I’ve often felt that discussions on systematic change in our country are relatively fruitless. Applying theories like retribution and utilitarianism to a pre-existing problem in the hopes of finding a miraculous solution that hasn’t been found in decades, sitting in a classroom, feels utopian.
However, that doesn’t stop me from raising my hand in my criminal law class to answer a question when the professor writes ‘JUSTICE’ with chalk on a dusty whiteboard.
The topic of discussion that day was prison reform. We were debating whether punishment, as a concept, should be abolished completely and replaced with more proactive efforts towards rehabilitation. A lengthy discussion eventually led us to the conclusion that some crimes may warrant greater punishment, while others could be dealt with differently or less severely.
Then one of my classmates raised his hand and told us about Hyderabad’s prison conditions, and the entire debate on punishment versus rehabilitation went down the drain, along with our lingering belief in the justice system.
The problem with prison reform is that it is easy to discuss in a classroom. It is harder to understand when the subject stops being a theory and becomes a cell, a person and a family waiting outside a prison gate.
Hyderabad Central Jail is a major correctional facility on the National Highway in Hyderabad, Sindh, Pakistan. In 2022, it was reported that it was holding more than 2,300 inmates against a capacity of 1,500. At the time, Sindh’s 26 operational prisons were holding more than 23,500 prisoners against a total capacity of 13,500.
The numbers have not become much easier to digest since then. In 2024, Pakistan’s prisons held 102,026 people in facilities designed for 65,811, according to the National Commission for Human Rights, the National Academy of Prison Administration and Justice Project Pakistan. More than 73 percent of those prisoners were under trial. In Sindh, the operating occupancy rate was over 160 percent.
However, these are just statistics.
Numbers are often used as symbols that desensitize the on-ground realities of the world.
So I asked my classmate to tell me what he had actually seen.
“Worse than what animals are housed in,” were the exact words he used when I sat down with him to continue our discussion about the jail. His father is in the police and had a friend who was incarcerated there at the time, a truck driver arrested on charges relating to the transportation of drugs.
“A cell built for one, housing five, and maybe even more.”
Cleanliness and hygiene had left the equation a while ago.
At the time of his visit, there was no electricity, which the superintendent described as a rare outage. My classmate suspected that this was more than a regular power cut. The cell, as he described it, was more like a godam – a storage space for crops or rotten things.
His account is not evidence that every cell in Hyderabad Central Jail looks this way. But the conditions he described are not entirely out of step with the broader prison crisis documented by human rights bodies. In its June 2026 concluding observations on Pakistan, the UN Committee against Torture expressed concern over severe overcrowding, particularly in Sindh and Punjab, alongside poor hygiene, old infrastructure, inadequate ventilation and daylight, insufficient food and water, limited educational and recreational activities, and restrictions on family visits.
The problem, then, is not simply that Pakistani prisons are overcrowded. It is that overcrowding affects a lot of other functions too.
The superintendent himself, according to my classmate, sat in a tiny, congested space. A small chair and table were overpowered by the presence of hundreds, if not thousands, of papers stacked around him, untouched for so long that the layers of dust on them could be seen from miles away.
These were important papers. Some perhaps concerned a prisoner’s release, a family visitation request, or something else that could determine the course of a person’s life.
And yet they appeared to have been discarded and forgotten about, just like the convicts.
This is where the statistics can start to be seen less as numbers and more as actual people.
The overwhelming proportion of undertrial prisoners is particularly important here. The 2024 Prison Data Report found that 73.41 percent of Pakistan’s prison population was awaiting trial. The report linked the problem to prolonged judicial processes, ineffective bail mechanisms and an overreliance on custodial measures.
An undertrial prisoner has not been convicted. Yet a person who has not been found guilty can still spend months or years inside an overcrowded prison while waiting for the legal system to determine what happens to them.
That distinction matters when we talk about punishment.
It matters even more when we talk about justice.
There is, however, another side to the story.
The official picture of Hyderabad Central Jail is not uniformly bleak. In a 2023 visit, the Sindh Human Rights Commission reported that food, health, bedding and other facilities at the jail were comparatively better than those it had observed at other prisons. In March 2024, another SHRC inspection described the jail’s classrooms, kitchen, library and IT centre as being in commendable condition.
That does not erase what my classmate saw. It does, however, complicate it.
A prison can have a functioning library and still be overcrowded. It can have a classroom and still fail to provide adequate living conditions. It can have rehabilitation programmes on paper while the people inside remain trapped in a system struggling to process the most basic paperwork.
In fact, Sindh’s own law recognises that a prison is supposed to be more than a place of confinement. The Sindh Prisons and Corrections Services Act, 2019 states that the prison system should assist in the welfare and rehabilitation of prisoners and their reintegration into society through reformation programmes.
And despite all of this, the prisoners themselves seemed to have found a way to create something of their own.
Beaded jewellery, wooden toys and threaded bracelets became means of earning a living and providing for their families. The truck driver mentioned earlier would often make small elephants out of stone and give them to my classmate’s younger brother.
There was something deeply unsettling yet profound about that.
The hidden talent and generosity of people who are given the least speaks more about the volume of their character than it does about the people claiming to provide for them.
And so we return to the conversation about whether the justice system actually works.
I believe justice cannot begin with deciding how much punishment a person deserves. I think it begins much earlier – with ensuring that a person does not disappear into a system where overcrowding, neglect, bureaucracy and deprivation become a punishment in themselves.
Because before we debate what punishment should look like, we should first ask whether we have built a system capable of delivering justice at all.
Justice cannot remain a word written in chalk; it has to become a reality for the people behind the bars.
