LAHORE: The Punjab Home Department has taken a step to improve prisoner welfare and prison reforms by putting the complete record of prisoners’ sentence reductions and remaining terms online across the province.
As per the private media report, Punjab Home Secretary Noor ul Amin Mengal launched this new system and said that families of prisoners will now receive information about their release dates through SMS.
Under the new system, the Home Department will send a reply message with details of the last two sentence reductions and the possible release date. All this information will be available in one message, with a standard fee of five rupees.
According to prison rules, prisoners can get their sentences reduced or pardoned in several ways. This includes government announcements of general pardons, as well as reductions for completing education, learning technical skills, or showing good behavior in jail. Every type of pardon must be added to the prisoner’s record immediately.
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The Home Secretary said that this system will make it easy for prisoners and their families to access records of sentence reductions without any trouble.
He added that all data has been put online in a clear way to ensure no prisoner stays in jail longer than their set sentence. New rules have also been issued to update the records of sentence reductions on time.
The Home Secretary directed the Directorate of Monitoring to make surprise visits to jails and take strict action if rules are broken at any level. The public can send a message to 8070 with specific details to get information about prisoners.
This step by the Punjab government is aimed at improving transparency and protecting human rights. It will help prisoners’ families and bring more clarity to the work of jail authorities.
