By Thulasi Muttulingam Rotting in our prisons right now are several thousands who have not even been charged with any crimes - for years on end. This, by our country’s own laws, is illegal. Yet we continue to have a travesty of a justice system where well-connected, heavy-weight criminals enjoy ‘hospital stays’ if they make it to prison - while those who might have just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, are locked up for years on end under horrific conditions. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ Where is this maxim in our justice system? People often look the other way despite knowing (or not knowing) that many prisoners are unduly suffering as they assume only criminals make it to jail. Even if that assumption were to be correct, that only criminals who deserve to be there make it to jail, there are basic human rights enjoined upon them which our legal system is not even attempting to cover. Some of you might know of the debacle caused by women prisoners begging for help from passers-by while being transported in a prison bus last month. The driver of the bus attempted to drown out their cries by honking long and loudly - but the whole sorry debacle was captured on a passing journalist’s mobile phone - from where it rapidly made rounds on social media much to many people’s horror. That was yet before activists made it their business to find out what it is the women were crying about. Here are just a few of the horrors they found when they investigated: ● The women prisoners were assaulted subsequently in the Welikada prison for trying to raise awareness on their subhuman treatment within. One died. Others continue on without access to medical treatment after being injured in the assault. ● The female prisoners are allowed just one menstrual pad per month during their menstrual cycle. All the women out there would know exactly why this is a devastating human rights blow. Some of us have such heavy flow that we need to wear two at a time to stop overflow - and in that way, I sometimes run through 16 a day in heavy flow. At the bare minimum, a woman would need 5-7 pads a day. The Prison officials have stated they don’t even have an allocation to provide sanitary pads. Read that again. The State does not make provision for sanitary pads for women prisoners at all. The women got it thus far from visiting relatives or NGOs and because it was coming in from outside, some official down the line made a rule that women could use only one pad a month, as they were ‘smuggling drugs’ in the pads - and this has been arbitrarily enforced upon the women, already living under horrendous sanitary conditions. There is no way one pad is enough for one menstrual cycle lasting 4-7 days. Who comes up with these rules, and for what misbegotten reason? ● Sanitation conditions: Sri Lanka is still using the prisons left behind by the British pre-independence. Little effort has been put into expanding the prison space even though the number of prisoners thrown into them has expanded massively over the years. Hundreds of prisoners are crowded into cells where they can barely stand up, never mind sleep in. And estimates surmise there are three toilets for 3000 people! ● Corruption: the conditions as you can imagine is rampant for psychopathic prison guards to rule. Sexual abuse - of both male and female prisoners, is allegedly rampant. So is the demand for bribes for the delivery of everyday items needed to survive? According to activists who interact directly with prisoners - A bucket of water costs Rs. 500 - A pillow costs Rs. 50,000 ● Nutrition- one of the demands put forward by the women prisoners is access to basic nutrition. It is a major problem that they have said they are facing. Some of these women have children born in prison, living with them - and those children face the same squalid conditions - lack of sanitation, nutrition, space to play in or even toys to play with. One of the human rights lawyers who had been inside the prison described the conditions as 'hellish' and something that tore him up every time he visited. The people of this country have largely ignored this problem. Please remember, you don't have to be a criminal to end up in this system. There are hundreds of inmates who were arbitrarily picked up and have remained there for years without being charged of any crimes. Even if they are charged and / or convicted, keep in mind that police investigation skills in this country are mainly relegated to randomly arresting people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time in the vicinity of a crime, and torturing them into confessions. There are quite a number of such persons in prison too. I know one inmate who was arrested for reporting a suspicious basket on the premises he worked in - and spent five years in jail for it. During the war years, an easy way for people to settle scores in the North and East was to tell the Army / CID / Police that the person they had an argument with, had links to the LTTE. I have personally heard this threat thrown around by people on multiple occasions. In one well known case that made it to the papers in 2003, a woman was arrested on a tip off, as being linked to the LTTE's airport bombing. After two years of torture she underwent in prison to confess, it eventually emerged she was innocent and had been picked up on one such unwarranted accusation to settle scores. She had been an innocent woman living in Trincomalee who had been duped into marrying an already married man in Negombo. When she came up from Trincomalee to live with him in Negombo, she discovered his other family already there and refused to live with him as his second wife. She had left immediately, but the man had kept on threatening her he would report her as an LTTE cadre if she did not return to live with him. He eventually carried out this threat and the woman was tortured for two years in prison for it. Her case was eventually overturned but you can imagine the number of cases that were not similarly overturned. Ongoing right now are also the political prisoners’ fasts demanding either to be charged or released - a number of them have spent years in jail without any charges. Some of the problems they encounter are: - Having been arbitrarily picked up under the draconian Prevention of Terror Act (PTA) without proper charges being filed. - Being tortured into confessions they have since recanted. - Being tarred as ‘LTTE’ even before that was proven without doubt and thus having difficulties finding defence lawyers in Sinhala majority areas. - Having their cases heard in Sinhala majority areas where the language of the courts is Sinhala, which they being Tamil, most LTTE suspects cannot understand. - Having had to put their signatures to ‘confessions’ obtained under duress in a language they could not understand, many of them have said they did not realise what they were signing. It is to be noted that the PTA allows for such confessions which are otherwise not admissible as evidence under ordinary criminal law. The PTA does not say outright to torture and obtain confessions - but once confession is sanctioned by the law, torture is the inevitable consequence. And such confessions are now being used against the prisoners as the sole evidence - if they are charged at all. Among these political prisoners could certainly be inmates who might have indulged in unlawful acts - but due processes have clearly not been followed in their detention and treatment, catching in the net also potentially innocent bystanders. Some of them have been released after several years of detention without charges, while others continue to fast for a resolve. A recurring theme here is the structural racism such political prisoners being Tamil face as opposed to Sinhalese political prisoners, including former JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) inamtes, who fared better in similar circumstances. Even assuming that people in prison are indeed criminals and are deserving of being incarcerated, being imprisoned is punishment enough. Torture, abuse and withholding of basic human facilities should never be condoned, to whomever it might be. And they do need to be duly charged and convicted first. Our justice system needs a drastic overhaul. Right now it has too much to do with arbitrary power and too little to do with actual justice. (Thulasi Muttulingam is a freelance journalist based in Jaffna. All views expressed are her own and not of any organizations affiliated to her)