The overall occupancy rate of the State’s prisons is just over their capacity, at 101.4 occupants to a capacity of 100 inmates. But it is lower than the national average of 118.5, according to data from ‘Prison Statistics India - 2019’, released recently by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

However, a closer look at the data shows that the eight central jails, prime among them Parappana Agrahara Central Prison of Bengaluru, are more overcrowded, with an occupancy rate of 119.48, while the district jails have an occupancy rate of 96.11 and the sub-jails an occupancy rate of 38.35, indicating a skewed distribution of inmates in the State’s prisons. Not just that, a whopping 68% of the prison inmates are lodged in just eight central prisons of the total 104 prisons in Karnataka. “This has mostly been the case because of the infrastructure available in central prisons, which is sadly not the case in other jails. Undertrials are also mostly lodged in central and district prisons because of the frequent court visits they have to make,” a senior prisons official said.

The report also exposes the lack of medical personnel in the State’s prisons. The medical staff-inmate ratio in the prisons — one for every 691 inmates — is the second-worst in thBENGALURUe country, behind West Bengal (1 to 923).

However, though Karnataka’s prisons function at just over 68% of the sanctioned strength, they have a better staff to inmate ration. In the State’s prisons, there is one staff member for every five inmates; the national average is 1 to 7.