Click to play videoNew Delhi: Sanjay Dutt's tryst with Gandhigiri continues in Yerawada jail, Pune. Now that he's in jail, Dutt has decided to enroll in the Gandhi Vichar Pariksha to learn and teach Gandhian ideology – a purpose to which he says he will dedicate six years of his life.
The Bollywood star looks to play a real-life Munnabhai, studying and teaching Gandhigiri in the prison where the Mahatma, too, had spent six years of his life.
Just three days into his jail term, Munnabhai has discovered that the jail is the best place to practice the famous Gandhigiri that he had propagated through his movie Lage Raho Munnabhai.
Sanjay wants to do the one-year course and possibly teach the same to other jail inmates as well. The voluntary programme run by an NGO was started four years ago.
Jail inmates attend lectures and are issued books on Gandhiji. Meanwhile, Dutt is soon likely to be assigned some prison work, which may include textiles, laundry, baking, paper printing, carpentry or painting.
The question that arises here is: Should convicts like Sanjay Dutt who are educated and talented be allowed to do community service and not just spend their sentences uselessly in a prison cell?
Yakub Memon, who has got the death sentence for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts, is a trained chartered accountant. Should his skills too be put to society's use?
The question that was discussed on CNN-IBN's Face The Nation with Sagarika Ghose was - Should convicts get the option of community service?
On the panel of experts to try and answer the question were DG, Bureau of Police Research and Development Kiran Bedi; and film director Rahul Dholakia, of Parzania fame.
At the beginning of the show, 81 per cent of the viewers agreed that yes convicts should get the option of community service.
Advocating the notion that someone like Sanjay Dutt -- a celebrity and a talented person – should be given the opportunity to serve the community, Dholakia said, “An actor like Sanjay Dutt is more useful to the society outside than inside the jail. We have seen from his track record that he has served his16 months and he is not a high-risk candidate. And if Sanjay Dutt does charity shows or something like that he can really benefit lot of people. Like rehabilitated children, he can do the drug abuse program because he himself has come out from that and he has been a role model to a lot of people.”
About the other educated people in the list of convicts, Dholakia said, “As long as a convict is not a high-risk convict, a person who has raped or murdered, then they should not have to go through that process. The whole idea is to rehabilitate people in society and if one has to do it, then it’s best that we take them in society and make use of them as long as they are not high risk though.”
Petty offences or heinous crimes
In the West, community service is something that is offered to people who have committed petty offences.
Talking about the crime level and related punishment to it, Kiran Bedi said, “In the Western countries for minor offences like theft people are given a sentence of community service rather than being imprisoned. One of the major reason of our prisons being very over crowded is that everything goes to jail.”
“If you can’t be bailed out and if you can’t offer bail or your bail is not reliable, you go into the prison. So even people who commit railway ticket offences go to jail. During my time, we had hundreds of them.”
However, Bedi said that community service is something that should be awarded only for petty offences not for serious, heinous crimes.
But what is the definition of a prison? Should a prison be a place where you repent or should it be a place where you are punished? If somebody is given community service doesn’t that take society’s power of punishment away.
“Punishment has to have its bite. Breaking the law for a heinous offence punishment has to have its bite. But the problem is while the law delivers the punishment prison is not for continuing punishment. Prison is for a reform prison is for restorative justice, Bedi answered.
“But we need to understand what are the ways by which the prison could restore justice and restore the person to the community. A prison is also within a community. When we have 10,000 prisoners in the Tihar jail we made a community for them, within. The educated prisoners started to teach the less educated prisoners,” she added.
By advocating community service for an offence like Sanjay Dutt’s could actually not be a deterrent to others.
Rejecting the view Dholakia said, “Sanjay Dutt is only an example. When we talk about reforms we are talking about a country as a whole and not just about Sanjay Dutt. If we work out a way by which there is a part of jail sentence and part of community service. There is film called Catch Me If You Can it was based on true story about a person who did a lot of bank frauds. Now the IRS eventually got him in working for them to detect bank frauds. If we can work slightly creatively we can make them more useful.”
Rewarding criminals or punishing criminals?
If jail becomes a place where you provide training where provide facilities that the individual may not get then aren’t you rewarding the criminal in someway?
“The objective of the imprisonment is to restore the person to back to society otherwise the prison will remain a revolving door. So you got to check the revolving door, Bedi said.
Bedi added, “I personally feel Sanjay must first serve the community within the prison. His creative talent should be used within the prison for a while and then if the court considers he come out and serve the community again. May be he can go and serve in the hospitals serve the ill and the sick. But the critical issue is who decides when who should get what.”
“The problem is how do you have a system of an independent board which decides not on the basis of who is who but whose talent is where it should be decided. “
In the age of white-collar crimes, crimes of deformation or intellectual crimes where would those criminals be based housed, in a prison or within the society.
“It all depends of board. We haven’t got any individual evaluation system of looking at individuals what could they contribute within the community inside the prison or outside community – we don’t have that system. We should put in a proper system before we even come to who goes for what kind of community service, Bedi replied.
Final verdict: Should convicts get the option of community service?
Yes 86 %
No: 14 %
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