A Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Panjab Police on 10 Jul told the Punjab and Haryana High Court that out of the two TV interviews of jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi in March 2023, one was conducted in Bathinda central jail. The interview was conducted via Signal, and the SIT has requested more time to complete the investigation. Bishnoi earlier admitted planning singer Sidhu Moosewala’s death. He repeated this in the interviews and said he was a Hindu nationalist. The interviews have since been scrubbed off the Internet. The police report contradicts Panjab Director General of Police Gaurav Yadav’s statement in March 2023 that Bishnoi was not interviewed in Bathinda jail. While the police’s reputation is at stake, the Panjab police is now planning to build a radial jail in Ludhiana to lodge terrorists, high-risk prisoners, gangsters, and serious criminals. According to the prisons department website Panjab currently has 25 jails of which 10 are central Jails, one district jail, one open jail, one maximum security jail, and one women’s jail. The list notes the high-security prison is empty, raising the question of why build a radial jail, a 19th-century European design. The purpose of a radial jail is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched. This design is a violation of the inmates’ basic rights and is linked to the rise of totalitarianism.
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