India has had no prison reforms for ages. It is said that a civilisation can be judged by looking at its jails. If that is so, it would be rather difficult for us to find anything to be proud of. If we were to look at the humanistic approach Scandinavia takes as a method of transformation and reformation for its inmates, we would be ashamed of how we treat ours.
Our jails are strikingly overcrowded. We have 67% occupants under trial, meaning they could be proven innocent, and one-third being convicts. Generally, the idea of reformation is alien in practice and what prevails is retribution and torture.
In this article, I will not only discuss necessary amendments in our prison system but go a step ahead and say that prisons should be abolished. My intention through this article is to critique the present system, raise certain fundamental questions and create a space for my readers to introspect.
If I were to define prisons, I’d simply call them a system of oppression. History has shown us that increasing rates of incarceration stand irrelevant to reducing crime rates. For example, if we want to reduce (or end) sexual and gendered violence, putting a few perpetrators in prison does little to stop the act. It does nothing to change a culture that has given birth to this crime.
Prisons did not exist for ages, so when I speak of doing away with prison, I am not saying something unthinkable and that which can’t be undone.
Yes, punishment doesn’t work, and the moment you start believing that is the only way, you re-affirm the systems of hierarchy and oppression as legitimate. If you have to battle against that, you have to do away with the concept of punishment.
What’s The Alternative?
The alternative, you ask? I want accountability. I want people to take responsibility. I want education that makes people take responsibility for their acts that harm others and subsequently themselves.
With punishment at the core of everything and sort of like an easy consequence to ask for, we do not even get to learn to ask for all the other very important things. I’ll give you an example. For people at the helms of power, stepping down from their jobs is a consequence; taking that power, which is their privilege, away from them. But punishment would be to make sure the person can never make a living.
Another example is if a person has committed a crime in a certain place and is made to move out, that’s the consequence. If it is made sure that they never get a house anywhere else, then that’s punishment.
There is a difference between inflicting cruelty and torture and making someone lose their privilege as a result of what they have committed.
As a community, we are conditioned to hold social control very closely and surrender to authority, criminalisation, police and prisons. Think about this, when the police commit gross human rights violations, we justify it through their uniforms. But civilians with the same actions are caged, have their rights taken away and are inflicted with unthinkable torture and suppression.
Where are we going circling around this power dynamics? Where are we going by thinking we are battling against violations and crimes in one instance and yet legitimising the same in the other? It is our failure to have not been able to build a culture of care, compassion and sincere long-term vision aiming at nurturing human growth and growth of civilisation in turn.
When we think there is no alternative to jails, what it really means is that there is no alternative to state-sanctioned violence.
What do we do without having a system of imprisonment? We will have to do everything to reflect, introspect, educate and question in order to be able to reform ourselves with time to avoid the trappings of bondage and oppression and confinement and work for a larger vision of truly being free.
Prison is simply a bad and ineffective way to address violence and crime. With their lack of understanding and empathy, politicians try to tell us how more stringent punishment for stringent crime is the only policy that works.
The majority of the parliamentarians have always supported extraordinary laws (erstwhile TADA and POTA and now the likes of UAPA and NSA) based on hyper-criminalisation, stripping off of basic human rights, and are proactive in the criminalisation of civil affairs.
If politicians acknowledged that most criminalised harms are rooted in social and economic inequities, they would have to address those inequities, which most are reluctant to do because let’s face it, that’s the tougher path. It is more complex and requires a long-term commitment and value system to resolve, and it’s best ignored at one’s convenience.
The logic of using policing, punishment and prison has not proven to address the systemic causes of violence. It is high time we looked at how this system came to be, who are the ones actually gaining from this, analyse how it functions and then ask why it should be that way. It is also high time we see how justice can be practised without relying on punishment and archaic and barbaric systems that serve nothing.
As writer and educator Erica Meiners says, “Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.” In my opinion, real justice in this context is about trying to figure out how we react or respond to violence in a way where it does not cause more violence and harm in turn.
The truth is that without a radical change in our values and drastic rearrangement of our social institutions, we can never achieve large reforms of the criminal punishment system.