Imprisoned and Unsafe: Prisoners and the Pandemic

The Lockdown on Civil Liberties Series
The lockdown and attendant issues have led to major violations of civil liberties and human rights. While some restrictions on rights may have been inevitable due to the nature of the pandemic, we believe that a large number of violations were entirely avoidable. The impact has been across sectors including economy, education, health, media, prisons, employment, migrant workers, women, domestic workers, sex workers, access to justice and many other segments. The lockdown has also been used by the Government to push through undemocratic means laws and policies which are against the people.
In this context, the PUCL Maharashtra has decided to bring out various segment-wise reports to record the impact. While some of the reports like the present one focus on Maharashtra others deal with all India situation.
The present report is the first in the series. PUCL had filed a Petition in the Bombay High Court concerning the prison conditions in Maharashtra and many of the annexures are taken from status reports filed by the State Government in Court. Some of them are therefore in Marathi and the report itself concentrates on Maharashtra.
This Report has been authored by Mihir Desai but is a combined effort of many persons including Vijay Hiremath, Shiraz Prabhu, Sandhya Gokhale, Lara Jesani, Geeta Seshu, Chayanika Shah, and many other members of PUCL (Maharashtra). We are also thankful to lawyers Kritika Agarwal, Isha Khandelwal and Archana Rupwate for helping with the court case.
Finally, we thank Shrujana for the cover page design.
PUCL (Maharashtra)
2nd September 2020