One of the main objectives of incarceration, right from the inception of this concept in a sovereign state, was to curtail the liberty of movement and the freedom of initiative of a person, if he was found to have violated the established law of the land. Prisons took shape as institutions of state retribution as a natural outcome of the materialization of this objective.

Resultant segregation of ‘offenders’ from the society, and the obligation of prison giards to restraint their movement against escape from lawful custody, constrained the architects of prison buildings to burden them with high walls, narrow galleries, labyrinths, shutters, locks, chains, fetters, cells and places of solitary confinement. This physical stnicture of prisons and the archaic rules of management of these ‘punitive’ institutions endowed them with a cover of obscurity in which fundamental human rights could be unofficially violated and officially denied.

Prisons grew to be places of low visibility where inhuman and even cruel conditions could prevail. The possibility of inflicting injury and injustice on inmates always lurked in these closed institutions. State supervision over day-to-day happenings within such institutions became a mere formality and the surveillance of