LIFE IN JAIL
Imagine this. Hamlet was thrown into prison for public nuisance. The police caught him acting like a madman. He finds himself in the unlucky half of those Indian under-trials who spend on average between three months and two years in prison.[1]Months and months of rumination led him to utter:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die-to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause- there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.[2]
Hamlet ponders the fundamental question of whether to live or die. He wonders whether it really is very honorable to withstand, and in the process, suffer at the hands of terrible fortunes written by fate, or just take arms and rebel against them in an attempt to end them completely? Or would the latter be futile, considering nobody comes out of the lifelong ordeal alive? Hamlet isn’t alone when it comes to being susceptible to such thoughts, though. A study conducted by Narendra PS in the central jails of Karnataka, comprising 347 under-trial prisoners, found high levels of anxiety and acute depression.[3] Unlike convicts who have a set release date, the continuous state of legal limbo can induce anxiety in the under-trial prisoners. Women under-trial prisoners face double the brunt as their essential needs are mostly unmet in prisons designed primarily with men in mind. So, it is only natural that the next thought they entertain is ‘to sleep’ or to die, because that’s all that death is. To Hamlet, the sleep would spare him from the heartache and the thousand injuries that being alive forces him to be vulnerable to. To the ones waiting for their trial for an extended period of time, this could mean freedom from the “Tareekh pe Tareekh” horror. According to the last Prison Statistics India report produced by the National Crime Records Bureau, suicide accounted for 80 per cent of the unnatural deaths in prisons between 2017 and 2022.[4] 2/3rds of the sanctioned posts for psychologists and psychiatrists in prison were empty, and only 9 women psychologists and psychiatrists were employed in prisons in 2022, six of them being in Tamil Nadu.[5]
Hamlet observes that the vexation of the unknown that exists after death, or the hope about the dreams that may come after, is what convinces people to withstand the calamities of life for so long. The under-trial prisoners hope as well, just for the provisions of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 to come to their rescue. Although the act provides for mental health professionals in prisons,[6] ground reality suggests that there is only one for every 23,000 inmates. 25 of 36 states and Union Territories in India have not provided for a single post for psychologists or psychiatrists. The aforementioned conditions exist despite the 2016 Model Prison Manual promulgated by the Ministry of Home Affairs, which suggests at least one psychologist or counsellor for every 500 prisoners. The Model Prisons and Correctional Services Act, 2023, shared by the Union with the state governments, calls for the movement of prisoners to mental healthcare institutions after being permitted by the Mental Health Review Board.[7] However, the India Justice Report 2025, produced by Tata Trusts, observed that only six states and one Union Territory have any sort of framework to record mentally unhealthy prisoners.[8] Similar to Hamlet standing on the battlements of Elsinore, the Indian under-trial exists in a permanent state of ‘To be or not to be’ neither fully a citizen with rights nor a convict with a defined ending, trapped in a judicial no-man ’s-land.
But Hamlet goes on:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that is the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet questions why else does one subject oneself to the hurtful blows of time, the devastation of oppression, the abuse of life, the disappointment of existence, the insolence of people or even the law’s delay. To him, a simpler response to life’s vicissitudes lies in an unsheathed dagger. It isn’t too far-fetched for the Indian under-trials to go down Hamlet’s spiral, considering approximately 3.84 lakh people in prison are awaiting trial, that is ¾ of all inmates, approximately 74 per cent of all prisoners across the country.[9] ⅓ of all under-trials have been in custody for over a year without conviction, even though the Supreme Court in Hussainara Khatoon v The State of Bihar considered that the right to a speedy trial is a fundamental right implicit in Article 21. The “law’s delay” here affects people on trial literally, withering away decades of their lives. The culmination of several factors – severe shortage of judges, limited legal aid, delays in investigation, jails being overcrowded at 131 per cent – has led to such a pitiful condition.[10]
Today, there are only 21 judges for every million persons, which appears to be less than half of what the Law Commission recommended in its 120th report published back in 1987.[11] It isn’t very far-fetched to conclude that the population growth in the last 39 years demands an even larger distribution of judges. The National Legal Services Authority, in its 2024-2025 report, noted that 78,492 prisoners had stayed in jail longer than necessary, despite the provisions under section 479 of BNSS. (Generally, a person under-trial may be released on bail if he has served half of the maximum sentence, although a first-time offender may be released on bail if he has served 1/3rd of his maximum sentence.) For a man who has spent more time awaiting trial than the maximum sentence for his alleged crime, the ‘mortal coil’ goes beyond a philosophical metaphor and assumes the heavy, bureaucratic weight of a backlogged judiciary.
The Fair Trial Programme, which ran from 2019 to 2024, observed that 67.6 per cent of under-trials belong to disadvantaged groups, who are least equipped to navigate a slow judicial system. In Re: Inhuman Conditions in 1382 Prisons, the court noticed repeated failure of the police to produce prisoners in court for hearings, which only exacerbated the overcrowding of prisons. In the “Access to Justice Survey” by Daksh, it was noted that even though an average criminal trial in India takes 3-5 years to conclude, 10 per cent of cases remain pending for over 10 years. Despite existing mechanisms that are meant to make a trial smooth, prisons have currently transformed into warehouses for housing people who haven’t yet been declared guilty.
LIFE AFTER JAIL
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Hamlet remarks how the natural flush on one’s face, which comes from resolve, passion and determination to do great deeds, disappears with the incapacitating hesitation that overthinking entails, and the life that under-trial prisoners have waiting for them after they are finally released is no different from this. Post-Incarceration Syndrome happens to be a cluster of symptoms related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that develops due to the trauma of imprisonment. Symptoms include persistent difficulty in making simple decisions, difficulty navigating open spaces or loud crowds and emotional numbness.[12] Reports from Bihar Jail indicate that post-release, women experience higher rates of social abandonment by families compared to men, which only makes PICS worse.[13] Individuals who are eventually acquitted after years of trial report the highest levels of rage and identity loss, often struggling with PTSD that makes returning to a “normal” life nearly impossible. The prison cell of an under-trial is the physical manifestation of Hamlet’s internal ‘prison’; both are structures designed to hold a man until his resolution is sicklied o’er by the weight of systemic sluggishness.
CONCLUSION
The crisis of under-trials in India represents a systemic failure that threatens the constitutional guarantee of liberty. When the majority of the prison population consists of individuals who have not been proven guilty, the “presumption of innocence” ceases to be a functional legal principle and becomes a tragic irony. This institutionalised delay does more than just stall cases; it permanently alters the social and economic trajectory of the marginalised.
Until the gap between “arrest” and “adjudication” is bridged by efficiency and empathy, the architecture of justice remains incomplete, serving more as a warehouse for the forgotten than a sanctuary for the innocent. A democracy cannot claim structural integrity while its citizens remain trapped in a state of indefinite legal limbo.
Author: Zarin Mahtab (The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata)
References:
[1] Shreehari Paliath, ‘Half A Million Indians Behind Bars, 74% Still Awaiting Trial’ (Indiaspend, 14 October 2025)<https://www.indiaspend.com/governance/half-a-million-indians-behind-bars-74-still-awaiting-trial-968804>
[2] William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 3 Scene 1)
[3] Harpreet Singh Dhillon et al, ‘Prison Mental Health – An Indian Perspective’ (2024) 8(1) Annals of Psychiatry<https://journals.lww.com/aips/fulltext/2024/08010/prison_mental_health___an_indian_perspective.17.aspx>
[4] National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics India (2022)
[5] Shreehari Paliath, ‘The Brewing Mental Health Crisis in Indian Prisons’, (Indiaspend 2 August 2025)<https://www.indiaspend.com/governance/the-brewing-mental-health-crisis-in-indian-prisons-963116>
[6] The Mental Healthcare Act 2017, s 103(7)
[7] Model Prisons and Correctional Services Act 2023, s 45
[8] Tata Trusts, India Justice Report (2025)
[9] Atul Thakur, ‘74% of prisoners are undertrial, and that’s an ‘improvement’’,The Times of India ( 4 October2025)<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/74-of-prisoners-are-undertrials-and-thats-an-improvement/articleshow/124298582.cms>
[10] Tata Trusts, India Justice Report (2025)
[11] Law Commission of India, Manpower Planning in Judiciary:A Blueprint (Law Comm No.120, 1987)
[12]’National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences(Deemed University), Minds Imprisoned: Mental Health Care in Prisons (2011)
[13] Policy Perspectives Foundation, Incarcerated Gender, A Study of Women Prisoners in Bihar Jails (2020-2024), (2024)
