Pakistani families suffer as hundreds jailed far from home

Gul Shireen, a woman in her late 60s, has traveled around 260 kilometers (160 miles) from her village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to the city of Rawalpindi to see her incarcerated son, who was sentenced to life after being convicted of murder.  

Authorities have imprisoned her son in the city's central prison. 

"We often speak over the [jail] phone. But as a mother, I want to see him in person to satisfy myself that he's fine. That's why I show up at the jail every month after traveling long distances," she told DW.

In Pakistan, theirs is not an isolated case.

Shireen's son is one among 945 people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who are behind bars at the Rawalpindi prison, according to Pakistan's National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR).

Families struggle to pay for long journeys

Most of these prisoners have been convicted of committing crimes in Punjab. They're housed in the state's prisons, far away from their home province.

But their families, many of them from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, say they struggle to pay for the long journeys needed to visit the inmates. They argue that prisoners should instead be held in their home states.

The younger brother of Mukhtar Shah, a resident of northwestern Kohat city, is currently serving time in prison.

"There's no denying that my younger brother has committed a crime and should be punished, but why should we [family] suffer?" Shah said. 

"We're too poor to afford to leave work and pay high bus fares to visit him in prison," he added. Shah has appealed to the authorities to transfer his brother to a prison located closer to their family home.

'Pakistani prisons are notoriously overcrowded': HRW

Prisons in the South Asian country are also often overcrowded.

The central prison in Rawalpindi, for instance, has capacity to hold around 2,200 inmates, but currently houses more than 6,000 prisoners, the NCHR said.

"A key problem we have seen is the extent of overcrowding in jails, as a result of which, not all inmates are housed in jails in their home provinces," Maheen Paracha, spokesperson for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent rights group, told DW.

"Wherever this happens, it affects poorer families disproportionately because they do not have the funds to travel long distances to meet incarcerated relatives," she said. 

Human Rights Watch also released a report in March, slamming the overcrowding in the nation's prisons.

"Pakistani prisons are notoriously overcrowded, with cells designed for a maximum of three people holding up to 15," the report stated.

 "The principal cause for overcrowding is the dysfunctional criminal justice system itself," HRW added in the report.

'Contact with the outside world, especially family, is their right'

Mian Farooq Nazir, a senior police official in Punjab, recently launched an initiative allowing prisoners to make video calls to their families.

The initiative is currently available in central jails in the cities of Rawalpindi and Lahore. Safdar Chaudhry, a lawyer, said there are plans to extend it to other prisons in Punjab.

Rabiya Javeri Agha, who heads the National Commission for Human Rights, said she had raised the issue of prisoners being jailed in provinces other than their home state with the Pakistani government, but no action has been taken so far. 

"Though there are no hard and fast rules for holding prisoners in their provinces, contact with the outside world, especially family, is their right as per the international human rights standards," she said. 

"So, they all should be relocated to the jails nearest to their homes to facilitate family visits."

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru