Carceral Entrapments

Abstract

This article focuses on three overlapping layers. First, it illustrates multiple and incoherent expressions of the prison/street nexus in India through fieldwork in prison and a para (urban neighbourhood). Second, it argues that existing categories of understanding prison/street porousness – such as a ‘deadly symbiosis’, a continuum, liminality and a carceral state – are inadequate for explaining these expressions of the prison/street nexus in India, which is framed within chaotic environments. Consequently, I argue, there is a poverty of concepts in narrating the prison/street nexus in the global south more generally, and it stems from methodological concerns. Third, the article unravels the methodological lessons from the study of imprisoned populations to examine how these may be used to narrate urban marginality. I take recourse to Lorna Rhodes’ illustration of ‘blind fields’ and ‘punctums’, to show how these may be used to disrupt conventional and hegemonic narratives of urban marginality.

“A Futile Activity”: Reflections on Imprisonment in India through Kobad Ghandy’s Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir (2021)

“…At the same time, the carceral logic of power and its inherent dehumanization may be traced beyond the “distinctly segregated penal institution” into the broader social landscape (Lynch, 2001, p. 89), from the community-based segregated and security-driven surveillance of the gated community (p. 91), to the “culture of the carceral “that penetrates urban social margins, traditionally “trapped in the metanarratives of deprivation, the clamor for space and the systematic processes of disenfranchisement,” and now enmeshed in the everyday “disposable” lives of those on the margins (Bandyopadhyay, 2020, p. 24). 3 It follows that the ‘prisoner’ too constitutes a “disposable body” (p. 24), even as the tenuous social and penal continuum is contended with, negotiated with (often with little success), conformed to (out of necessity), and resisted (at times by appropriating the very mechanisms of control, that is to say, the display and use of extreme violence and force).…”

“…Significantly, these also manifest and order the carceral template of the prisons in which he had been interred for more than a decade, lending credence to the need to move beyond the simplistic notion of the prison as an exclusive jurisdiction of the authority of the state, and by that logic, a space excluded from the values of the social order beyond. As Bandyopadhyay (2020) notes, the neatly cleaved “symbolic and real separation between the inside and outside” (p. 24) no longer adequately articulates the experience of the social and penal landscape in India. Larson (2010) names these as “ambivalent barriers” (p. 144) in that the logic of separation is unequivocal.…”

“…Similarly, Father Stan Swamy, a tribal rights activist of over five decades, noted that imprisonment is a means of stifling dissent (Karwan e Mohabbat, 2021)—and that the prisoners form an under-recognized constituency of the marginalized. “Many of such poor undertrials don't know what charges have been put on them, have not seen their charge sheet, and just remain in prison for years without any legal or other assistance,” wrote Father Swamy from the Taloja Central Jail in Maharashtra (Swamy, 2021, as cited in Bisoee, 2021). He was arrested and imprisoned despite his age and his medical conditions, including Parkinson's disease.…”

“…This differentiation allows for dealing with sensitivity regarding the specific contexts and types of incarceration, and also queries as to who is being imprisoned in order to reckon with the why. This aspect of the ‘lived’ experience of the prisoner constitutes an important part of understanding the broader carceral narrative in the prison/non-prison dichotomy, especially since the values and concerns of society seem to invariably make their way into the prison, such as how, according to Bandyopadhyay (2020) “the prison/street nexus” may reveal the “key features of the culture of incarceration in India [as] the contingent entanglements of power and privilege and the fusion of functions” (pp. 15–16).…”

“…Bandyopadhyay (2020) notes that in a “culture of the carceral”, it is inevitable that “the local goon, the prisoner, the ordinary criminal, the political prisoner, and the ‘disposable’ are all tarred with the same brush” (p. 24), even as Ghandy's memoir is different, for instance, from the narrated prison experiences of women prisoners, or POWs, for example. The conditions in each jail, as Ghandy reveals, was also influenced by power dynamics reflective of what is witnessed beyond the prison walls—namely, caste and class, and to a certain extent, social behaviours.…”