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may not be the most effective method of rehabilitating prisoners, but rather that a sense of agency can act as the linkage between life within and outside the prison walls. It is this sense of continuity of agency and construction of “meaningful worlds” that Bandyopadhyay argues best facilitates rehabilitation. “It is assumed”, she wrote,

that a change in the physical conditions of prison life will automatically institutionalise reform as an objective of the prison. However, these changes do not necessarily imply changed administrative practices aimed at reforming the prisoner/criminal (ibid).

From Bandyopadhyay’s observations at the prison, in fact, physical improvements did not facilitate administrative practices for reforming the prisoner, but rather facilitated spaces wherein prisoners could exercise some degree of agency.

Provision of Privileges

Bandyopadhyay argues that the physical conditions incorporated into prison administration as a result of the reform agenda are treated as privileges by prison administrators.

The attempts to provide certain facilities, either material or non-material, to prisoners in the context of modernising trends in prison administration are very often translated as privileges to be granted prisoners at the behest of the authorities... Such arbitrariness is a useful technique for the efficient management of the prisoner population (p 284).

Power relations between prisoners and prison administrators are constituted by the exchange of services. Interestingly, Bandyopadhyay observes that prisoners are often willing to forgo rights for the provision of contraband services. “Prisoners accepted certain unfair aspects of life in prison in spite of knowing that they could protest against them. In return, they had certain expectations from the system, which were fulfilled” (Bandyopadhyay 2007: 396). According to Bandyopadhyay, this exchange of rights for subversive services restores prisoners’ sense of a gency within the confines of the prison, undermining the sense of the prison as a totalising institution.

Bandyopadhyay observes that the arbitrary provision of “privileges” is awarded in a hierarchical fashion. Various reform reports have recommended flexibility in dealing

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with individual cases of prisoners and a system of classification according to the nature of the crime.3 Bandyopadhyay finds that this flexibility and categorisation, as well rewards to be used as a positive reinforcement, are awarded to prisoners with social and financial influence, creating a hierarchy that mimics external social structures:

For those prisoners who were perceived as decent and sober and from good families, maintaining a good relationship with the

o fficers was not a difficult task. Styles of dressing, talking and the general demeanour of the prisoners determines this perception. In the staff’s view, the ‘habitual’; or ‘professional’ criminals were the most difficult group. The prison, for them, was perceived as an extension of their criminal careers (p 15).

Culture of Leniency

By privileging some prisoners, “the prisoners

create hierarchies that dissolve the idea of

a homogeneous prison population. In this

case, the dissolution is a result of the for

mal structure of rule, which called for di

viding the prisoner community into gangs

and appointing leaders or convict watch

men to control the gangs” (ibid: 72). The

recreation of external structures of hierar

chy, Bandyopadhyay suggests, presents a

continuity between life inside and outside

the prison that facilitates the prisoner’s

construction of meaningful worlds. It is the

acts of subversion, and the constriction of

hierarchies that replicate life outside of the

prison walls that allow inmates to construct

meaningful worlds through exercising

some level of agency and control over their

everyday existence. Since Bandyopadhyay

argues that “reform within the prison can

only be effectively addressed when it

evolves from the prisoners”, she suggests

that rehabilitation of the prisoner is best

facilitated not by the mandatory uniform

material provisions, but rather through

the construction of interstitial spaces of

negotiation afforded through a culture of

leniency (Bandyopadhyay 2007: 410).

Bandyopadhyay illuminates the ways

in which the prison administrators are

complicit in the inmate’s subversion of prison

rules. Although the Prisons Act category

disallows business or other dealings bet

ween the inmates and warders, “corruption

within the prison, in connivance with the

staff, is common knowledge in the public

discourse on prisons”.4 Bandyopadhyay’s

notion that this corrupt service provision, the withholding for legislated rights from some prisoners, that is desirable to the prison population obfuscates those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, for whom the process of negotiating relationships with warders means that their rights are systematically violated.

Bandyopadhyay writes that

...this friendliness and sociability between the staff and the prisoners becomes one of the grounds for discrimination among prisoners. The prisoner community ceases to be a uniformly disadvantaged and controlled group (p 69).

Warders interact with inmates in a m utually beneficial relationship, which is nevertheless at the discretion of the prison administrators. The warders’ participation in subversive activities for their own benefit further cements the culture of corruption prevalent in the Indian prison a dmini stration system. Warders who feel they can withhold “privileges” (rights) from inmates are unlikely to facilitate r eform policies wherein rights are universally granted. This endemic corruption, which Bandyopadhyay takes for granted as a reality of the prison infrastructure, renders the reform agenda a highly ambitious endeavour as the prison administrators are unlikely to sacrifice the reward they regularly extract from their wards. The culture of leniency, thus, simultaneously allows prisoner agency and undermines the greater reform agenda. Bandyopadhyay’s argument that agency allows for rehabilitation is, therefore, short-sighted, and i gnores the systemic problems that arise.

Bandyopadhyay argues against the narrow interpretations of reform suggesting that

the idea of reform signifies the ability of a person to live a life that is both emotionally and physically based on free choice, which are made responsibly...It represents a life that is as close as possible to life outside of the prison walls, albeit in a narrow material sense (p 286).

Bandyopadhyay prioritises the element of free choice and continuity over the provision of basic material rights as the central referent of the agenda of reform. The replication of external hierarchies, however, can replicate the social scenario in which the initial crime occurred, thereby undermining the rehabilitation process.

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“A deliberate muting of the prison’s coercive and abnormal character and an exaggeration of similar characteristics in a relatively free space shows that prisoners did not wish to present the prison as a special kind of coercive institution”, Bandyopadhyay points out. “Instead, they reflected on the coercive elements of their lives both within and outside the prison. Through such reflection they normalised the prison e xperience, while at the same time presenting as abnormal the pre-prison experience.” The normalisation of the prison experience and the normalisation of the coercive elements in outside life undermine the rehabilitation process. As prison hierarchies replicate the social reality of the outside, and prison experience becomes normalised, the hierarchical structures, corruption and subversion form a self-perpetuating cycle of continuity, undermining the possibility of rehabilitation.

Clinical Approach

Bandyopadhyay’s argument that the practice of prison reform follows a clinical a pproach to reform that does not account for the realities of prison life is a pertinent one. The proliferation of reform reports and the limited impact on the everyday existence of prisoners in India is a testimony to the fact that the reform agenda has not been pursued with the commitment required to make a meaningful change. Her argument, however, that the “culture of leniency” in the prison system creates a space in which prisoners can gain an agency and construct a meaningful world obscured the discrimination implicit in such a system, as well as the ways in which it cements further the culture of corruption amongst prison administrators.

Bandyopadhyay admits that the prison system in a process of reform is rife with hierarchies, but fails to investigate the e ffects of the system on those at the bottom thereof. In the sense that the hierarchical nature of prison life points to continuity rather than a break from the outside suggests that those at the bottom of social h ierarchy outside remain there on the i nside, meaning their access to programmes of reform is limited by their inability to negotiate effectively with the power structures both within and outside the prison walls. These people are denied

Reference

allowing prisoner agency, reformist and

prisoner rights are non-negotiable.

SAHRDC is South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, New Delhi.

available at

EBS News Agency

Notes

1180, Sector 22-B,

1 The Karnataka Prison Manual, for instance, states that “the concept of Correction, Reformation and