We spent about seven hours at a drop-in center, right outside Central Station in Mumbai. The team interviewed seven drug users, and one staff member. Splitting off into pairs, the team asked general questions about what prison conditions were like in Mumbai, how guards treated inmates, how overcrowded were the prisons, and more. Several items ran consistent throughout all of the interviews.
First, almost every interviewee made clear that drug use is rampant inside prisons, and is often steered by mafia-type bosses who control the flow of drugs inside and outside of the prison gates. (Staff members also indicated that if prisoners themselves had money, it was easy for them to get drugs from the outside.) Second, medical care inside prisons is severely inadequate. Two former prisoners, released just a few weeks ago, made a point of saying that there might be two doctors for the entire jail (which holds about 500-700 inmates). The doctors also only practice for about an hour a week, if that, according to most of those interviewed. And every person that our team spoke with said that prison doctors all deal with illness the same way: whether you have a headache, a fever, stomach ache, rash or more, you are given one pill, the same pill for any condition. (*Note: in this picture, it's not actually a guy injecting drugs. It's a staff member of the drop-in center, demonstrating how users inject themselves.)Prisoners also mentioned forced sex, rival gang violence, lack of water, and lack of comfortable sleeping conditions as major problems within Mumbai’s prisons. Many of the stories were difficult, and offered a glimpse of what it looks like within the walls of India’s prisons.
We also had the opportunity to sit in on a narcotics anonymous meeting, and two members of the team spoke with a drop-in house coordinator, who showed a diagram of how drug users inject themselves (what is commonly referred to as “fixing”). He also showed us an area directly next to the shelter, buttressed against the train station, where dozens of men were injecting themselves. It was a challenging and emotional day, but the seven hours spent interviewing the former inmates offered quite an insight into both the drug culture but also the prison culture within Mumbai.
We finished the evening by stopping by a concert for sex workers, organized by the Gates Foundation (Richard Gere was in attendance, too!), and a full-team meeting that lasted until just after midnight.
Our second day in Mumbai started out with an impromptu meeting with the director of a local NGO that works with drug users in Mumbai. The NGO runs two drop-in centers for drug users, as well as a counseling center. Those who attend the drop-in centers daily have access to counseling, recreation, opportunity to rest, and access to health care through staff members and referrals to specialized hospitals. In addition, the drop-in center runs a needle exchange program that hundreds of drug users access.
At our surprise, the director invited us to a special lecture being held that night, at the Mumbai High Court. The lecture was being given by Justice Michael Kirby, Judge of the High Court of Australia, on “The Life, Books and Legacy of H.M. Seervai.” H.M. Seervai was a legal scholar in India who wrote “Constitutional Law in India,” a book Seervai referred to as a masterpiece. Kirby was not only eloquent, but spoke with such authority on the intersection of moral ethics and the law. Kirby said that “Equal justice under the law should not just be in our courtrooms, but in our hearts and minds as well.” 
Monday (January 8) marked the first full day of our mission, and two words sum up the bulk of our day: meetings and logistics. Still a bit jet-lagged (given the 30+ hour flight, and the fact that we didn’t leave Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport until the middle of the night), we woke up for a 9am breakfast meeting with the full team, thoroughly going over the mission plan and doing an initial “mapping” of our trip. The crux of our mission will focus on doing a report of prison conditions here in India, covering a wide range of public health concerns. As of now, we have yet to get access to any prisons, meaning that the report will focus on the input of stakeholders as opposed to directly interviewing prisoners. But judging from our initial mapping, just getting a handle on the many stakeholders involved could fill up an entire three weeks and then some.
With the help of one of their legal officers, we set up a meeting with an NGO that works with drug users and HIV-infected individuals for the following day. It was a jam-packed afternoon meeting, and following we joined the staff for a tea break, and also got a handful of literature from the NGO, including newsletters, magazines and more.
Not to steal a line from Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, but tomorrow marks the departure for a group of Human Rights Program students to Mumbai, India. The six of us (four students, a clinical instructor, and myself) will be spending 19 days in Mumbai, working on a variety of international human rights projects with several Mumbai-based NGOs. 