LAHORE: Prisons in Punjab officially reported their first COVID-19 case on April 4. Three inmates had fallen ill in Lahore, as per the documents of Punjab’s primary and secondary health care department. From thereon, the numbers began to grow.
Until April 20, 94 prisoners had contracted the virus. Two days later, on April 22, 97 cases were recorded to have the disease from nine cities in the province. But then a day later, on April 23, the numbers fell unexpectedly from 97 to 86.
Listed at the end of the Punjab government document was the following explanation: “Human generated sheet, errors are possible.”
From April 23 to date, the number of infected prisoners has officially remained the same. No new cases have been recorded in over a month.
Interestingly, Punjab’s Inspector General of Prisons Mirza Shahid Saleem Baig puts the figure even lower. “The total infected are 78,” he recently told Arab News over the phone. “Among them, 70 are inmates and eight are jail staff.”
He added that those who tested positive to date had recovered and none of the inmates had died.
“There are no new cases as we quickly isolated the infected inmates,” Mirza said, praising the prison authorities in the province for taking strict measures from February 27, the day after Pakistan reported its first case of the novel virus.
“We set up 1,296 quarantine centers in jails across Punjab,” he went on. “We put a hold on court productions of prisoners. We have even stopped all visitations [by family members]. Instead, we allowed them telephonic communication.”
But the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a non-profit based in Lahore that represents the most vulnerable Pakistani prisoners, is not convinced.
“It would be overly optimistic and perhaps even a tad ignorant to assume that not a single case has been reported from jails in a month and a half,” Ali Haider Habib, the spokesperson of JPP, told Arab News. “This is just not how the virus works.”
As per the organization’s own tally, collected from media sources and official reports, the total number of infected prisoners in Pakistan is 553. Among them, 101 are in Punjab and 452 in Sindh.
JPP claims that three inmates have also died – one in Punjab, a prisoner from the Central Jail in Rawalpindi, and two in Sindh. The other two provinces of the country, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, have not made public the number of infected prisoners, if any.
In Sindh, the figure of infected inmates keeps rising, albeit slowly, in its daily situation reports. But in Punjab, the count has stopped at 86.
It is also unclear when Punjab last tested its prisoners. Senior health officials in the province did not reply to Arab News’ request for comment.
“Prisons are not islands,” said Habib. “Even with routine visits banned, hundreds and thousands of people visit jails every day: Prison staff, officials, judges, ministers. Pakistan’s prisons have an alarmingly high churn rate, which means that hundreds of prisoners go in and out of jails every day.”
In the Central Jail in Karachi, Sindh, several prisoners who fell ill with the deadly virus were asymptomatic, notes the JPP data.
Jails in Pakistan are also notoriously overcrowded, almost bursting at the seams. In many cells, several prisoners are cramped up together. This makes social distancing practically impossible. According to the inspector general of prisons in Punjab, the 43 prisons in the province have the capacity to house 37,000 prisoners. At the moment, however, it has an estimated 47,000 inmates locked up.
Sohail Yafat, a former prisoner and now an activist, visited a few jails in Punjab recently. He told Arab News that while larger prisons were better placed to enforce safety protocols and could regularly disinfect the cells, small facilities were struggling to keep up.
Also, many jails in Punjab lack basic amenities such as clean drinking water.
On March 25, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called on countries to reduce overcrowding in prisons during the pandemic. She further urged governments around the world to “release every person detained without sufficient legal basis, including political prisoners and others detained simply for expressing critical or dissenting views.”
While the coronavirus can affect anyone, people with pre-existing health conditions are known to be at greater risk of developing severe symptoms of the disease.
In Pakistan, the immune system of many prisoners is already compromised due to unhealthy living conditions behind bars. As per the JPP data, 600 prisoners across Pakistan are mentally ill, 4,500 physically ill and 1,500 are elderly.
“Prison health is public health,” said Habib. “Prisoners are sitting ducks in this pandemic. They are packed in overcrowded jails with little to no access to health care and they have poor hygiene and few safety protocols.”
He continued that this made them more vulnerable to the virus.
“They may not be able to survive if infected.”