Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has directed the law ministry to initiate sweeping jail reforms, including changes in laws so that all under-trial prisoners, except those involved in some categories of heinous crimes, should not be sent to jail and those incarcerated be released, said a news report. “Who else but I can understand the long ordeal and miseries of the under-trial prisoners as I spent five years in jail in the name of giving jobs to jobless people of Pakistan so that they should not become criminals,” the prime minister said according to the report appearing in the leading English language daily The News. Gilani's decision, if executed, may immediately benefit around 80,000 under-trial prisoners. They may be brought back to jails if at some later stage they are convicted and sentenced by courts. Gilani said he had been watching the sorry ordeal of prisoners during his own detention. In all these years, he had seen how people, arrested on charges of very minor crimes, were being kept in inhuman conditions and how their family members were being dragged unnecessarily to courts, police stations and jails. Gilani regretted that these prisoners usually spent more than 10 years in jails waiting for judgments. “This is totally inhuman and I want to change this culture of first keeping the accused in jail for years and then deciding their cases,” he said. The prime minister said he always had a strong conviction during his jail days that if Allah gave him the chance to serve the masses, he would make a law that no under-trial prisoner would be detained unless the courts punished him after due process of law. Gilani said he was shocked to see how poor children were being detained in jails on minor crimes, spending years in jails without even being given a chance to attend a single hearing of their case in courts __
