Everything was new

Jadhav, 37, was returning home to Vadner village in Pune district after 11 years of incarceration. He had been acquitted by the Bombay High Court three days before. “I thought I would show up suddenly and surprise them,” he says, chuckling at the memory, when we meet at the high court.

At the age of 25 Jadhav was jailed for the murder of the village sarpanch. That was in 2003 — a year before Facebook was born, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister and India had finished runners-up at the South Africa cricket world cup.

In 2006, Jadhav was convicted. When he left prison last year, he emerged into an alien world. His children, six months and three years old, respectively, when he was arrested, couldn’t recognise him, acquaintances viewed him with suspicion, and he himself could barely recognise his village, now that it had a new road.

In the first few weeks he struggled to grasp the changed value of money. Misal pavs for ₹5 were now ₹40. Neighbours who’d had cycles were zipping around in cars and bikes. This thing called the internet was most mysterious. “Everything was new,” he says. “I had to make an effort to understand it all.”

Jadhav looks older than his 37 years. He speaks softly and slowly. His only wish now is to beat back time and live afresh.

For those set free, whether after completing their jail terms or getting acquitted on appeal, readjusting to the world outside is not just a challenge. It is a massive leap into another reality. From social to financial to familial — there are a series of adjustments to make and few solutions on offer.

Nigel Akkara, 35, spent those first few years dealing with the stigma of being a former prisoner. Incarcerated when he was 21 on charges of kidnapping, and acquitted nine years later in 2009, he found it hard at first to get a job, to engage with society, to readjust to life with family. “It’s always on your mind,” he says, over the phone from Kolkata. “Are people looking at you as an ex-prisoner? Should I approach someone to talk to them?”

Addled by anxieties, he lived alone the first year after his release from a Kolkata prison. He sustained himself on the ₹4,500 a month he earned from his job at a non-profit organisation, limiting himself to one meal a day to save money. “But I didn’t want to leave Kolkata,” he says. “It was here I was accused, and it was here I wanted to clear my name.”

He struggled to find work despite having a BCom and a Master’s degree. He went on to set up his own manpower services firm, Kolkata Facilities Management, and has since July 2010 helped 54 former prisoners find jobs as guards or cleaners.

Akkara, in the meantime, managed to bag film roles after a director saw him performing in a dance drama as part of a therapy programme introduced in the prison.

It has taken Akkara several years to reorient himself to a changed reality. Relationships have to be repaired or nurtured back to health. “It takes time for your family and society to have complete faith in you,” he says. “It has to take its time.”

In some cases, families might not be willing to take back the former prisoners, or the individuals may be hamstrung by guilt over making their loved ones suffer. At the age of 23, convicted by the Mumbai sessions court for the murder of a relative, Hitesh Shah stepped into prison. It was 1992, Mumbai was still Bombay, and communal tensions had not flared up yet. His wife left him. He was a broken man. He spent 19 years in jail, serving a life term, before his sentence was remitted and he was released in 2011. “Technology had changed. People’s ways of thinking had changed,” says Shah. During the first three months after his release, he stayed with a friend he’d met in Nashik jail and survived on his jail earnings of ₹12,000.

For Shah, the bonds made in prison ran deep. After all, life in prison is pegged on the hope that the next court date, or the next bail application or appeal, will come through. The men spoke of tearful family meetings, befriending fellow prisoners, and sustaining those bonds even after release. Shah’s brothers remain distant, but society and some friends have wholeheartedly accepted him. Now 49, Shah has remarried and has been practising as an advocate for four years. He completed two degrees while in prison and, inspired by a lawyer named S Kudle he had met in prison, he set up his own practice.

Eleven years after he was jailed, Shah had stepped outside for the first time in 2003. Emerging from his time capsule, he spent the first few days of his parole crying in sheer excitement. During subsequent paroles he visited relatives in an attempt to show them he had changed and was not “criminal-minded”.

Parole is usually granted for special reasons — such as an emergency — based on an application, while a furlough is an annual leave entitlement for every prisoner. These measures are meant to ensure that prisoners have some contact with the world they have left behind.

However, those eligible for parole are often unable to use it because there is no one to stand surety for them. And even when they do come out, their interaction with the world is limited. “They remain with their families, so they are cut off from the larger reality,” says K Srinivasan, former additional director general of police, Karnataka.

In many cases, the families are hit hard financially as their main earning member has been incarcerated. Naresh Kale* returned home after six years when he was acquitted in a murder case. A farmer with a small patch of land in Kolhapur district, Kale’s family had suffered tremendous monetary setbacks in his absence; farm yields had fallen by 75 per cent, so he desperately needed to find an additional source of income.

Now his main goal is to earn enough to put his two children through school and college. “I am also considering a poultry business,” he says, over a cup of chai. “That’s all I kept thinking of when I was in prison.” He has spent the first month of his freedom gorging on home-cooked food, says lawyer Abhay Kumar Apte, as a withered, white-haired Kale smiles gently.

Role of the states

The criminal justice system is intended to both punish offenders and reform them before they return to society, making rehabilitation an essential aspect of the process.

India has more than three lakh people behind bars; a large proportion of this are undertrials. Management and supervision of jails continue to be substandard. Repatriation of prisoners is clearly not a priority.

The 2003 draft of the Model Prison Manual, prepared by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD), devotes an entire chapter to after-care and rehabilitation. It recommends follow-up and liaising with welfare officers, help in finding a job, assimilating into the community, and assistance with temporary housing, among other things. This document, however, has not been finalised.

An even older report on prison reforms — the Mulla Committee report of 1983 — had suggested a slew of similar rehabilitation measures, which found voice again in a 2007 national policy draft that was forwarded to the ministry of home affairs. However, it hasn’t been implemented.

“Rehabilitation remains a neglected area,” says Upneet Lalli, deputy director of Chandigarh’s Institute of Correctional Administration, which trains prison personnel and police. “In most states it is not under the prison department and there is lack of coordination between prison authorities and the social welfare department on this issue.”

Each state has its own prison manual and ways of dealing with prisoners. Several have vocational skilling courses, therapy initiatives and even jail-based recruitments. In Himachal Pradesh, for instance, the authorities have allowed prisoners to work outside during the day and return to prison at night. A Tamil Nadu prison launched a bakery unit in 2012 while, in Delhi, Tihar Jail last year opened an auto harness plant employing prison labour. “Some states have brought in good practices,” says Lalli, “But these are piecemeal efforts.”

Jail authorities are clear where their responsibilities end. “There is no assigned role for the government after a prisoner’s release,” says PK Shukla, superintendent of Sultanpur Jail, in Uttar Pradesh. He said they paid the fare for prisoners to travel home after release, but the involvement ended there.

Another drawback is this: due to their incarceration, prisoners are often caught in a time warp, whereby the skills they once had or learnt in jail may become irrelevant. Prisoners should be helped to acquire relevant skills, says Srinivasan. For instance, instead of handloom weaving or carpet weaving, prisoners could be taught other marketable skills.

The bars haven’t lifted

According to the latest national crime statistics, 7.8 per cent of the 37.9 lakh arrests made in 2014 involved repeat offenders, indicating that thousands were reverting to crime even after serving jail time. “If society and family don’t accept them, there is a tendency to fall back into crime,” says Dr Sanjay Kumawat, a psychiatrist and former member-secretary of the Maharashtra State Mental Health Authority, who has dealt extensively with prisoners. “Former prisoners face a lot of problems, including issues of identity, insomnia, depression and the after-effects of abuse in prison.”

Lawyers speak of clients losing their grip on reality, or of being unable to complete simple actions like crossing a road. Some former prisoners become very insecure, especially when they come across policemen, fearful of getting arrested all over again. Sister Suma Sebastian, who works with the Human Rights Law Network, recalls the case of a man who tried to return to prison by committing another crime, because he felt rejected by the world and could find refuge only behind bars.

“It is a difficult transition for people who don’t have family support,” says Shukla. “Many prisoners have been inside for a while, have formed bonds in prison and don’t have resources outside, so they would prefer to remain inside if they could.”

Looking ahead

Though there may not be uniform large-scale programmes, several non-profits and volunteer groups have been working with former inmates in various states. “There are very few welfare officers, so follow-up is difficult after release,” says Father Sebastian Vadakumpadan, national coordinator for Prison Ministry India, a group working with prisoners across jails. “Non-profit groups can play a big role and do good work,” he adds.

In Mumbai, Prayas, under the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, works with undertrials. Reny George, a former convict, runs Prison Fellowship Bengaluru to help individuals build a life after incarceration.

What former prisoners carry with them is a certain mellowness, a sense that they must do whatever they can to recover time and live as fully as possible. Jadhav spends all his time with his children, having missed much of their childhood, and in trying to find a new routine. “Right now I am less than nothing,” he says. “And I know it is going to be a struggle. So I am trying even harder to always do the right thing,” he adds.

Similarly, Hitesh Shah is painfully self-conscious about his identity as a former prisoner. “People who’ve undergone life sentences live very carefully in the world outside,” he says. “I’m conscious that people shouldn’t think of my past.”

But while the universe outside might have changed for those locked up for years, some things are timeless. “One of the first films I watched when I came home was Bajrangi Bhaijaan,” says Kale. “Sure, Salman has grown older. But Salman is still Salman, right?”

(*Names of a few recently released prisoners have been changed to help them reintegrate into society.)

Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based journalist