Pakistan: Families suffer as hundreds jailed far from home

Prisoners’ families say they struggle to pay for long journeys needed to visit the inmates.

Security officials guard a blocked road leading to a counter-terrorism centre after security forces started to clear the compound seized earlier by Pakistani Taliban militants in Bannu, a northern district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. | Photo Credit: MUHAMMAD HASIB/AP

Gul Shireen, a woman in her late 60s, has travelled around 260 kilometres (161 miles) from her village in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to Rawalpindi city to meet her incarcerated son, who was sentenced to life after being convicted of murder.

Authorities have imprisoned her son in the city’s central jail.

“We often speak over the [jail] phone. But as a mother, I want to see him in person to satisfy myself that he’s fine. That’s why I show up at the jail every month after travelling long distances,” she told DW.

Theirs is not an isolated case.

Shireen’s son is one among 945 people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who are behind bars at the Rawalpindi jail, according to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR).

Struggle to pay for long journeys

Most of these prisoners are convicted of committing crimes in Punjab. So, they are housed in the state’s prisons, far away from their home province.

But their families, many of them from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, say they struggle to pay for the long journeys needed to visit the inmates. They argue that prisoners should instead be held in their home states.

The younger brother of Mukhtar Shah, a resident of northwestern Kohat city, is currently serving time in jail.

“There’s no denying that my younger brother has committed a crime and should be punished, but why should we [family] suffer?” Shah said.

“We’re too poor to afford to leave work and pay high bus fares to visit him in prison,” he added, appealing to the authorities to transfer his brother to a prison that is located closer to their family home.

The problem of overcrowding in Pakistan’s prisons

Prisons in the country are also often overcrowded.

The central jail in Rawalpindi, for instance, has capacity to hold around 2,200 inmates, but it currently houses more than 6,000 prisoners, the NCHR said.

“A key problem we have seen is the extent of overcrowding in jails, as a result of which, not all inmates are housed in jails in their home provinces,” Maheen Paracha, spokesperson for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent rights group, told DW.

“Wherever this happens, it affects poorer families disproportionately because they do not have the funds to travel long distances to meet incarcerated relatives,” she said.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) also released a report in March, slamming the overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.

“Pakistani prisons are notoriously overcrowded, with cells designed for a maximum of three people holding up to 15,” the report stated.

“The principal cause for overcrowding is the dysfunctional criminal justice system itself,” HRW added in the report.

Maintaining contact with family: A right, not a privilege

Mian Farooq Nazir, a senior police official in Punjab, recently started an initiative allowing prisoners to make video calls to their families.

The facility is currently available in central jails in the cities of Rawalpindi and Lahore.

Safdar Chaudhry, a lawyer, said that there are plans to extend it to other prisons in Punjab.

Rabiya Javeri Agha, who heads the NCHR, said she had raised the issue of prisoners being jailed in provinces other than their home state with the Pakistani government, but no action has been taken so far.

“Though there are no hard and fast rules for holding prisoners in their provinces, contact with the outside world, especially family, is their right as per the international human rights standards,” she said.

“So, they all should be relocated to the jails nearest to their homes to facilitate family visits.”