Lankan lawyer-activist Ambika Satkunanathan says South Asian countries need to introspect on how our societies and justice systems are perpetuating crime instead of curbing it, said a report by moneycontrol.com yesterday.

It said: As a lawyer and human-rights champion who led the first-ever national study of prisons in Sri Lanka last year, Ambika Satkunanathan is vocal against the violence that is an endemic part of prison systems, and the ‘retributive’ and ‘vengeful’ nature of state justice that creates worse problems in society and creates criminals rather than rehabilitating them.

“Violence is used to maintain order, which robs the person in prison of dignity and agency from the moment they enter prison until they leave. Violence and discrimination are normalised in the system,” says Ambika, who was a commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka from 2015 to 2020.

“This penchant for violent forms of punishment is a result of societies being wedded to the punitive and carceral approach to dealing with what are essentially social problems,” she adds. “We believe that locking someone up and throwing away the key solves the issue, but it only compounds it.”

Regardless, she says, societies in the Subcontinent continue with this deeply flawed approach because it is easier than addressing the root causes of what is defined as ‘crime’.

The question of what constitutes crime has become increasingly blurred in the recent past in South Asia as more and more human-rights activists and even journalists in the region are being targeted by their own governments, and imprisoned on the basis of draconian colonial-era laws, and kept confined as ‘undertrials’ for years until the case begins. In these instances, prisons are being used not to deter crime but to deter dissent, and to threaten those who speak up against governments, even ‘democratic’ ones, she said.