Coimbatore: About a month ago, a 47-year-old inmate, who was serving life imprisonment at the Coimbatore Central Prison, had committed suicide by hanging from a ceiling fan.
The convict, R Seenivasan, who was sentenced to life in 2017 for raping a woman, was allowed to work inside the prison, thanks to his good conduct.
This was the second death inside the prison on that particular week. And exactly a month later, a teenage remand prisoner has murdered his fellow inmate by smashing his head with a stone.
“There has an increase in the number of unnatural deaths inside the central prison,” said human rights activists, pinpointing that over five unnatural deaths had been recorded inside the prison over a year.
The clashes and unnatural deaths inside the prison were due to the negligence of prison officials, said K Tholkappian, an advocate.
Pointing out that a lot of human rights violations were being recorded inside the prison, he said the Coimbatore Bar Association had recently represented before the Judicial Magistrate to limit the violations.
Whenever complaints were lodged against the inmates, prison authorities would often subject them to solitary confinement. Such treatments would push the inmates into depression, said S Balamurugan, national council member of People’s Union for Civil Liberties.
“Instead of adopting the rehabilitation method, repression method is adopted in the prisons,” he said and blamed the prison authorities for not taking good care of the inmates.
In 2017, Supreme Court had given instructions to improve the prison conditions and set up mechanisms to lower the number of unnatural deaths in the prison. But nothing was implemented so far, Balamurugan added.
Refuting the allegations, a prison authority, on condition of anonymity, said sometimes they could not pay close attention to the inmates and fail to notice the behavioural change of the inmates due to excess work load and stress.
There is more than 30% staff shortage in the Coimbatore Central Prison alone, the authority said. Ideally, two wardens would be incharge of a block, where over 100 prisoners would be lodged. In the past two years, a warden was put incharge of three to four blocks. The prison has a total of 12 blocks, a source said.