From the India Today archives (2011) | Degree of hopelessness, desperation among jail inmates shocking: Binayak Sen

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” On his odyssey through hell, epic poet Dante confronts that inscription atop the gates of hell in his Inferno. Those lines continue to haunt me. Like Dante’s hell, the Indian jail appears to be a threshold of no return, no hope, no future.

As a human rights activist and a doctor, I have been concerned with the rights of prisoners for years. But I always visited them in the outer rooms of the jail. It was during my term that I was able to see problems at a closer range and talk to them at length. The degree of hopelessness and desperation among prisoners came as a shocking revelation to me.

It was the darkest phase of my life, when I lost all hope of ever being released. My wife, Ilina, would ask me to stay optimistic during her visits, briefing me on the movement outside for my release. That allowed me to hang on to sanity. But there were hundreds of poor people who languished without any hope or horizon. They talked to their family and friends across double grilled windows, with several families jostling for space at each window and battling to talk for just 15-20 minutes after waiting for hours.

A major cause of hopelessness (and I am just reporting what I heard from my fellow inmates) came from the overwhelming sense that it’s terribly hard to get out of prison; that the poor would not be able to obtain justice or competent legal aid and that the functionaries of the system did not take up their cause with integrity and energy.

In 2007, I was put in a cell along with 30 prisoners, all serving life-terms for murder and rape. Each of us had a concrete slab for a bed and just a blanket. After the wake-up call around 6 a.m., we were herded into a courtyard and counted, to make sure no one had committed suicide, died or escaped. Everyone would be known by a number, like cattle. Bad food, rampant over-crowding and poor ventilation resulted in dangerous conditions, inhumane treatment of prisoners, and appalling healthcare. Most prisoners were not looked after if they fell sick. Tuberculosis was rampant. With overcrowding, absence of hygiene, malnutrition and lack of medical attention, sickness and lingering death stalked the cells.

What added to the burden of hopelessness was the unbearable monotony of prison life. In between continuous counting, our lives revolved round tea, washing clothes, bath, exercise, lunch, rigorous work for many (jail clean-up or carpentry), watching some television in the evening, dinner and going to bed. The lack of any constructive approach to the future created a vacuum that was extremely debilitating. Suicides, caused by hopelessness, were unsettlingly high.

The system was designed to deprive prisoners of dignity. One very bad arrangement was the use of prisoners as convict overseers. At the slightest infraction of jail rules, 10-15 of them would attack an inmate brutally, till he was beaten to the ground. The jail authorities were above law and the jail manual was kept a secret from prisoners. We had asked for it and refused. I was not given preferential treatment. Nor was I beaten up or targeted for abuse by inmates and officers. Custodial violence was aggravated by psychological violence. Prisoners were degraded and humiliated to such an extent that they came to expect sub-human treatment.

The memories I cherish are of the friendships I formed with my prison mates—eating together, talking, listening and sharing every daily hardship and humiliation with each other. We came to know each other extremely well, accepting each other as we were. I remember re-cooking the food together on little stoves, something that was only implicitly allowed in jail. They watched news clippings of my case on TV and supported me and often forced me to accept their blankets and use those as a mattress. I also remember a number of prison officials who treated prisoners with fairness and respect. My worst memories are, of course, of torture, violence and watching people getting beaten up.

It was an intense learning experience. I wouldn’t have known what it means to live without rights and dignity. It was the sense of common humanity that enabled me to survive prison.

(As told to Damayanti Datta)

—The writer is a human rights activist and doctor. He was lodged in Raipur jail for two years and four months

(The article was published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated July 4, 2011)

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