One of the most devastating outcomes of anyone’s incarceration is his total lack of communication with outside world. This results in aberrational behavior on the part of the inmate. It tells upon his mental health. It also leads to smuggling of cell-phones by the inmates into the prisons. Such smuggling of cell-phones leads to all types of security hazards. There is also no denying the fact that one of the major sources of corruption in the prisons all over the world is the facility of interview for which prison administration gets flak from the society. It definitely is a violation of the rights of any inmate as citizen of the country. It is to address all these issues that a provision has been made in the West Bengal Correctional Services Act, 1992 that every prisoners shall have the right of communication
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Telephone Booth Facility
with relatives and friends as permissible under Rules. However, other than interview across the window and writing letters there is hardly any other way of communication across India except in the State of Karnataka. The writing of letters is always not possible by the illiterate inmates. There is no denying that letter writing is also gradually becoming out dated. The telephone facility is now being increasingly allowed to prison inmates in many parts of the world.
One cannot however, be oblivious to the dangers involved if the inherent security concerns are not addressed properly while thinking of such a facility. We have introduced telephone booths for the inmates of correctional homes in the State but after addressing all such security concerns. The unique sim-less telephone facility has been designed for us by Vodafone Essar East Ltd on our request. The pilot project of the facility was inaugurated at DumDum Central Correctional Home by Sri Biswanath Chowdhury, Hon’ble MIC, Jails & Social Welfare Depts. on September 23, 2009 and Sri Sridhar Rao, Chief Executive features:
Officer, Vodafone Essar East Ltd. in a function presided over by Sri Ardhendu Sen, IAS Addl Chief Secretary, Home & Jails Departments. The unique telephone facility has the following features:
- The correctional home authorities provide Vodafone with a list of inmates opting under the project.
- Vodafone creates a unique account for each of the inmates opting for the project by assigning him / her an unique ID No. and a mobile no.
- The subscriber inmate is asked to specify three numbers at the time of his / her admission in correctional home which are fed into the data base.
- Only outgoing calls can be made from the telephone booth facilities.
- No calls to numbers not notified by the inmates at the time of admission are allowed by the system itself.
- All the calls are recorded and available to the authorities for review up to a period of 15 days.