HRCP Report: Nearly 3 in 4 Pakistani Prisoners Are Still Awaiting Trial

Nearly three out of every four people in a Pakistani prison have not been convicted of a crime. That is the headline finding of "Beyond the Prison Wall: Reducing Overcrowding in Pakistan's Prisons," a policy paper released this month by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which puts the under-trial share of the national prison population at 73.41% in 2024 — up from 66% in 2017.

A system built for 64,000, holding nearly double that

The paper's capacity numbers are what make the under-trial figure land as a crisis rather than a statistic. HRCP found that prisons across the country operated at an average of 152.2% of their official capacity in July-August 2024, with individual facilities running far higher than the national average. Separate reporting this year put the national sanctioned capacity at roughly 64,000 against an actual population approaching 110,000 — meaning the system is holding close to 1.7 times what it was built for.

Punjab, the report's most acute case, offers the clearest illustration. Official figures cited in the paper show 74,773 prisoners held across the province's 45 prisons in September 2026, against a designated capacity of 39,204 — an occupancy rate of 190.73%. Of those, 54,932 were under-trial prisoners, meaning fewer than a fifth of Punjab's prison population has actually been convicted of anything. Sindh's 23 jails tell a similar story at smaller scale: a combined capacity of roughly 14,000 is holding around 25,000 inmates, of whom only about 4,000 have been convicted.

The bottleneck is the courts, not the cells

HRCP's central argument is that this is not a construction problem. Pakistan's courts already carry a backlog running into the millions of pending cases, and the report traces prison overcrowding directly to that same bottleneck: slow investigations, prolonged prosecutions and bail mechanisms that in practice keep people locked up by default rather than at liberty pending trial. Build more prisons without fixing any of that, the paper argues, and the new capacity simply fills with more people waiting on the same slow courts — the per-facility ratio improves on paper for a while, then the under-trial math reasserts itself.

That argument lines up with the trend data. The under-trial share has risen steadily since 2017 even as Pakistan's prison population has grown, which HRCP reads as evidence that the system has been adding bodies faster than it has been resolving cases — not a sign that any one government added an unusual number of prisoners in an unusual year, but a structural drift that several administrations have now presided over without reversing.

What reform would actually require

The paper's prescriptions follow from its diagnosis: faster case disposal, more consistent use of bail for non-violent and minor offences, and better tracking of how long individual detainees have actually been waiting, rather than treating "under-trial" as a single undifferentiated category that includes people a week into a case alongside people years into one. None of that is cheap or quick relative to pouring concrete for new barracks, which is precisely HRCP's point: a crowded prison is often the most visible symptom of a justice system that is failing to move cases, not an argument for a bigger prison system.

Why the number keeps climbing regardless of who's in government

Overcrowding of this kind rarely makes for a single-villain story, which may be part of why it persists. No single minister, court or police department owns the pipeline from arrest to verdict, so a detainee's months or years inside have no single office to blame and no single office positioned to fix it unilaterally. HRCP's own historical comparison — 66% under-trial in 2017, 73.41% in 2024 — spans multiple governments and multiple reform announcements, which is its own quiet argument that until bail practice and court throughput change together, the share of Pakistan's prison population that has never been convicted of anything will likely keep climbing before it falls.

Build Better Pakistan's Justice Desk covers courts, policing and the state of the rule of law, and will track whether HRCP's recommendations get any legislative traction.