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DHAKA: Top political leaders including former ministers and lawmakers are among a record 86,000 detenues “packed like sardines” in Bangladesh’s jails which have a total capacity to house only 27,000.
Several hundred new prisoners are huddled every day by authorities conducting a nationwide drive against crime, corruption and religious extremism, making the
situation worse.
Sweaty summer and monsoon for which the tropical Deltaic region is known add to the woes of the prisoners.
Even the authorities are appalled. “You will be astonished to see the awful condition of the prisoners,” said the inspector-general of prisons, Brigadier General Zakir Hasan.
“They sleep in shifts, and queue up for hours to use the lavatories and bathrooms,” New Age quoted him as saying yesterday.
There were 71,000 prisoners already when the present government took office January 12, thanks to several weeks of mass agitation by a 14-party opposition alliance led by Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina.
The influx has been even higher since Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed’s caretaker government launched the drive, nabbing scores of high-profile people, with most of them detained and put on trial, in police or judicial custody.
With the drive continuing, it is showing no sign of a decline. The number is in fact growing, though there is no space left for accommodating “even a single person”, senior prison officials told the newspaper.
The situation has worsened in recent weeks in that the prisoners cannot move about in their cells properly, let alone lie down for sleeping and use toilets and bathrooms when necessary.
Three shifts have been formed so that the prisoners can sleep in phases, and it does not matter whether he or she sleeps in the day or at night.
As per the statistics recorded by the prison authorities, the number of inmates in jails was 68,278 in January, and rose to about 86,000 on May 27. The present capacity of the country’s 66 jails is only 27,254.
The general prisoners are feeling the pinch as the jail authorities had to empty many cells in the country’s prisons to accommodate the VIP prisoners, including former ministers, lawmakers and businessmen who were netted in the drive.
“It’s really tough to stay in the crowded cells in the hot weather. You will not understand the dreadful condition of the general prisoners if you have not been there,” said a prisoner at the jail gate, before rushing away with his parents.