The Waiting Room: India’s Broken Justice System And The Victims It Devours | Mumbai Train Blast

Sheikh and Khan’s stories are not exceptional. India’s criminal justice system currently has more than 434,302 undertrial prisoners—women and men who have yet to be convicted of any crime but await their trials inside prison. As of 2022, this figure represented 75.8 per cent of the total prison population of 573,220, according to the Prison Statistics India 2022 report. Uttar Pradesh had the highest number of undertrials—94,131 out of 1,21,609 prisoners—followed by Bihar, which had 57,000 undertrial prisoners out of a prison population of 64,000.