later, haggard again.”

If all this sounds unusual, the reason is that Tihar Jail is indeed different from many other jails. Only 20 per cent of its inmates are convicts. The rest are “undertrials” — suspects waiting to be charged, waiting for bail or waiting for their trials. They usually spend much longer in jail than if they had been found guilty and served their full sentence. It can take five years just to get bail.

This is a peculiar form of torture caused by India’s clogged judicial system. The legal system was designed for a population of 350 million, not one billion. There are currently 20 million cases winding their way through the courts, hence the delays.

Compared with one judge for every 5,000 people in the West, India has one judge for 100,000 — and lawyers paid by the hour have turned adjournments into an art form. It can take 20 to 30 years for a trial to be completed. “I fought a case where the children grew up and got jobs before their mother got alimony,” says one lawyer, Ajit Panja.

So the biggest agony of Tihar inmates is being innocent but incarcerated until they can prove it. They need help of a special kind. To meet this need, Tihar Jail offers Vipassana, an ancient form of Buddhist meditation designed to help people “to see things as they really are”.

Organised by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called the Art of Living, it lasts for about 11 days — with breaks — during which, if possible, you neither speak to nor make eye-contact with anyone. Its proponents say that it triggers introspection and creates lasting behavioural changes.

Life in India is hard at the best of times for the poor; life in an Indian jail doubly so. Money is scarce and legal fees consume whatever paltry savings there may be. The inmate is invariably sole breadwinner, so the family suffers.

Sleeping is difficult in a jail built in 1958 to house just a few thousand inmates which now houses 12,000 in overcrowded cells. Anger and bitterness are common.

For the innocent, incarceration is sheer anguish. “That’s why it’s so important to help them to overcome stress,” says Akhilesh Chabra, of the Art of Living. “They are seething with negative emotions, very bitter yet helpless. Meditation improves their frame of mind.”

All the evidence of Tihar shows that meditation helps inmates to cope. It has changed the atmosphere — inmates are calmer and more co-operative, relations with the staff more harmonious.

Art of Living also holds classes to teach less taxing breathing exercises called Sudarshan Kriya, different from Vipassana but with similar benefits. These are standard deep-breathing exercises set to a rhythm devised by the guru behind Art of Living.

Two years ago the Art of Living taught the entire jail population. Because people are constantly arriving at and leaving Tihar, though, it plans to repeat the whole exercise over the coming year at the express request of the authorities. On any day, 1,200 inmates are learning meditation.

Sunil Chinchine, accused under the Official Secrets Act, says that the Art of Living has made confinement bearable: “It’s the only pillar that has helped me to withstand separation from my wife and son. Once I’ve done the exercises I feel stress leaving my body in a great surge. If something angers me I know how to control my reactions.”

Vanika Gupta, an Art of Living prison instructor, says that meditation helps prisoners to accept their fate: “Somehow it gives them mental clarity. They see their actions in a sharper light and start to calm down. I had one man accused of murder who denied the charge. After the course he wept and confessed his guilt to me. Then he went to the judge and changed his plea.”

Not all transformations are so dramatic, but the soothing effect seems near-universal. “I would have gone mad if I hadn’t done it,” says Satish Kumar, accused of murder. “If I were guilty I could accept being in jail, but I’m innocent. Meditation has helped me to control my pain and grief.”

Another murder suspect, Suresh Kumar, says he was so full of anger when he arrived in 1999 that he refused to eat or talk: “It was only doing these breathing exercises that kept me sane. I sleep better now. My appetite is better. My sciatica is better.”

Mishra believes that meditation gives inmates the anchor they need: “It helps them to accept their confinement if they’re innocent and their sentence if they’re guilty. People can only move on once they have accepted their fate.”

Not everyone responds to meditation. Addicts focused only on the next fix are resistant, as are Muslim and Sikh fundamentalists or terrorists who dismiss meditation as “Hindu mumbo-jumbo”. The utterly uneducated may also fail to benefit, struggling to grasp what it’s all about.

When India’s most famous policewoman, Kiran Bedi, began transforming Tihar in 1993, she opened up the jail, bringing in volunteers to help to organise prisoners’ time. Tihar is distinctive for the huge role played by NGOs. More than 50 NGOs work in Tihar, providing legal aid, running literacy and health programmes, training inmates. Navjoti, for example, has not only set up a crèche for female inmates with children under 6 who are allowed to stay with their mothers, but trains the mothers in childcare.

Most of the female inmates in Jail No 6 are accused of dowry-related offences. These typically involve torturing a young bride into giving more dowry, or killing her — the method of choice being to hold her down, pour kerosene over her and set her alight.

Sunita is 25 and accused of murdering her sister-in-law for more dowry. She gave birth to her daughter Nancy after arriving at Tihar two years ago. “I was very scared when I came here but the conditions are good,” she says. “Nancy is well looked after and I’ve done a six-month crèche training course so that I can earn a living when I get out.”

NGOs also provide feedback for the authorities on how life can be improved for prisoners, which inmate is suicidal and needs supervision, and who might be HIV-positive.

Usually in India, when new civil servants take over, they undo the work of their predecessors — particularly if that person was high-profile, as Bedi was. To his credit, the present director-general, Ajay Agrawal, has built on Bedi’s reforms instead.

Perhaps that is why Arundhati Roy, the Booker prizewinner, emerged from a one-night stay at Tihar in 2002 over a contempt case looking as though she had been to a health farm. “It was clean and the food was good. I could have spent three more months there,” she told journalists.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFr...072645,00.html