The Pulse | Society | South Asia

Sri Lanka Prison Riot Exposes Intertwined Crises of Drugs, Crime and Overcrowding

A recent prison riot at Negombo underscores the need for the government to dismantle drug trafficking networks, contain criminal activity and carry out prison reforms.

A screenshot of emotional scenes outside Negombo Prison in Sri Lanka as relatives of inmates seek information about their jailed kin, following a deadly prison riot on July 5-6, 2026.

On July 5-6, Sri Lanka witnessed a prison riot at Negombo, north of the capital, Colombo. The riot left 20 prisoners and eight prison officials dead. Over 100 were injured, and security equipment, including CCTV and body scanners, worth tens of millions of Sri Lankan rupees, were destroyed by prisoners. Thousands of prisoners have been transferred to other correctional institutions.

The violence began on July 5 when a group of inmates associated with the leader of an organized criminal gang assaulted and killed two people suspected of providing information about drug dealing inside the jail to prison officers. Things seemed to have settled down by Sunday night, but violence erupted again on Monday. For the first time in Sri Lankan history, jailors were assaulted and killed.

Sri Lankan prisons are overcrowded, and organized criminal gangs operated from inside these institutions without much resistance until recently. Changes in drug-related legislation in 2022 have increased congestion. Austerity measures over the years have weakened prison management. There are over 40,000 inmates in Sri Lanka’s 26 prisons; they were intended to house just 10,000. On paper, Sri Lanka does not mix remand prisoners awaiting trial and convicted prisoners after trial. But the overcrowded prison population makes it difficult to enforce this standard when inmates are not in their cells. There were around 2,600 inmates at Negombo, which was designed to house 650. Apparently, around 700 prisoners were involved in the unrest. The only surprise is why such riots are not more frequent in these overcrowded and under-supervised institutions.

In addition, successive governments have also orchestrated unrest in prisons to divert public attention and to silence people who know too much.

Ever since the J.R. Jayawardene administration in the late 1970s, mainstream political parties have worked closely with organized criminal gangs. These acted as muscle to terrorize political opposition, organize votes in areas where the poor lived and for overall general campaigning, given that no mainstream political party, apart from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, have any dedicated cadres. These groups also operate inside prisons and frequently work with prison officers to run their criminal operations inside.

Political parties in power have sometimes worked with these groups to incite violence in prisons. In 1983, the United National Party (UNP) allowed racist thugs to attack and kill 53 Tamil inmates in Welikada in a bid to divert public attention from its disastrous policies, to postpone elections that would have cost its supermajority and to proscribe several leftist parties, including the JVP that led the resistance against the UNP’s rule of violence and impunity.

In 2012, a number of prisoners were targeted and killed at the same prison, allegedly by powerful politicians who had previously used these criminals to do their bidding.

Given the above factors, preventing similar unrest in the future requires a multi-pronged approach.

The National People’s Power (NPP) government will........

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