Part IV — What the design does to a person, and how it catches itself

Three to Ten Years

A documented case, told from the first judgment of India's Supreme Court in the Bihar undertrials case.

In January 1979 an Indian newspaper reported that people were being held in the jails of Bihar awaiting trial. When the Supreme Court took up the case, the State of Bihar did not appear, and the Court proceeded on those reports. The prisoners were held on charges which, the Court said, even if proved would not warrant punishment for more than a few months, perhaps a year or two; they had been in jail for periods ranging from three to ten years.^[1]

On 12 February 1979 the Court directed that they be released on their own bond, with no money demanded of them, as an exceptional interim measure, because some had been held for offences whose punishment would in all probability be less than the time they had already spent in detention. It held that a speedy trial, though named nowhere in the Constitution, is part of the right to life and liberty, since a procedure that holds a person for years untried cannot be reasonable, fair or just.^[2]

No court had convicted them. They were held because they were awaiting a trial that had not come, and their detention continued from one day to the next.

Part IV is about what the design does to a person and how it notices its own failures: the protection a disclosure gives, findings about a person's credibility, the standing a prisoner keeps, where a confined person is put, the one thing a sentence takes, and the alarms that tell an office it has broken the rules. Together the chapters show what authority must be current before anyone is held, what survives confinement, and who must answer when the authority runs out and the holding goes on.