MAZHAR Hussain was sentenced to death in 1997. He spent 17 years in prison before he died of a heart attack in custody. Two years after his death, the Supreme Court acquitted him as innocent.
Muhammad Iqbal was arrested at 17. He spent 21 years in prison before the courts realised that he had been a child at the time of the offence and released him. While Iqbal waited in jail, Pakistan saw six prime ministers come and go, Facebook was invented. Smartphones changed the world. An entire generation of Pakistanis was born, grew up and became adults. When justice arrives after 21 years, can we still call it justice?
Mazhar Hussain and Muhammad Iqbal are not isolated cases. Countless prisoners throughout the country face delayed justice — often when it is too late. The reason is simple. Pakistan’s prisons system is overburdened and overpopulated. Our prisons house more than 113,000 people against a capacity for fewer than 69,000. New punitive laws passed regularly further fuel the rate of incarceration in the country.
Most importantly, approximately three out of every four prisoners has not been convicted for any crime. They are waiting for justice: for an investigation to finish, or bail, or to be produced before a court. Pretrial detention should be the exception — but in Pakistan, it is the default response. Pakistan’s prison debate treats overcrowding as an engineering problem. The fixes follow this logic: more barracks, digitised records, trained staff, repaired hospitals. Much of this is needed but it misses where the crowding comes from. A prison population is built by decisions made long before anyone reaches a cell; for starters, new punitive laws that widen what counts as an offence and how harshly it is punished — from narcotics to public order. And with too many arrests that could have been mere warnings, and remands and further remands, which are now routine procedure. Bail is granted on paper but denied in practice simply because the accused can’t arrange surety.
