Thousands of inmates across Pakistan are held in prisons that lack basic facilities and worse are forced to live in overcrowded cells. It has been reported that Adiala Jail alone accommodates a total of 5,799 prisoners even though its limit is 2,100. It’s difficult to wrap our heads around the fact that the prison is operating at almost over 300 percent of its capacity. And this is what – rightly so – irked the Islamabad High Court (IHC) Chief Justice Athar Minallah during a recent hearing of a case. The court had converted a prisoner’s letter, detailing the human rights violations in the jail, into a petition. The IHC CJ maintained that there was no rule of law in jails as even under-trial inmates occupied cells despite the legal notion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Justice Minallah also observed that there was too much corruption in jails. Ironically, the hearing of this case came just days after Shahrukh Jatoi, a murder convict in the 2021 Shahzeb Khan case who was awarded life imprisonment, was reported to be enjoying a ‘lavish lifestyle’ in a private hospital in Karachi. According to reports, the influential Jatoi family had rented the upper floor of the hospital and got Shahrukh transferred to the facility with the help of senior officials in the Sindh government. It was only after a leaked video of the inmate was released that jail authorities had moved Shahrukh back to the prison. The fact that a convicted murderer was allowed to live a life of luxury says a lot about the justice system in our society. On one end we have prisoners living under poor conditions, dozens cramped together in one cell, and on the other, we have criminals enjoying a luxurious life outside the walls of a jail.
While this is not the first time that such a case had been reported, as we have ample examples of senior political leaders spending ‘jail time’ in destinations of their choice, but it certainly should be the last. The bench hearing the case under CJ Minallah had proposed giving media access to prisons and interviewing prisoners. This could gravely help bring into limelight the injustice in our justice system. Perhaps it is the mainstream news that the authorities concerned pay heed to as numerous reports on poor jail conditions by international organisations, such as Amnesty, have gone unnoticed
