The police hope that a new control room in Bengaluru, which was inaugurated by Home Minister G. Parameshwara on Tuesday, will help improve security. The control room will receive feeds from high-definition CCTV cameras in eight district prisons.
The reputation of State prisons had taken a beating in the wake of a series of embarrassing jailbreaks and incidents of contraband and mobile phones being smuggled into cells. The CCTV cameras will be monitored 24/7. While it currently has eyes on eight prisons, Dr. Parameshwara said an additional 20 prisons across Karnataka will be added to the network in phases by 2017.
Director General of Police (Prisons) H.N. Sathyanarayana Rao, who is heading the project, said the CCTV cameras are equipped with alarms, which will be activated automatically in the event of a security breach. The cameras will be equipped to sound an alarm if there is an unauthorised entry or exit.
Earlier prisons were built outside cities for security reasons, but owing to rapid urbanisation, many important jails are in the middle of residential layouts. As a result, inmates housed in prisons in Mangaluru, Shivamogga and Bengaluru, use residents and locals to smuggle drugs, mobile phones and even weapons into their cells.
Porous state
Even to this day, the security of some of the central prisons here are entrusted to wardens, who are armed with no more than lathis at night.
After much pleading, only three central prisons and a district prison in the State — Parappana Agrahara (Bengaluru), Hindalga (Belagavi), Ballari, and Mangaluru — were provided Karnataka State Industrial Security Force (KSISF) cover a few months ago. However, this cover is also inadequate as the number of guards provided is very few. There are only four to five guards at any given point of time.
The Prisons Department has been demanding KSISF armed security for all the seven central prisons and a few strategic district prisons, which is yet to be granted. “Security at even some of the central prisons like Kalaburagi and Vijayapura is woefully inadequate,” said a senior prisons official.
The State has 19 district prisons, of which only Mangaluru prison has KSISF cover, and Mysuru prison has additional security provided by the local police. None of the other prisons has armed guards at the gates round the clock.
As of 2015, Karnataka had the second highest number of escapees from prisons in the country, with 10 such cases, just behind Maharashtra (13 escapees).
Mr. Rao said they had made multiple requests to the Police Department to provide armed security to all district prisons, which is yet to materialise. A senior prisons official said there was a suggestion made by the Prisons Department to house the District Armed Reserve (DAR) at the prisons for security, which has fallen on deaf ears.
The net result of inadequate security is the skewed utilisation of prisons in the State.
“To avoid clashes among prisoners and to break gangs getting together in jails, we constantly move prisoners from one prison to another. Lax security at most prisons have made them fall off our maps for moving such prisoners, which leads to overcrowding only in a handful of jails,” the official said.
Mr. Rao said, today, all security outside the gates of the jails is the responsibility of the local police. “But, we are moving to take control of the immediate premises of our jails, putting up barricades and trying to control access to our jails in view of security,” he said.
High-security prison at Parappana Agrahara
Bengaluru may soon be home to a high-security prison. The Prison Department on Tuesday proposed the construction of an additional facility on a 75-acre plot near the existing Parappana Agrahara jail soon. DGP (Prisons) Satyanarayana Rao announced that the proposal has been submitted to the State government for approval.
According to prison officials, there is a need for a high-security prison on account of the increasing number of inmates in the existing jail. The proposed prison had earlier been planned at Devanahalli on the outskirts of the city, but owing to shortage of water, it was planned at Parappana Agrahara.
