Daily Times

“T he architecture of our prisons is outdated and must be redesigned to reform prisoners,” said Nusrat Mangan, Sindh Prisons Inspector General (IG) while speaking at “Reimagining Prisons” an architecture competition focused on resolving some of the more pressing problems of incarceration through design.

Mr Mangan said that the standard policy of adding more barracks to a prison to address overcrowding was not the right solution. “There is no prison in Pakistan that is not overcrowded,” he stated.

The architecture competition was held with the joint collaboration of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) and the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP). As many as 25 final year students submitted their designs for a medium security prison with a capacity of 300 prisoners for a site in Malir, Karachi.

The competition was adjudicated by Sindh Prisons IG Nusrat Mangan, Chamaine Enerva from the International Committee of the Red Cross and architects Saifullah Sami and Hameed Anees.

Students were instructed to incorporate, in their designs, layout plans for administration and visitation blocks, a primary care clinic, services including laundry, kitchen and commissary, an inmate holding block and various additional services and programs for inmates.

Fourth year IVS students Mahaa Ejaz and Tahir Zahid won the contest. Their designs focused on rehabilitation through design. The top five designs by Hamza Mandviwala, Mahaa Ejaz, Hoorya Mehmood, Tahir Zahid and Saif Zubair were presented at IVS on Friday.

Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) will be replicating the architecture prize for other provinces in the coming year. Rimmel Mohydin, JPP Spokesperson said “With Reimagining Prisons, we hope to make human rights violations within prisons real and visceral to the public. The students have generated new, practical ideas for making Pakistani prisons more humane and rehabilitative. The urgency is widely recognized but now, concrete solutions are in hand.

Karachi’s prisons are extremely understaffed and overfilled. This leads to tremendous challenges in prison management. Central Prison Karachi for men houses 6,174 prisoners against the authorized capacity for 2,400 inmates. Currently, over 100 inmates are required to sleep in a unit designed for 60. Similarly, Malir District Jail, a prison built to hold approximately 1500 men, currently holds over 4,000 men.

These prisons lack basic facilities, and any recreational and rehabilitative activities. Inmates are locked in overfilled communal barracks from sunrise to sunset.

Overcrowding negatively impacts the ability of the prison management to separate high risk prisoners from low risk ones, reduce corruption and deal with operational challenges.

In Punjab, executions are being used as a means to make room in prisons that are facing overcrowding. Currently, 25 of the 27 prisons in the province are beyond capacity manifold and for every 70 prisoners added to an overcrowded jail, 1 prisoner is executed.

Published in Daily Times, May 26^th 2018.