Children grow up in jails as moms serve jail term

HYDERABAD: At least 35 children are spending their childhood behind grim walls of jails in AP while their mothers are serving jail terms in criminal cases. While some of them are infants, others are minors requiring the care and love of their mothers.
None of the jails in AP possess any special facilities for these kids who are confined to prisons for no fault of theirs.
What is shocking is that the state is not providing them minimum comforts like clothes. Added to this is the complete lack of in-house education and recreation facilities in most of the prisons. Adequate and appropriate food is also not being given to them and there are hardly any arrangements for preparing food for the innocent kids.
Since no records are maintained on the vaccination administered to them, it can also be assumed that these children are not being properly protected against diseases because majority of the prisons lack in-house medical facilities.
These were some of the shocking findings in a report furnished to the Hyderabad High Court by P V Rambabu, member secretary of the AP State Legal Services Authority. The report was submitted as per the direction given by a bench of Justice C V Nagarjuna Reddy and Justice M S K Jaiswal which was hearing a public interest litigation case referred to it by the Supreme Court.
The state legal services authority collected details of women prisoners, their children, the mentally challenged prisoners etc from 86 jails in the state through district judges who are functioning as district legal services authorities. Of them, ironically, three prisons are known as special women prisons. Four are central prisons, one is an open jail. The remaining are four special sub jails and 66 sub jails where the conditions are far more worse. There are four pregnant prisoners in Chittoor and Guntur jails.
In majority of the cases, no efforts are made to keep the children away from the convicts as most jails do not possess any separate accommodation for them, the report says. But the report finds one silver lining. The jail authorities are providing milk to the infants as per government diet scale in case of non availability of breast milk.