The government is considering introducing house arrest and other technology-based alternatives to imprisonment as part of broader legal reforms aimed at easing severe overcrowding in Sri Lanka’s prisons, Justice and National Integration Minister Harshana Nanayakkara has said.
Speaking at the opening of the new Pugoda Court Complex on Friday (24), the Minister said the government was working on legal amendments to allow alternatives to imprisonment in suitable cases, including technology-based measures such as house arrest.
He noted that the country’s prisons, built to accommodate 10,375 inmates, are currently holding around four times that number.
Nanayakkara identified delays in obtaining Government Analyst reports as one of the main causes of overcrowding, saying they prolonged the remand period of suspects. If such reports were issued more promptly, he said, the remand prison population could be cut by nearly half. To address this, the government has increased the Government Analyst’s Department’s capacity to issue between 1,500 and 2,000 reports a month, while providing additional staff and resources.
The Minister also highlighted the growing backlog of court cases as one of the biggest challenges facing the justice system, stressing the need to bring pending cases down to a manageable level for judges. He pointed out that while developed countries have between 40 and 60 judges per million people, Sri Lanka has only around 10 per million.
