JUDGMENT

KRISHNA IYER, J.:— A philanderer of 22, appellant Phul Singh, overpowered by sex stress in excess, hoisted himself into his cousins house next door, and in broad day-light, over-powered the temptingly lonely prosecutrix of twenty-four, Pushpa, raped her in hurried heat and made an urgent exist having fulfilled his erotic sorti. The screaming victim complained to her mother working in the field; thereafter a first information, prosecution and conviction ensued, a sentence of 4 years R.I. was imposed by the Sessions Court, and the High Court affirmed it in appeal. The broad facts bearing on the instant act of carnal assault look too probable for pettifogging legalistics about poor corroboration, consent and false implication to devalue their credibility. The culpability is beyond doubt and we uphold the conviction.

2. Ordinarily, rape is violation, with violence, of the private person of a woman - an outrage by all canons. In our conditions of escalating sex brutality a 4 - years term for rape is not excessive. But here the offender is in his early twenties and signs of repentance are seen. The victim and her parents have forgiven the molester who is a first cousin, says counsel. An affidavit from the father-in-law of the woman has been filed and, if needed counsel is ready to produce the victims statement that she has forgiven the criminal. While it is possible that the accused may procure such condonation from an unwilling victim, the fact remains that the two families being close cousins are ready to take a lenient view of the situation. Of course, this does not bind the Court in any manner. Therefore, taking an overall view of the familiar and the criminal factors invoked, we reduce the imprisonment from 4 years to 2 years R.I.

3. We must, however, direct our attention in a different penological direction. For, sentencing efficacy in cases of lust-loaded criminality cannot be simplistically assumed by award of long incarceration, for, often that remedy aggravates the malady. Punitive therapeutics must be more enlightened than the blind strategy of prison severity where all that happens is sex starvation, brutalisation, criminal companiship, versatile vices through bio-environmental pollution, dehumanised cell drill under zoological conditions and emergence, at the time of release, of an embittered enemy of society and its values with an indelible stigma as convict stamped on him - a potentially good person successfully processed into a hardened delinquent, thanks to the penal illiteracy of the Prison System. The Court must restore the man.

4. A hyper-sexed homo sapien cannot be habilitated by humiliating or harsh treatment, but that is precisely the perversion of unreformed Jail Justice which some criminologists have described as the crime of punishment. This Court has held, in Sunil Batras case, (AIR 1978 SC 1675), and later that, constitutionally viewed, punitive deprivation of personal freedom must be goal-oriented and humanely restorative, apart from being deterrent. The insulated years behind the insensitive bars must possess a hospital setting if correction is a social purpose, as Gandhiji often insisted. In-prison treatment must, therefore, be geared to psychic healing, release of stresses, restoration of self-respect and cultural normalisation, apart from training to adapt oneself to the life outside. The functional failure of our pachydermic prison projects, exacerbated by its tension and trauma on the one hand and the reverse ethos inside on the other, deserves judicial cognisance. The current efforts of Governments, Central and State, to reform jail regimen, we hope, will give a better deal to the caged community. For these reasons, in this case, we deem it desirable to superadd to the sentence of imprisonment a few directives to ensure that the carceral period reforms the convict.

5. The appellant is not a habitual and has no vicious antecedents except this fugitive, randy molestation which is bad enough in