Had Dhaka city had a soul and a voice, it would probably heave a shy of relief with the shifting of the Dhaka Central Jail (DCJ). It was a veritable hell where 8,000 inmates were crammed against its capacity of 2,600. It gives one the impression that the huddling of prisoners was not much different from the inmates in a boiling cauldron in a hell. Years ago a panel of pictures showing what punishment awaited sinners in the after world was found on display with other pictures on footpaths and marketplaces. The DCJ reminded one of the various punishments in the picture being meted out rather in this life.
When the inmates had to wait in long queues for short and long calls and had to invent the method of snapping some sleep in shifts, the ordeal could not be more unbearable. The least said about the quality of food the better. In his Rajbondir Rojnamcha, Shahidulla Kaiser has described the awful living condition and food quality of the late 50's and early 60's. Did the quality of food improve of late? Even if it did, the living condition exacerbated many times over.
Now that the prison has been shifted to the newly built accommodation on 194.41 acres of land at a cost of Tk 4.06 billion, can its inmates hope for a decent living standard? The size of the area is less than half of the largest prison in the world on the Rikers Island in the United States of America. In Bangladesh condition, it is spacious enough. But this prison too has a capacity for accommodating 4,000 prisoners. If all the 8,000 inmates are put in there, the congestion is likely to be less than before but still it is going to be crammed with double its capacity.
In modern concept, though, jails are no longer mere confinement of those condemned to suffer imprisonment of various terms. Rather, these are correctional centres where the hardened criminals are brought under programmes for reforming them. The imprisoned need to be handled with care. Those who are in charge of looking after them must undergo special training in order to acquire the required skill for performing their duty.
Mere rhetoric will not do. Facilities at prisons should be created sufficiently in order to take the best care possible for their inmates. Brutal treatment only works as contagious diseases, to which juvenile and adolescent delinquents or others coming to the prison for first time offences are susceptible.
Gone are the days when political prisoners with lofty ideals could change hearts of criminals. Today, apparently innocent people will run the risk of getting criminalised or radicalised like a few of the militants killed recently in the city were done.
On the other side of the positive move to Rajendrapur under Keraniganj, nostalgia will definitely haunt many who spent sometime in its old location. In fact, with its shift, a piece of history has also been shifted. It is in the old Dhaka Central Jail that the Father of the Nation was confined. It is here his comrades-in-arms and national leaders Tajuddin Ahmad, Sayed Nazrul Islam, Captain Mansur Ali and AHM Kamruzzaman were brutally killed.
Will those cells stand to tell the true story of Bangladesh's struggle for independence, the country's journey off course and the sacrifices of many who made history of the nation? At least for the sake of history of the nation's making, there is a need for preserving a few such landmarks in the old Dhaka Central Jail.
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