Children who are brought up in the prison system lack access to vaccines and suffer from neglected welfare, alleged the Committee for Protecting the Rights of Prisoners (CPRP).
“When you look at these children, you can see that they lack basic vaccination facilities and some of them don’t get vaccines,” alleged the CPRP President, attorney Senaka Perera. “They also don’t get medical checkups and their health often suffers as a result.” Perera also said that several prisons suffer from overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, leading to more disease. Prisoners are also not given proper meals or the quality of meals is inadequate, he claimed while speaking to The Daily Morning. “How can you give anyone, especially a child, food unfit for consumption?,” Perera queried. “This will lead to them having several health problems.”
In order to reduce the cost on the Government and to solve the problem of prisons’ overcrowding, the former Government mooted a house arrest system, among other measures.
The Daily Morning’s attempts to contact the Justice Ministry, the Prisons Department’s Media Spokesperson and Prisons Commissioner, Gamini Dissanayake, and the Health Ministry Secretary Dr. Palitha Mahipala in this regard, proved futile.
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