Crime and Punishment– Trends and Reflections

“Having officially worked for prisoners from close quarters, I found that owing to hatred against them, there is nobody to hear their cry for help. Not just that, I also found numerous violations of human rights of prisoners by some of the State agencies in total ignorance, if not deliberate disregard of the laudatory judicial pronouncements aimed at upholding the rule of law by protecting the fundamental rights of prisoners. I felt a need to consolidate the necessary material for awareness of those who deal with this ‘discarded section of human beings’. The predominant paradigm here is not the advocacy for rights of the prisoners in abstract, but campaign to uphold their fundamental rights and consequently, ensure the rule of law. Failure to protect fundamental rights of prisoners would be failure to ensure the rule of law. With this concept in mind, I worked on this book across a period of about three years. Further, the idea of crime and criminal has always fascinated the lay person, whose only source of knowledge about crime and criminal is the unscientific fiction or some equally ill researched movies, television sops and news channels. Portrayal of crime and criminal in the mind of a lay person needs to be demystified, so that societal response to crime and criminal could be made more productive in minimization, if not elimination of crime. For this, such a lay person needs to be served with scientific material to help him structure better informed opinion. The book contains materials, which are otherwise not spoken of, like chapters on ancient Hindu criminal law, Muslim criminal jurisprudence, kinds of punishments not in use in India, different forms of prison tribulations, and different modes of inflicting death sentence etc.”