“It feels like nothing makes sense anymore”, said Rajesh* as we sat across each other on a dusty staircase.
Rajesh, a formerly incarcerated convict, had managed to secure release for good behaviour after languishing in prison for nearly 15 years. His small business was all that was left of his previous life. People who knew him well — friends and family — stared at him on the street as if he did not belong there anymore.
“I had to move to my sister-in-law’s house,” he said. “I couldn’t even walk outside my own house without feeling like an outsider. It was starting to drive me crazy.”
Humanising Prisoner Narratives
Last year, I had the opportunity to interact with a group of ex-prisoners in Thrissur, my hometown in central Kerala. Most of the inmates I spoke to — some reserved, others more talkative — were struggling financially and attempting to secure assistance through government social defence schemes.
During our conversations, albeit brief, I uncovered a series of harrowing events.
Many prisoners revealed how everything in prison had a price — toothpaste, envelopes, medicines, clean sheets, even soap.
They spent much of their time negotiating with wardens who refused to bend unwritten and arbitrarily imposed rules. Engaging in work around the jail helped some prisoners cope with suicidal feelings; for others, contacting their lawyers restored hope of eventually getting out.
Fear, loss, ostracisation, stigma — these words repeatedly popped up in our interactions, especially during discussions with long-term detainees. Weeks into the interviews, Jacob,* acquitted of robbery, requested me to help him send money to a fellow inmate and friend. “The prison authorities do not let me meet him. I’ve tried several times, but they do not understand his condition,” he said.
He bitterly confessed that during the seven years he spent in jail for a crime he did not commit, his only real friends were his cellmates.
As a law student, I had always discussed prisons in the abstract until this point. I had never visualised what it felt like to have human connection and dignity snatched away; to spend each passing day in a miniature, more chaotic world hidden far from my bustling town. Engaging with prisoners on the ground taught me to recognise the emotional, paradoxical, yet painful consequences of punishment — stories of inmates often drowned out in an unjust prison system.
When I enquired about their past, some inmates expressed deep regret. Naveen,* sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, told me that he thought about his actions each day. With nobody to support him, Naveen was regularly arrested for petty crimes at a young age. “Sometimes, I wish I could convince my family to give me a second chance,” he expressed.
Another released lifer struggling to find gainful employment said, “[I]f only they saw us as human beings with different life circumstances, rather than human waste. Then they’d know that not all of us can get back our lives with one lump sum payment.”
Fiction v. Reality: A Deeply Flawed System
For decades, the historical depiction of prisons as dark, frightening places that house “evil monsters” has given rise to othering stereotypes that allow society to distance itself from prisoners and “maintain a sense of superiority” and “cleanliness” while having conversations about prisons and their inhabitants.
American social psychologist Professor Craig Haney observes how imprisonment is an unwritten code that exposes inmates to psychological stressors such as dehumanising treatment, diminishing life circumstances, deprivation of basic living standards, and the dangers of extreme confinement conditions.
Crime shows in pop culture often over dramatise and popularise negative stereotypes on prisoners and prison life, dangerously swaying public sentiment and increasing misplaced support for ‘tough on crime’ policies. Box office hits like Singam II — involving a do-gooder cop who proudly circumvents the law by killing goons and threatening them with the death penalty — overemphasise the ‘bad offender’ label.
Unlike the experiences of an influential Bollywood Don who manages to beat the prison system or Andy’s heroic jailbreak in The Shawshank Redemption, Indian prisoners face a bleak reality.
With a prison population disproportionately comprising undertrials, convicts and detenues from vulnerable communities and religious minorities, nearly 27% of India’s prisoners are illiterate, while 41% and 22% do not possess educational qualifications beyond Class 10 and Class 12, respectively.
Trapped in vicious cycles of poverty, most prisoners depend on the abysmally poor quality of legal aid — lawyers whom they barely get to meet face-to-face, let alone rely on.
When COVID-19 broke out, thousands of individuals behind bars were trapped and rendered helpless in overcrowded prison cells. Several government restrictions during multiple lockdowns crippled prisoners’ access to adequate healthcare, legal aid, recreational activities, and, worst of all, contact with their loved ones. Degrading conditions in prisons were termed “ticking time bombs” for many prisoners, especially those with life-threatening health risks.
Yet, the measures adopted to release prisoners on emergency bail arbitrarily selected inmates based predominantly on the nature and gravity of the offences accused of, rather than their age and health conditions. To make matters worse, reports emerged of released prisoners left stranded amid strict lockdowns without money, transport or a home to return to.
In stark contrast to distorted media portrayals of the prisoner versus victim dichotomy, in reality, the experiences of victims and offenders frequently overlap. As Bruce Western, professor of sociology at Columbia University, explains: “Violent offenders, more often than not, are victims long before they commit their first crime. There are lifetimes of trauma that fill the prison system, and reform efforts have failed to confront issues of violence.”
Many offenders have lived chaotic lives enduring intersectional layers of oppression — exposed to abuse and violence at an early age, belonging to low-income communities and having little access to mental healthcare services. This is not to say that offenders should be let off scot-free or their rights prioritised over victims’ needs. However, harsh punishment policies that lack compassion and encourage revenge against offenders do not further the ends of justice.
Rather, such policies only increase the possibility of prisoners reoffending while simultaneously relegating victims to the sidelines. Over the years, a failure to examine the effectiveness and real-world implications of these dehumanising penal policies only perpetuate disparities that worsen criminal justice outcomes for both victims and offenders.
Working with prisoners allowed me to cross paths with distressed individuals in my own neighbourhood, carrying burdens and identities unrecognised by institutional justice delivery mechanisms. I listened first-hand to inmates serving long sentences for violent crimes describe their childhood and adolescent lives growing up in broken families or enduring abuse.
Apart from the loneliness arising out of routine isolation, many prisoners faced prejudicial treatment from jail wardens adding to their declining mental health. These were human beings trying to make sense of the hopelessness built into carceral settings that deprived them of liberty, the right to self-determination and feelings of belonging. Somehow, the widespread ignorance of the trauma that accompanies everyday prison life has made it easier for us to disengage — to humiliate prisoners and exacerbate their feelings of worthlessness and frustration.
Prisoners’ Rights Are Human Rights
A progressive society guarantees all its people a good life by treating everyone with equal respect, kindness, and compassion regardless of identity or ability. Unfortunately, the Indian prison system today is indicative of democratic processes that do not listen to everyone’s stories with equal interest. Humanising the lived experiences of prisoners through empathic public discourse, including film and media channels, is critical to doing away with misguided notions of criminality.
For example, certain narratives in the popular Netflix series Orange Is the New Black offer a refreshing take on the complex human emotions and struggles accompanying incarceration. These scenes unpack clichés surrounding the ‘bad offender’ label and highlight the myriad ways in which female inmates’ gender and sexuality are commonly weaponised against them by the prison industrial complex. Rather than treating prisoners as a sub-human class, protecting their rights is essential to building safe, inclusive communities.
It is high time we reform existing prison policies in India. But before that, we owe it to incarcerated populations to have uncomfortable conversations about their fundamental rights, not when politically convenient, but to salvage our shared humanity.
*Names changed to protect identity.
Featured image is for representational purposes only.
This is the first part of the three-part series on ‘safeguarding prisoners’ rights in India‘ as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The second and third part can be found here and here.