prisoner rehabilitation programme

jail inmates

Flipkart

Nashik

Maharashtra

zebra

Chintan Upadhyay

Hema Upadhyay

You could help with the state government’sfrom the comfort of your home, at the click of a button. Products made by convicted, such as garments, carpets, furniture, paintings and idols and even confectionery, will be made available on leading online retailers Amazon andSkill acquisition is a major component of prison rehabilitation programmes. “We have inmates who are very skilled and some of them are even artists. We want to commercially exploit their talent aggressively and use portals like Amazon and Flipkart as platforms,” Deepak Pandey, inspector general of police (prisons).A senior prison official said at present, products made by convicts are sold in showrooms housed within jail premises in Thane, Nagpur,and Pune. “The response to the sales as of now is not great. Once we go online, the scope of sales and the clientele reach will be wider,” said the official. “Everybody should be allowed to grow their potential when they are in jail. We want prison products to become a brand on online portals.”The official said a dedicatedState Prison Corporation will be established to implement this plan. “Its objective will be separate from the rest of the prison department. Its focus will be solely on marketing industrial products made by inmates through all possible platforms. We are working on the modalities of how much money prisoners can make after sale and the intellectual rights to their works. If all goes as planned, the products should hit online portals in a few months.”If the plan is successful, the prisons department could extend the programme to undertrials. Exhibitions of artworks of prison inmates have garnered wide interest in recent times. ‘Wounded’, a painting of by artist, who is facing trial for the double murder of his wifeand her lawyer Haresh Bhambhani in 2015, was put up at an art exhibition by the Thane prison in August last year. One of his works was also picked up by a film producer for Rs 4.5 lakh.