Prisons and Correctional Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The Indian Jails Committee of 1919-1920 was the first to recommend the principle of reformation and rehabilitation of offenders, moving away from the purely deterrent view of prisons. The All India Jails Reform Committee of 1980-83 (the Mulla Committee) and the Krishna Iyer Committee of 1986 on women prisoners came much later, so they were not the first. The answer is B.

Answer: C

The main law dealing with prisons in India is the Prisons Act, 1894, which governs the management of prisons and the discipline of prisoners. The Transfer of Prisoners Act, 1950 deals only with moving prisoners from one state to another, and the Prisoners Act of 1900 deals with giving evidence of prisoners, so neither is the main prison law. The answer is C. The Act governs matters such as the classification of prisoners, the duties of jail staff and offences by prisoners, and state governments have framed prison rules under it.

Answer: C

Probation service for offenders began in America: John Augustus, a Boston shoemaker, began to stand bail for offenders and supervise them in 1841, and Massachusetts passed the first probation law in 1878. England later passed the Probation of Offenders Act of 1907, India its own legislation after that and France is not credited with the start. The answer is America. Augustus's work in 1841 gave probation its name and its first practice, a century before many countries had a probation service.

Answer: A

In jail administration a prisoner is first admitted (II), then kept in quarantine (I), then classified (III) and finally released (IV). So the order is II, I, III, IV, option A. Options B and C put quarantine before admission, which is impossible since a person must be admitted first, and option D reverses the whole process, putting release before admission. The sequence follows the order of events as a prisoner enters and leaves the prison system, beginning with the admission register and ending with release or transfer.

Answer: C

An administrative action to remove a person from parole status in response to a violation of the conditions is called parole revocation. Probation revocation is the equivalent for a person on probation, a split sentence combines incarceration and probation, and 'parole restitution' is not a recognised term. So the answer is Parole revocation. When parole is revoked the person goes back to prison to serve the rest of the sentence, whereas probation is a sentence served in the community in place of prison.

Answer: C

A State confinement facility with custodial authority over adults sentenced to confinement is a prison. An observation home and a special home are for juveniles, and a Juvenile Justice Board is a body, not a facility. So the answer is Prison, option C. Under the Prisons Act and the state jail manuals, prisons are classified as central, district and sub-jails, with central prisons usually holding long-term convicts, while observation homes and special homes are run under the Juvenile Justice Act for children.

Answer: D

The values and behavioural patterns characteristic of prison inmates are called the prison sub-culture, the set of norms inmates share. Prisonization, a term of Donald Clemmer, is the process by which an inmate adopts these norms, which is why it is a tempting option, while remission is a reduction of sentence and prison population is a count. The answer follows the key, D.

Answer: C

The panopticon refers to a particular style of prison design, proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. In it a central watchtower overlooks a circle of cells so that one guard can see every inmate, while the inmates cannot tell when they are observed. It is not eye surgery, nor a mirage, which is an optical effect, nor a kind of official statistics. The word has since been used for any system of constant surveillance. Bentham called his plan the panopticon and argued that the sense of being watched would make prisoners behave, a point which Michel Foucault later used to discuss modern discipline.

Answer: D

The first open-air camp in India was set up in Uttar Pradesh.

The open camp was started at Lucknow in the 1940s as a way of letting prisoners live and work with little restriction. Assam, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh later had open prisons of their own, but they were not the first. In an open camp the prisoners are allowed to work without close guard and many live with their families nearby, with the aim of training them for life outside, which is a reform from the closed prison. Uttar Pradesh began this with the camp at Lucknow.

Answer: B

The committee that examined the after care programmes in prison was the Gore Committee.

The key names it, and it is the one dealing with prison training and after care in the committee list of prison reform. The Krishna Iyer, Verma and Saxena Committees are not given as the body on this subject. The prison reform reports of the 1970s and 1980s, such as those of Gore and Mulla, examined training, after care and the conditions of jails, and the key takes the Gore Committee as the one on after care among the committees named.