Bhubaneswar: The Odisha Human Rights Commission Monday directed the state Home, Health and Family Welfare department and Additional Director General of Police for prisons to submit report on the issue of mental illness among the state prisoners within a month. The commission sent notice to the said authorities while hearing an application submitted by several city-based human rights activists over a story based on National Crime Records Bureau’s annual prisons data published in the Orissa POST, October 24.
The recently released NCRB report for 2017 reveals shocking details regarding the sorry state of mental health of the inmates in the jails of the state. Prison statistics for 2017 say that Odisha ranks second in the list of states with maximum number of inmates with mental illness in the country.
As per the data, as many as 787 prisoners kept in the jails of the state were reportedly suffering from mental illness. Out of that, 412 convicts, lodged in various jails of the state, have been suffering from mental illness. As many as 375 under-trials were found to be suffering from some sort of mental disease. The numbers are second highest in the country, next only to Uttar Pradesh where around 639 convicts, 515 under trials and two detunes were found suffering from mental disorder.
Around five per cent of the jail inmates in Odisha were reported to have some sort of mental disorder as against only one percent of the mentally ill prison inmates in Uttar Pradesh. However, Uttar Pradesh had six times more prisoners than that of Odisha.
Sources in the Prisons department also informed OP that the extremely poor living conditions in the jails across the state have been the main reason behind mental health problem of prisoners. That apart, most of prisons in the state have no doctors for medical counseling. No steps are being taken by the prison authorities to alleviate the stress among the prisoners.
Similarly, the situation regarding the poor mental health of the prisoners in the state was not an isolated fact but Odisha ranked high in mental illness among prisoners in the previous years too.