Indian Prisoners
Changes in a society demand changes in the way of maintaining social order. The techniques of social control are also adjusted to changed situations, as no system of social control works perfectly. People often deviate from social and legal norms, although non-conformity varies greatly in form and frequency.
Though deviation is perceived as a threat to social stability yet attitude towards deviants keeps on changing with change in beliefs in the causes of deviant behaviour in general and crime in particular. There was a time when crime was attributed to the possession of an individual by evil spirits.
Then, it came to be believed that crime was the result of biological defect, mental illness, defective social environment, or of conflicting sets of norms and values, and so forth. With such changes in attitude towards crime, general attitude towards criminals and particularly with regard to punishing criminals, has also kept on changing.
With this change over time, the functions of prisons have also changed from custodial, to coercive, to corrective. In early India, jails functioned on the principle of custodial care.
With the assertion that a jail for confinement and not for punishment, prisons were concerned simply with holding prisoners while they waited for trial during the medieval and early British periods, emphasis came to be laid on retributive and deterrent aspects of punishment.
Physical torture, social degradation and restrictions on freedom were among the programmes used for inflicting pain on criminals. Prisons were primarily used as penal institutions. No attention was paid to differences in age, sex, nature of crime, criminal background or mental status of the offenders.
It was only after the recommendations of the Jail Reforms Committee of 1919 were accepted that conditions in prisons gradually improved and prisons came to be used for corrective purposes, i.e., for bringing offenders round to becoming good citizens through discipline of work, education, and moral instructions.
