Sensory Garden inaugurated for children at women’s prison

Sindh is the first province to have implemented an act for prisons because the provincial government always tries to take progressive initiatives to reform the criminal justice system.

Sindh government spokesman Barrister Murtaza Wahab said this while addressing the inaugural ceremony of the Sensory Garden at the Early Learning Centre situated in the Women’s Prison Karachi.

The Committee for the Welfare of Prisoners (CWP), a public-private initiative of the provincial government, organised the event that saw attendance from various government departments and non-governmental organisations.

The Sensory Garden aims to provide knowledge of the outer world to the children living inside the jail with their mothers. The AMI School collaborated with the CWP to develop the Sensory Garden.

Wahab, who is also the city administrator and the chief minister’s law adviser, said the enactment of the Prisons & Correctional Facilities Act 2019 is a testament to the provincial government’s sincerity in improving prisoners’ lives, with the CWP a model legal aid service provider.

He said the government is running a call centre to offer free legal advice to all citizens across Pakistan through qualified and trained lawyers. “We must reform the prisoners and try to make them better citizens of society.”

He also said the prisoners’ rights must be respected. “Before 2019 we had the British-enacted law of 1894, the purpose of which was to control the people, to keep them under control and to create fear in them. After Independence, it was necessary to amend it.”

He explained that after assuming the post of law adviser to the Sindh government in 2018, the first thing he did was to formulate laws for police reforms and prisoner reforms so that they could be improved. “The laws give priority to human rights, and the dignity and well-being of the prisoners.”

Wahab said the CWP was set up to provide legal assistance to prisoners. He said the innocent children living in the jail should be provided with a free environment, and opportunities for education and training, while the children serving sentences for various crimes strive to become good citizens after completing their punishments.

“Better plans can be made only under public-private partnership. We have improved Sindh’s infrastructure, hospitals and justice system for the citizens, and this will continue in future as well.”

Prisons chief Kazi Nazeer Ahmed said: “The old prison laws made by the British authorities were deeply punitive in nature and followed a colonial mindset, while we’re living in an independent country.”

Therefore, he said, the older laws should have been repealed with new ones, and the credit for this goes completely to the Sindh government, which introduced the new law. The prison authorities are trying their best to implement the newly enacted rules, he added.

Ahmed said the laws of 1894 and the 1900s were for the Pharaonic rule of the British Raj, under which prisoners were separated from society and punished by being handcuffed, which was extremely cruel, so this law was repealed.

“We have also made many improvements through public-private partnership, and the Sensory Garden is one of the best examples of it,” he added. He pointed out that the conditions in jails had been very bad before 2008, with officers’ and staff’s salaries being low and the performance not being good.

AMI Schools focal person Nasira Faiz said: “The children incarcerated with their mothers are suffering a lot with different problems, and there are scant opportunities for them as compared to the children living outside.”

She said the AMI School, with the support of different donors, tried to create a platform where the children residing in the prison could feel the sense of life outside and learn the importance of different general ethics in a friendly environment.

CWP Secretary Barrister Haya Emaan Zahid said the committee is providing legal assistance to vulnerable and needy prisoners, adding that it provides assistance to almost 2,500 prisoners annually.

She said how female prisoners can keep their children with them in jail up to the age of nine years. The CWP has identified these children as being at high risk, and is working to fill this gap through the early learning centres operating at the women’s prisons in Karachi and Hyderabad since 2015, she added.

She also said the AMI School is one of the members of the Advisory Board for the Early Learning Centre and has just launched the initiative.