Treatment or Correction of Offenders

Every Mumbai commuter knows the name Arthur Road, and most people picture a jail as the place where a person’s story simply stops. It does not stop. Apart from those who die in custody, every prisoner comes back out, to the same lanes, the same trains and the same employers. So the real question is what the State should do with the years in between: only guard the man, or also change him? This topic is about the second answer, and about how far Indian law and practice actually deliver it.

In two minutes

Treatment or correction means using the period of imprisonment to reform the offender and prepare him for release, through education, work, counselling and graded responsibility, while the Prisons Act 1894 supplies the legal frame of custody and discipline.

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