• Prisons lack yardstick to measure poverty-crime nexus
• About 75% charged for petty crimes have subpar education
• Prisons overcrowded by 300%

Poverty, when it comes to the criminal justice system, is intertwined with a number of other issues such as narcotics, recidivism, prison overcrowding, deaths in prison, and more poverty.

When The Sunday Morning approached Minister of Justice and National Integration Harshana Nanayakkara through his Media Secretary to learn about the ministry’s approach to poverty as a driver of crime and incarceration, the Minister was not available for comment. The Media Secretary cited the complexity of the topic and the need to discuss it at length on a later date.

In exploring whether persons from lower tiers of income are disproportionately incarcerated, the Department of Prisons said that income-based statistics were not available. The department’s Media Spokesperson, Prisons Commissioner Jagath Weerasinghe said that there was no indicator to illustrate the relationship between incarcerated persons and poverty. Instead, he proposed the level of education as an indirect lens.

“The majority of persons in prison have a low literacy level. About 75% of persons fall under the category of those who have passed Grade 8 or lower,” he noted. 

However, 2023 prison statistics showed that 68% of the total admission of convicted prisoners were those imprisoned due to defaulting on the payment of fines.

Criminalisation of poverty

“This is criminalisation of poverty,” said former Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) Ambika Satkunanathan, observing that the majority of the people in prisons were poor and marginalised. However, she added that this was not a case unique to Sri Lanka.

Often, these persons struggle to afford a lawyer to file a bail application. Although the State provides legal representation for persons without any, it is only given at the High Court and the Court of Appeal level, and not during the process of filing an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Satkunanathan noted that most of the people who ended up on death row were people who had not been able to retain legal representation, but had been provided legal representation by the State and therefore not received competent representation.

“The representation assigned to them are young persons; they do not have experience trying death penalty cases. Therefore, such people have not received competent legal representation,” she said.

Satkunanathan has come across many people on death row who did not appeal to the Supreme Court. According to the ‘Prison Statistics of Sri Lanka 2024’ report, 68 out of 101 prisoners sentenced to death in 2023 recorded incomes below Rs. 3,000 a month.

When a person is sentenced to death by a High Court, there is the option of challenging the sentence in a higher court. However, the convicted person would still be in need of legal support to file the appeal. This is legal support the State will not provide until the case reaches the Supreme Court, where representation will be assigned.

A 2020 study by the HRCSL found that the majority of prisoners were from a lower socio-economic background. According to the study, prisoners could not afford to retain legal representation and they attributed their initial involvement in criminal activity to financial instability and poverty.

Male prisoners who were the primary breadwinners reported feeling that while the Government fed them in prison, there was nobody to feed their families.

When it comes to ensuring the criminal justice system is fair to those of lower economic backgrounds, Satkunanathan pointed out that it was important to question who the criminal justice system viewed as a ‘criminal.’

“Many LGBTQIA+ individuals might be harassed, arrested, kept overnight in jail, and released. It is that lens of who is a criminal that should be changed,” she said. 

Similarly, she claimed that there was prejudice towards the poor; for instance, if a person appears poor or if they are begging, they might be viewed as a criminal.

“We are not addressing the issue. They might be begging because they are homeless, and we are not looking into how the State and society have failed them,” she stressed. 

Access to social services, livelihoods, and housing could provide answers to this, she said.

Petty theft to narcotics

When asked about those in prison for petty crimes such as theft, Prisons Spokesperson Weerasinghe claimed that the majority of incarcerations, about 60–75%, were for drug-related offences.

“The amount of those who are in prison for petty crimes not related to narcotics is probably 4–5%,” he said. 

According to him, many of the petty crimes that have led to incarceration have been committed by persons addicted to drugs as means to purchase more narcotics. However, he stated that instead of incarceration, such persons should be directed to rehabilitation. Despite recommending plans for rehabilitation, Weerasinghe said that these proposals had not been properly implemented yet.

“To incarcerate a young lad with other criminals is to expose the lad to more crimes,” he observed. 

Despite discussions that have taken place to expand and improve the rehabilitation system, which The Sunday Morning reported on in April, Weerasinghe said that not much had been accomplished yet.

Rehabilitation and improved vocations

If poverty is a driver of crime, better opportunities to earn could potentially improve the lives of those in prison. Penitentiary systems, instead of places that separate people from society, should be aimed at the reformation and social rehabilitation of convicts.

Earlier this year, the Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners (CPRP), a civil society organisation that has been advocating for the well-being of prisoners, handed over a report outlining recommendations to tackle prison overcrowding, improve conditions within prisons, and promote rehabilitation to Minister of Justice Nanayakkara.

These recommendations included proposals to improve vocational training in order to uplift the lives of those in prison, especially to ensure that they do not relapse into criminal action. This is a broader concern as current rates of recidivism remain high, with 57.2% of convicts in prisons in 2023 having been convicted earlier.

According to CPRP Chairperson, Attorney-at-Law Senaka Perera, most people in prison are persons from the lower tiers of society.

“Crime is a product of social anomalies,” he said, noting that crime happened when a society failed an individual. 

He explained that if people lost their employment, they would look to fulfil their immediate needs. In light of this, he highlighted the need for vocational training programmes in prison to be lucrative. “If they cannot earn money through what they have been trained on, they will turn to ways that will earn them money,” he pointed out. 

Further, Perera emphasised the need to rethink the framing of crime along with dilemmas involving crimes, such as theft of food. “When someone becomes hungry, they will not consider whether stealing is legal or not. In some countries, when the motives are of this nature, the courts provide leniency.”

Perera noted that the person incriminated for a petty crime, who served and was released back to society, may involve themselves in more serious crimes due to the stigma they and their family would be faced with when it came to matters such as employment.

The challenge of overcrowding

Overcrowding remains a crisis in the Sri Lankan prison system. Sri Lanka’s prison infrastructure holds space for about one out of every 2,000 persons. However, as of September, one out of every 600 people in Sri Lanka is in prison. This is more than 300% of the system’s capacity.

“The prison system can only house 10,500 inmates. However, currently there are close to 36,000 inmates in prisons,” said Prisons Commissioner Weerasinghe.

According to Perera, the overcrowding has resulted in deteriorated living conditions within prisons. According to the CPRP, overcrowded wards force many new remandees to stand all night due to a lack of space to sleep, with some compelled to sleep near or inside toilet areas.

While this has made prisons detrimental to successful rehabilitation, it has also resulted in riots within prisons. Perera warned that these conditions could result in an “implosion within the system” which could potentially hurt many prisoners if overcrowding and its attendant conditions were not addressed.

Functioning under the motto of ‘custody, care, correction,’ Perera feels that it is imperative that the prison system treats prisoners with dignity. He said that at the end of the process, the inmate should feel that it was an attempt to integrate them into society, and not to be treated differently.

Incarceration connected to poverty goes beyond the mere challenge of prison overcrowding. Rather, the overcrowding itself points to a crisis in the breakdown of domestic economies. Failing to address such systemic issues points towards potentialities of worsening social inequalities and furthering poverty.