Number of AIDS and hepatitis positive cases in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa prisons has increased by 80 percent over past three and half years.
Prison department figures show that about 196 prisoners have contracted contagious diseases. The figures showed that 138 of them were suffering from hepatitis, 25 AIDs and four others from tuberculosis with highest concentration of them 47 prisoners incarcerated in Peshawar prison.
In contrast to this, there were a total of 108 prisoners with communicable diseases languishing in KP prisons in 2019 including 12 AIDS patients, 71 hepatitis B and 25 with hepatitis-C.
The figures show that the KP jails had space to accommodate 13,076 prisoners; however, they were housing 14,321 inmates currently. Besides, 2897 of them were convicts while 11,424 others were under trial.
Peshawar Central Jail officials told reporters that its hospital has space for treatment of 124 patients while there were eight doctors including two female doctors serving at the hospital.
They said that they were also providing medicines to the sick prisoners and specialist doctors also visit jail on need basis.
Besides, they said that the jail also employed a psychiatrist to address prisoner’s psychological issues.
It is worth mentioning here that the Peshawar central jail has space to incarcerate 800 prisoners; however, it has always housed more prisoners than capacity due to its being the province’s largest prison.
Due to this, the issue of over-crowdedness could not resolve despite construction of new barracks at the prison.
A report stated that the Peshawar prison currently housing 4,000 inmates instead of 3,000 capacity including 218 death row inmates, 275 lifers, 53 juveniles and 83 women.
Similarly, 300 others were serving terms in the terrorism related charges.
