MADURAI: As in 2013, Tamil Nadu has again ranked first in the number of persons under preventive detention in the country according to the Prison Statistics India (PSI) report released last week by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2014.
The report showed that with 1892 persons under detention in various prisons in Tamil Nadu till December 31 2014, the state contributed 58.45 per cent of the 3237 persons detained across the country while Gujarat retained its distant second position with 594 detainees.
Police sources said most of these detainees were booked under The Tamil Nadu Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug Offenders, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders and Slum-Grabbers Act (also known as the “Goondas Act”) while a handful could have been detained under the National Security Act.
Since 2012, the number incarcerated in Tamil Nadu trebled as the PSI report showed. In 2012, there were 532 detainees which went up to 1781 in 2013 and 1892 in 2014.
The Tamil Nadu government in August 2014 widened the scope of the Goondas Act by bringing sexual offenses and cyber crimes under its ambit and also giving the police the powers to detain first time offenders.
Though police claimed that notorious criminals and habitual offenders were detained under the Goondas Act to prevent crimes, particularly violent crimes, the NCRB’s Crime in India report for the last two years did not show a drastic decline in crimes in the state.
The data showed that while the number of detainees had more than trebled since 2012, the number of violent crimes had reduced only 6.77 per cent. Since the POCSO Act in 2013, a large number of rape cases earlier classified under violent crimes were now being reported separately.
The report also showed that only 134 (only 4 per cent) persons served the entire detention period, which for Goondas Act is one year, while 2781 persons were freed prematurely in 2014 as police could not provide convincing reasons for detaining them.