The Closed and the Open Prison: Contested Imaginaries and the Limits of Openness

Abstract

This article explores the conceptual landscape of open prisons in India. Open prisons are institutions intended to facilitate prisoner rehabilitation by permitting them to live in small dwellings with their families and earn livelihoods outside their boundary walls. The article delves on the tensions between how “openness” is conceived in prison reform documents and the multiple ways in which it is imagined and materialized through everyday practices. It focusses on a specific open prison in north India which is considered exceptional even as far as open prisons are concerned both for its scale and forms of community. It draws attention to its histories and the modes of governance that incrementally shape its socio spatial landscape. This is followed by an interrogation of the elevated status this specific prison enjoys in penal discourse as an idealised community of reformed prisoners while underscoring the open prison’s overall potential as a shifting institutional form. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted with activists, open prison advocates, formerly incarcerated persons and open prison residents, this article makes contributions to the study of governance, political and legal institutions and the carceral state.