Conditional Liberty: Parole In The Indian Criminal Justice System
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Priyanka Pandey, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia National Law University
Introduction
India’s criminal justice system, similar to many other legal systems around the world, has its challenges in deciding the right mix of punishment and offender rehabilitation (Ghosh, 2008). Inside that circle, parole and probation stand out as two important tools that are used mainly to help prisoners who have been convicted of crimes to become law, abiding members of society again. Besides, these tools also help in relieving the issue of overcrowded prisons as well as the potential for offenders to relapse into crime (Joseph & ML, 2025).
Let’s take a closer look at parole in the Indian criminal justice system from various angles: its legal basis, how it works in practice, and the trends shown by the statistics also comparing it with international research (Lovtsov, 2022). Primarily, it will investigate how parole, which is the releasing of a prisoner who has only served part of his sentence under certain conditions, can be used as a way for the prisoner to return to live in society (Haque & Khan, 2025). Parole will be compared with probation, which is a judicial procedure where most times a first, time defendant bypasses going to jail (Haque & Khan, 2025).
Knowing the difference is very important because in general parole is for an individual who has already been in jail for some time whereas, probation is usually a first step which may be substituted for confinement, not forgetting that the main objectives of both strategies include the reduction of re, offense and the creation of opportunities for the offenders to live successfully in the community (Haque & Khan, 2025; Jodha, 2023).
The main idea of a reformative penal system is that the guilty should be reformed eventually by their punishment and that therefore they can be accepted back into society as normal members again (Santhosh & Mathew, 2021). Hence, the need for correctional methods that do not focus alone on locking up but on the overall change of the person through rehabilitation (Haque & Khan, 2025). Therefore, the article investigates the capability of the parole system to help attain these resocialization, oriented objectives in India while balancing the benefits with the difficulty of the problem of prisons being filled far beyond the recommended number of inmates (Nomani & Hussain, 2022). Besides, the article sheds light on the system in which parole decisions are made, including the identity and decision, making power of parole boards that are essential for the system to be trustworthy and efficient (Guiney, 2022).
