TN accounted for one in three prisoners under preventive detention in India
Preventive detention allows the state to detain a person without trial for up to 12 months on the grounds that their activities are considered prejudicial to public order.
CHENNAI: One in every three prisoners held in preventive detention in India was in Tamil Nadu, according to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) Prison Statistics India 2024 report. Significantly, one-third of these detenues in TN are from Scheduled Caste communities, despite SCs only accounting for a fifth of TN’s population.
Preventive detention allows the state to detain a person without trial for up to 12 months on the grounds that their activities are considered prejudicial to public order.
As of December 31, 2024, Tamil Nadu had 1,117 detenues lodged in prisons, the highest in the country by a considerable margin. Out of 3,048 detenues recorded across India, TN alone accounted for 36.6% of the total, more than the combined figures of Jammu and Kashmir (660) and Maharashtra (414). Gujarat reported 249 detenues, Kerala 215 and Madhya Pradesh 92. Uttar Pradesh, despite having the country’s largest prison population of 86,762 inmates, recorded only 82 detenues. Bihar, which has the second-largest prison population at 51,990, reported none.
The figures reveal TN’s unusually high reliance on preventive detention laws. The trend isn’t new, if data submitted by all states to the NCRB are accurate. In 2022, TN accounted for nearly half of all detenues in India, 2,129 out of 4,324.
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Lawyers and activists argue that the widening scope introduced through the 2014 amendment to Goondas Act, has increasingly brought young and first-time offenders within the ambit of the law.
Human rights activist Henri Tiphagne alleged that the law was being used excessively, including against protesting farmers. “During the Melma farmers’ protest in Tiruvannamalai, Goondas Act was invoked generously. Police use it simply to keep people in jail,” he said.
Tiphagne also referred to observations made by Justice N Anand Venkatesh of the Madras HC, who has remarked that preventive detention had become “a shield for shabby and defective policing”.
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