Healed Walls, Unhealed Wounds: Why Prison Reforms Fail Women Offenders in India?

Abstract

Incarcerated women have always been an intriguing category. Socially ostracised, economically impoverished and culturally stigmatised women in prisons of India are a small but marginalised category. While the country has witnessed a series of significant efforts at prison reforms, these are not informed by a feminist reading of the condition of women. As such, reforms in women’s prison follow templates shaped on Western models developed for men. Based on a study of incarcerated women in Telangana, a state in India that has undertaken significant prison reforms, the study provides a critique of the existing approach. It argues that the fundamentally different contexts and consequences of incarceration for men and women in India require a lens of cultural embeddedness, equity and intersectionality. Only then can one envision reforms that adequately encompass and respond to the reality of women’s lives, inside prisons and outside of it.