In Karachi’s old quarters, a fortress-like compound sprawls across 26 acres. Built by the British in 1899 to discipline a colonial port, Karachi Central Jail was meant for fewer than 2,500 inmates. Today, more than 8,500 live within its walls. Inmates sleep in shifts, diseases spread unchecked and many prisoners wait years without trial. The jail is not only an overcrowded facility, it is a mirror held up to Pakistan’s institutions, showing how easily rights guaranteed on paper can dissolve in practice.

The Constitution of Pakistan is clear. Article 9 guarantees security of person, Article 10 protects against arbitrary detention and Article 14 declares dignity inviolable. Yet Karachi Central Jail demonstrates how far these guarantees fall short in practice. According to the Prison Data Report 2025 of the National Commission for Human Rights, the facility is running at 355 per cent of its designed capacity. Nationally, 128 prisons hold more than 102,000 inmates against space for about 65,000. This is not a logistical challenge alone, it is a constitutional failure.

The human cost is severe. In March 2023, Human Rights Watch described Pakistani jails where fifteen men slept in cells built for three, where food and water were contaminated and where medical care was almost absent. In Karachi Central, doctors confront queues of the sick with little medicine to offer. During Covid-19, infections swept through the wards faster than authorities could respond. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned that unless Pakistan reduced overcrowding, prisons would become incubators of disease spilling into the wider community. The warning has been borne out.

Behind the statistics lies injustice. Justice Project Pakistan’s 2024 review found that more than seven in ten prisoners nationwide are under trial. In Karachi Central this means thousands are confined without conviction. They are there not because........

© The Friday Times