Positive engagement of prisoners a must

Shriniwas Joshi

IN January 2018, Somesh Goyal, a 1984-batch IPS officer in Himachal Pradesh, was transferred as Director General of Police, Prisons and Correctional Services, from the post of Director General of Police, which went to SR Mardi, a 1986-batch IPS officer. Though the two posts are equal in status, yet that of Director General of Police is considered glamorous. Goyal accepted the new post with grace and lifted it to his stature. I dub this Urdu couplet on him: “Jigar walon ka ghar se koi wasta nahin hota/ Hum wahan kadam rakhte hain jahan koi rasta nahin hota”. How much love has he for the prisoners as DGP? I believe that a prisoner after completing his sentence and still wanting to stay in prison answers my question.

The Department of Prisons and Correctional Services arranged a national seminar on ‘Positive Engagement of Inmates in Prisons’ in Shimla recently. Police personnel from about 20 states and union territories participated. Inaugurating his first official function as Governor in this state, Bandaru Dattatreya said, “He remained in prison for 13 months, not for doing anything wrong, but during the Emergency. As such he knows the problems of the prisoners. The life in prison may be difficult, but it becomes a misery for a family.” 

Somesh Goyal said, “A prisoner is a person like one who is out of sight, so out of mind”. He added that the prisoners suffered from emotional, psychological and financial stress and 78 per cent of them in the prisons of Himachal Pradesh belonged to the working force age group. Therefore, it was necessary for them to be engaged in activities that helped them earn money and send a part of their earnings to their families. The DG (Prisons) was happy that at least two of the 87 women prisoners have started going out and doing the beautician’s job whereas earlier they were restricted to kitchen gardening. “In this competitive world, the products of bakery, textiles, furniture, silver jewellery, painting etc. made by prisoners match well with those made by professionals,” he said. The sale of these products was fetching on an average Rs 46,200 annually to each one of them, which was the highest in India. The prisons of Himachal Pradesh, which were earning about Rs 25 lakh in 2015-16, have started earning Rs 3.5 crore to Rs 4 crore today. It is an eye-opener for our boards and corporations, which are running in red, all due to the efforts of a man dedicatedly performing the top job.

Luthra, a Police Research and Development officer, described the importance of engagement through Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman and his dog. Seligman puts a dog in a cabin with a latched door and directs battery current into the cabin. The dog tries to run away but finds the door closed. It is repeated thrice or four times to make the dog conditioned. This conditioned dog refuses to flee when placed in the same state with boltless door. This is the theory of ‘learned helplessness’. There could also be the reverse theory and that is of ‘authentic happiness’ which comes from positive emotions and engagement. Engagement is the focal element, so if one wants to see the prisoners happy, they be made busy with positive engagement, exactly what the jails were doing.

Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Manoj Kumar said that the prisons should have humane conditions, i.e. not overcrowded. Luckily, Himachal Pradesh is not facing such a problem. And then a big prison is coming up at Nalagarh. The second point that he raised was the issue of radicalisation or criminalisation of people in prisons. There are very few such issues in the jails of Himachal and are duly tackled. Thirdly, there is the issue of re-habitation of prisoners and that is what the DGP is doing. It is like handholding a child initially that stimulates the child to walk independently in near future. 

It is not that Himachal is the only state working towards the welfare of prisoners. It could, at best, be the flag-bearer where other states were the followers. West Bengal prisoners are producing the best of India Ghani mustard oil. The Haryana Government purchases products made by jail inmates without inviting tenders. It was unanimously decided in the seminar to forward a single line recommendation to the Central Government: Each District Jail should have a counsellor. 

I was pleased to see a few litterateurs gathered at the seminar and was cheery to find SR Harnot, ace storywriter of Himachal, presenting a paper describing the activities of litterateurs and performing artistes with the prisoners. He talked about late Saroj Vashist and Amla Rai in directing plays for the prisoners of Kaithu and Kanda jails. He also talked about the poetry books written by jail inmates. There are other names, which he missed, such as Bhattacharya and Kedar Thakur whose contributions towards teaching the art and skill of drama to the prisoners is no less.  

Tailpiece

“Handcuffs weigh much more than gravestones.” —Visar Zhiti, a poet