Day Nine: Academics and Activists

Today the group met with our first organization that works exclusively with sex workers. The women this group works with work in both brothels (referred to as “bars”) as well as on the street. The organization facilitates legal aid, provides HIV/AIDS education, counseling services, a job center, as well as some basic needs, including baby formula (so that HIV+ women don’t pass along the virus through breast milk). In total the organization is working on 70 projects, some of which are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with approximately 1,000 sex workers.

Three staff members of the organization told us about specific examples of abuse that many of the sex workers face. They described patterns of physical abuse committed by law enforcement officers against sex workers on the streets. Just when they are able to stop the abuse by a particular set of police officers, new police officers arrive and restart the abuse. Moreover, the staff members told stories of how police officers will target sex workers even when they are not practicing. They mentioned one incident of a woman who went to the grocery store to buy some fruit, but who was arrested for soliciting sex, which is against the law in India. If police know you are a sex worker, they said, they think you are always working.

When it came to describing the conditions faced by women in the prisons, the staff said that there is a separate cell for women at Mumbai’s largest prison, Arthur Road Jail. They described a hierarchical system within the women’s barrack, where certain inmates are able to take advantage of younger, newer inmates (physically and sexually). The staff members also said they find a disproportionate number of Muslim women both engaged in sex work, and also in prison.

Two of us left this meeting early to meet with a leading academic in the criminal justice field at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS), who was a former employee of the National Human Rights Commission in Delhi, where he headed their research division. This academic has been critically involved with India’s criminal justice system, and recently lead a study of medical doctors inside prisons in a neighboring state. His conclusions were stark: that there are not nearly enough medical professionals to handle the severely overcrowded prisons, and as such, public health is suffering drastically inside India’s prisons. In particular, the academic noted that tuberculosis is particularly bad, and that doctors are not trained well to handle the prison population.

He made some broad statements about conclusions made in the wake of his study, including: doctors are not usually willing to come to jails, because of the difficult population and the lack of money involved; doctors that do enter prisons are usually not briefed on international health standards, which may be one reason they overlook serious human rights violations and negligent prison conditions; doctors are usually not given any information about how jails operate, including formal and informal structures; since doctors work very closely with prison officials, they sometimes become silent partners in corruption or negligence within prisons.

After briefing us on his study, the academic engaged us in a new and very fruitful discussion on personal and societal conditions faced by jail guards themselves. His strongest point is that there is very little capacity building happening with the jail system, suggesting that guards and jail employees are not afforded the opportunity to advance, and have very little access to continuous training (their basic training, he asserted, consists of mostly physical fitness, and mirrors the training that regular police officials receive). There is also a societal stigma facing jail guards, he said, suggesting that they are not held in as high regard as police officers, nor are they paid a very high wage, which could push them toward corruption (bribing), or more often apathy.

Finally, the academic confirmed various conditions that had been reported to our team (poor water and sanitation, horrendous sleeping conditions, sexual violence among inmates, terrible food quality for poorer inmates, drug usage and dealing, and very little HIV/AIDS education). He suggested that some of these conditions could be addressed by updating the 1894 Prison Act, which was the last piece of legislation regulating how jails operate. The Act, he said, has no human rights provisions for both jail inmates and jail workers, and does not address the issue of overcrowding, which he blamed on the police and courts as opposed to the jail workers (“They cannot put a sign on the door that says ‘Full House,’” he said).

On our way out the door, he gave us several leads, including a few other individuals with TISS. Additionally, he asked us to submit a letter to him requesting a visit to the prisons, which we did promptly. If granted by the inspector general, the academic will take us on a tour of Arthur Road Jail, one of the most populous jails in all of Maharashtra State.