The Choudwar Circle Jail has come up with a dedicated 80-bed psychiatric hospital to treat mentally-ill inmates. The hospital constructed at the cost of over Rs 1 crore was inaugurated by Director General of Prisons Santosh Kumar Upadhyay on December 26. Besides having accommodation facilities for 80 mentally ill inmates, the hospital has also six high security cells for management of violent and aggressive patients.“Earlier, prisoners suffering from mental illness were being taken to the SCB Medical College Hospital for treatment.
Now, exclusively, the mentally ill prisoners have been kept in the block from which the Psychiatric Hospital is functioning for better monitoring of their mental illness by an expert,” said Choudwar Jail Superintendent Subhakanta Mishra.
At present, the Circle Jail has total 924 inmates and of them as many as 74 inmates are suffering from mental illness. Due to excess number of mentally ill inmates, there were problems in providing necessary treatment to them. Now the problem has been solved with setting up the hospital and they all are now being treated inside the jail premises.
Only critical cases would be referred to the SCB Mental Health Institute, Mishra said. Upadhyay, who inspected different wings and activities of the Choudwar Jail however stressed on augmentation of the jail food processing unit.
The DG Prisons said, “Considering the mushrooming of different food adulterated unit, we have planned to enhance the capacity of production of different food materials by the inmates and their marketing by setting up stalls at different places."