“Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything,” wrote Damien Echols in Life After Death. Echols spent 18 years in prison – 10 of them in solitary confinement – after a wrongful conviction for the murder of three eight-year-olds. He was finally able to come out in 2011, after having entered the American prison system at the age of 18. “You don’t get used to being in prison in a single day,” Echols told Guardian after his release, “and you don’t get used to being out of prison in a single day. For several months I was in a state of profound shock and trauma.” Two years later, Echols, who became a Buddhist while in jail, opened his own meditation centre. Despite the trauma he suffered during those years of imprisonment, Echols was able to piece together a new life for himself once he came out.

It’s something that many who enter India’s prison system struggle to do. Data from the recently released National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) showed that of all criminals arrested in India in 2015, 8.1 per cent were repeat offenders. The corresponding figure in 2014 was 7.8 per cent and 7.2 per cent in 2013.

As a percentage, it seems small but to put things in perspective, about 2.5 lakh people arrested in 2015 had been convicted in the past. As many as 37,649 had been incarcerated twice before, and 14,143 arrests were of those who had gone to prison thrice or more. This is just the tip of the iceberg of Indian criminality. The NCRB statistics don’t account for those who have slipped under law enforcement’s radar, like Pallavi Purkayastha’s murderer who jumped parole.

Are India’s prisons working as they should, or is there need for reform?

Upneet Lalli, deputy director of the Chandigarh-based Institute of Correctional Administration, feels a lack of focus on prison reform is one of the factors responsible for the rise in repeat offenders. “There are very few correctional officers,” Lalli told Newslaundry. “We don’t have enough correctional officers, and psychologists to care for the mental state of a prisoner.”

What makes matters worse is the widespread, almost systemic belief that criminals cannot be reformed. Prison brutality is not reflected in the numbers, but treated as an open secret in police circles. “The number of custodial rapes and suicides is an indication of what life is like inside prisons,” said Vikram Singh. “Rape [custodial] is often understated, but suicides cannot be.”

As per NCRB, out of 97 cases of custodial deaths or disappearances in 2015, 33 were attributed to suicide, 11 to prior illnesses, and nine to natural causes. Not one policeman has been convicted for the deaths and disappearances.

Prisons are meant to be correctional facilities, which implies that they will ‘correct’ the behavior of those who enter it. However, the reality is that jails are festering with problems. Overcrowded, unhygienic and filled with abuse by other inmates and staff, jails tend to become places where one goes in for a smaller crime only to come out as a bigger criminal, having spent years with hardened criminals.

“In my experience of handling large prisons, you put someone inside for burglary, and he comes out as a dacoit, because of the negative and malicious company in the prison,” said Vikram Singh, a retired officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS), who now works as an educationist.

Lalli also pointed out this problem. “There is a need to classify offenders in terms of the severity of offences committed, so that those in for small offences do not get influenced by hardened criminals,” he said.

Part of the problem is that someone who has spent time in prison is not free even when he’s come out from behind bars. The stigma attached to prison becomes a challenge in finding gainful employment. “The convicts’ families lie to relatives, saying that the person has gone out of the state, when in reality he/she is spending time in jail,” said Vartika Nanda, a prison reforms activist. “The stigma is so strong that in many cases I have seen people change their names, phone numbers, and even their appearances, in search of a fresh start.”

But making a fresh start is not easy. “In many cases a habitual offender is compelled to repeat a crime because of the gains it brought him or her,” said Prakash Singh, Former Director General of Police, Uttar Pradesh. “For example: those involved in the spurious drugs trade get away with little punishment. But once they are free, they return to their old ways.”

And yet, there are success stories. Reny George was once convicted for murder and now runs a home for convicts’ children. Adam Ajmeri, who was acquitted in the Akshardham terror attack case, was able to get crowd funding to set up a dairy and begin his new life.

While prison reform will alleviate the situation to a great extent, those like Singh believe it is all about giving the convicts a chance. “Work with their families, trust them to not return to crime once their conviction is over, give them love, respect, and a second chance,” said Vikram Singh. “I know that you will be betrayed 40 per cent of the time, but even if you have managed to get a success rate of 60 per cent, you have done your job.”