*Uday Dabas & Vaishnavi Karthick Prasad

In this episode, Ms. Shagun Bhargava and Dr. Kanupriya Sharma reflect on their experiences as prison researchers in India, addressing methodological, ethical, and institutional challenges. They discuss negotiating access, state gatekeeping, and the impact of positionality (in terms of caste, gender, and class) on how they were treated both by the state and the inmates. The conversation explores the impact that limited access has on both qualitative and empirical research work in Indian prisons, and raises ethical concerns around retraumatization and representation.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Uday – Good Evening to everyone watching this today, we the students of NLSIU and editors and observers of LSPR shall interview Ms Shagun Bhargava and Ms Kanupriya for their work in prison research and how Indian prisons have evolved over time and their work presents a comparative analysis across prison methods and how criminology has impacted research of prison methods. My observer will first introduce the speakers and then we will discuss how prison methods have changed discourse in India.

Ms Kanupriya Sharma, post doctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham conducted extensive framework and research in criminology specifically women’s rights and women’s experience in prisons as prisoners. Ms Shagun Bhargava is a research lecturer at the School of Law in BML Munjal University in India. She has earned an MPhil in Criminological Research from Cambridge, studied parole decision making in Delhi and studied her undergraduate law in NALSAR.

We will begin with the questions and either of you can begin. Please tell us about your background and how you gravitated towards criminology and research.

Kanupriya – My background academically and socially and personally has fundamentally shaped how I approached prison research in India. I entered prison in 2014 as a student at TISS Mumbai, conducting field work in Maharashtra as part of legal aid. And that experience stayed with me and exposed me to the institutional layers of incarceration in ways that a classroom couldn’t and made me realise how little academic training prepares us for the complexities of prison. Shortly after I did my masters dissertation in prisons, exposing incarceration. At the time i was naive and expected the stories of stigma, pain and abandonment that we read in texts which were existing in time, but the stories women offered of joy, solidarity and survival, they were not just enduring prison but reimaging prison but sometimes in ways that conformed to caste and expectations and sometimes subtly and overtly resisted them. I then moved to become a CM fellow and then pursued an Mphil and PHD in Cambridge both in 2019 and 2022. I then came back to prisons research and where I was exposed to dominant research frameworks. Having done a degree in cambridge exposed me to western forms of research that emphasized objectivity structure, standardisation, and portrayed as being neutral and universal but were not, were shaped by American history and institutions and often failed to imagine and accommodate the spaces how indian prisons look like , which are informal, relational and often shifting. Made me more interested in prison research. Because prisons in India don’t lend themselves to tidy research designs and access is not granted through formal ethics committees or paperwork it is negotiated through network, trust cultural fluency and made me all the more interested in talking about prison methodologies and prison research frameworks. I also run the cambridge decolonising criminology network where we talk about these issues and research coming from the global south and non western contexts and my research sort of fits in very well within all of these areas. I don’t know if you want to talk about my PHD research. We could talk about it later. My PhD research also explored women’s pathways to and experiences of incarceration through the lens of love marriage and kinship in India. I did my ethnographic research over states of Punjab and Rajasthan and interviewed over 127 incarcerated women. Of course whatever I say today in this podcast is deeply inspired by

my experience of conducting ethnographic research over a decade now. Over to you Shagun, we can talk about myself later.

Shagun: Thank you so much Kanupriya and Vaishnavi and Uday for conducting this. That’s a tough act to follow because Kanupriya has so much experience in prison research. The question is what brought me to this research and what is my background right? My undergraduate training was in law so doing empirical research and prison research was a detour from it. This is not something we learn in law school. We only study the IPC and CRPC and seldom think about what happens when one is incarcerated. We do not look at prison manuals so those are also rules and regulations one ought to look at but we seldom do. We also look at it in terms of rights but not in terms of the social life of prisons. Which is what I wanted to learn more about. So right after law school I litigated, one of the first cases I argued independently was a parole appeal. Based on my Mphil thesis on parole decision making in Delhi, I practiced there and was familiar with it there. For my MPhil thesis, I interviewed parole decision markers. Parole in Delhi is very eclectic, the parole decision making process involves a bunch of integrated institutional actors ranging from the police, to the prisons to the DG prisons and finally the decision whether an incarcerated convict should be given parole or not is taken by the LG of Delhi. Can see that it is very bottoms up. Which was very interesting. What made me do this research was when I was litigating for this new first case, the first time I was going to be in front of the judge, I wanted to speak about empirical research. Tried to look it up but there was absolutely nothing on parole. In terms of, we don’t think about how many get parole and why many applications get rejected. Thats when i realised what i want to do, i want to understand this better and the social life of these officers better. This led me to do an MPhil in criminological research.

Uday: That’s very nice to know. I will begin with how Shagun outlined her background in law and well notice how criminologists often come across various disciplines when conducting prison and field research. Yourselves being from a legal background, how do you feel that this legal perception which the undergraduate curriculum in law inculcates in one’s mindset. Do you feel this discipline is something which comes from the criminologist and this impacts criminology and prison research?

Kanupriya: Not really from a law background, but i did my undergraduate degree in psychology form punjab university and then was a journalist with hindustan times for a year and i also did a journalism degree at the asian college of journalism in chennai. So my career trajectory is messed up in terms of discipline but is also interdisciplinary but expanded my research in all of these directions. Then came my social work where I specialized in criminology and justice from TISS. I then worked with several organisations and worked as a CM fellow and did my MPhil in criminology in Cambridge and that’s how I picked up this specialization. I came to the discipline from an interdisciplinary perspective which helped me understand prisons from different lenses. For me law always existed parallel to criminology and often caught of as something in law, I am a bit biased looking at criminology as separate from law. Of course it is beneficial that when doing a law degree you often hear more about criminology but i think its a stand that criminology has its own identity. In Cambridge too it is under the faculty of law even for administration etc.

criminology has always struggled to find its own identity because of its interdisciplinary nature, earlier criminologists were sociologists and not legal scholars in a true sense. What we do is also the sociology of prisons and not just the legality of it all but how it translates into the lives of the prisoners and those involved in the criminal justice system. So I think it is important to delineate itself from law and see law as an important bit of criminology because we can’t separate prisoners’ lives from the legal entanglement and from the law that defines their lives. I think Shagun would be better off in explaining the career trajectory of law and criminology. But for me it came naturally due to the disciplines that i was studying psychology, social work and journalism all of this contributed naturally to the work i am doing now.

Shagun: My question was sort of influenced by the law because my research was extremely exploratory. Because nothing existed, I leaned on what I already knew. Extremely exploratory. Because nothing existed, I leaned on what I already knew, which was the law. And as I had litigated these cases, dealt with appeals, parole appeals, I knew certain facts about the role already, that most of the parole orders which are rejected and then appealed are overturned by the judiciary. So I used that and the thing was when I was on the field, it was very… as Kanupriya was also saying, it’s not neat and tidy at all. And for me, it was also extra messy because there were so, so many different institutional actors. And also because I knew so little about what was happening on the ground, my questions changed every single day. So it was evolving. And that’s also because both of us are qualitative researchers.

I was doing semi-structured interviews with my participants. So my questions were sort of evolving. They started off with the law, but then as soon as I realized X, Y, Z about their social lives, their hierarchies, what impacts their decision making, I probed in those more interesting directions which perhaps had nothing to do with the law.

But the law did impact, finally, my thesis as well. Because of my training in the law, I do look at Rules and sort of criticize them from the lens of fair, arbitrary, the words that lawyers use. So those words did make their way into my thesis but that was not the predominant framework with which I approached my fieldwork or my thesis. Just to be clear this is what I wanted to do with criminology and my thesis, and I did not want to restrict myself to rules. . Yeah, so, why not? That’s the issue.

Kanupriya:: Yeah, so like I said, I began doing prison research in 2014. Things have not changed drastically since then. Indian prisons have always been heavily gate-kept when it comes to research. And gate-keeping is not just sort of bureaucratic, it’s ideological. I’m not sure if you have read Karan Tripathi’s article, which, not an article, but it was a blog that he wrote in 2021.

It’s on the Oxford website. It’s called Gagging Penology, Structural Silencing of Prison Research in India. He talks exactly about access to prison research and how it’s sort of an arbitrary gatekeeping. He talks about gatekeeping through the lens of the state guidelines that were issued shortly after the banning of India’s daughter. In 2015, there were guidelines that were

issued by the Supreme Court and they were clearly designed to create a chilling effect for researchers.

So the 2015 advisory essentially states that no private individual or organisation should be allowed for research, interviews or documentation inside the prisons unless it is deemed to produce positive social impact or is government invited. And that alone reflects a desire to sort of control the narrative and not open it to the general public, right? And even when access is sort of granted, the process is intentionally sort of like gatekept. So for instance, in those guidelines, you have that one lakh should be given in security deposit.

Of course, we know that researchers are not very well funded. So of course, where will that one lakh come from? There’ll be surveillance by the superintendent. So the, so the interviews would be done in the presence of a staff from the prison. There’s also a right to delete any sort of undesirable content without explanation. And the final manuscript, I mean the final sort of transcript that you generate from your interviews, must be submitted to the prison department for a no-objection certificate.

Now, these are not neutral steps. They are structurally designed to deter, intimidate and sort of censor prison research, right? But beyond these formal restrictions, access is very arbitrary, shaped by who you are, what you are researching, where you are researching, how the system categorizes you. In my case, I was studying women prisoners. Throughout the decade, I have mostly studied women in prison. And women are not typically perceived as political threats.

And that sort of worked in my favor. But even within that, I remember when I received guidelines for my access from the Punjab Department there were explicit instructions that I must not speak with anyone booked under terrorism and UAPA offences. There were clearly explicit instructions the state drew lines on whose voices are permissible to be heard, and whose voices must remain unheard. And access, let’s be very, very honest here, is also about privilege.

I am an upper caste, foreign educated Indian woman with institutional affiliations and social capital. And I was granted access during the peak of COVID when I was doing my PhD. When families couldn’t even visit the prisons. And that’s not normal. That’s an exception. I carry that with huge responsibility. I often felt guilty about it. Why am I being allowed entry in prisons when nobody else was allowed access? That meant not just conducting interviews. I became the bridge between the prisoners to the outside world. Women hadn’t spoken to their families for days, sometimes weeks. Phone systems were not working and accounts were not charged as they were shifting from a physical system to an online system.

And they would literally request me to take their messages out. And I became sort of an unofficial courier of information. That became sort of an ethical dilemma. I see that my access came with a privilege, it came with jugaad, it came with pohonch, it came with a lot of pulling strings in the government. And all of that of course comes with social capital and as researchers, we should be very honest about the way we are carrying out research, the way we are gaining access, and maintain that honesty throughout our accounts of methodology, whenever we write our methodologies. I think that’s what my take on access is. But of course it

hasn’t changed temporarily at all. In fact, it has become more restricted and more gatekept and i think it will continue to do so especially in terms of who we are interviewing. It depends a lot on who our audience is. Are they women, trans women, is it men, is it political prisoners? Who are the people you want to interview? I think it depends a lot on what I mentioned earlier. It is a long answer.

Shagun: Not much is left to say, but a very excellent way of actually even picturizing access, again just to talk about karan tripathi’s blog post again. He quotes someone who calls it “fluffly” from the philosopher’s stone, the three headed dog which is guardian, the same way prisons are gatekept. I think it is an excellent way in relating to the struggles which researchers face when they try to access the black box, the prisons. As Kanupriya has rightly pointed out and i 100% agree, my access too was guided by my socio-cultural capital of being an upper class, upper caste, woman who has litigated in delhi and has networks in this space due to the capital i possess. If it were not for that and if i were to take the official legal route of enabling, of getting access to prisons, i do not think i would have been able to do my research because the advisory is so strict and they also view those with a foreign background suspiciously due to the context of why the advisory was rolled out in 2015 in the first place. In the context of the documentary. So people coming with foreign degrees and research etc are viewed with an added lens of suspicion. So yeah, access is something that is not officially negotiated. And the words that Kanupriya uses are extremely key and extremely instrumental in understanding access to Indian prisons. Excellent way of putting it.

I am also trying to think about whether this is just an Indian problem or not. Because I don’t think it is. For instance, from the US, we barely have ethnographic accounts anymore. And that has been documented. Because again, access is difficult to negotiate in the US.

And scholars have called this the fortress mentality of these institutions themselves. Which makes me wonder what is so special about prisons that states across jurisdictions We want to stop people like researchers who are questioning attitudes from entering these spaces. But of course Kanupnia can also talk about that more because she has conducted fieldwork in different jurisdictions.

Yeah, I mean, just to add to what you’re saying, Shagun, of course, now I’m doing research, a project exploring how resistance processes vary by ethnicity. So I’m interviewing people on probation. So I go to the probation office and interview people.

And of course, access works very differently in a probation office setting, because obviously it’s not the prison. Of course, when you have to go to the prison, there are official protocols and documentation that you have to follow in the UK, which means you also get your background.

verification check by the NRC and you know there’s a lot of formal process that you have to go through but it’s all formal. Of course I mean they know if you are coming from Cambridge there are some institutional affiliations that they will consider and of course but those are under the wraps but the whole process in total is very formal which is not the case in terms of what happens in India.

But in terms of the probation office for instance we obviously went to the upper authorities Once the top authorities are with you in terms of your research, automatically it flows downwards. Which means the probation officers are very nice to you. They are very cooperative. It also depends on where in the UK you are conducting your research as well.

Just like in India. Of course, I remember I got permission to conduct research in Punjab, whereas I pulled the same amount of strings in Maharashtra, but I couldn’t get permission. Because they said it’s COVID time, and no matter what you do, you will not be allowed and had to wait indefinitely. As a PHD researcher you do not have the privilege to wait, funding is on the line, the funders won’t wait for you, you cannot sit doing nothing wasting your time waiting for access. You need to be in the prison while doing your prison research. It comes with institutional pressures like i said, i had to complete my PHD. I couldn’t wait for the Maharashtra department to give me permissions. So of course, within states as well, because it’s arbitrary and it is dependent on the person who is sitting on the seat, how you interact with them, how they perceive you, how they perceive the institutional affiliation that you carry with yourself, all of that makes a difference in getting access.

And because I had previously gained access in Punjab prisons a couple of times before, in 2014, in 2018 as well, so of course they trusted me more with access because nothing happened. I mean, people understand you’re there to do research, everything is formalized, it’s set up for you on a platter and given to you that this is the way you will conduct it.

This is a very small example and of course, Western researchers may argue that it sometimes is difficult. And it is. It is complex. It is messy. Things are messy everywhere. But you do have a room where you conduct research, right? But in India, you don’t get a room.

I mean, there is no provision of a room. So you go to the prison, you need to just find your own space where you want to conduct an interview. You will not be given a room to conduct an interview because there is no infrastructure for research. I mean, there is no infrastructure for research. None in the UK either, but they would create a room for you. That’s one of the small examples. For instance, I have conducted interviews in kitchens, in barracks, in nurseries, in hospitals, in medical clinics, in the prison van, in the bhakshi khana, or the court facility.

Everywhere, almost. Here in the UK, I do go into a room or a technical setting. They know that I’m here to do research. Like we were talking earlier as well, me and Shagun, that, you know, They just know what research is, right? And that makes a huge difference. And that’s where your access also starts. So the access is not just entering the prison, it’s also entering people’s lives, right? And explaining to them why you’re there. So access is at different levels. And accessing prison is one of the levels that you sort of begin with, but you don’t end there.

Shagun: So yeah. Just to highlight like one difference when you have official access, you have access full stop. Whereas when you have this sort of access, the kind of access that we do sometimes in our context, that access is continually sort of negotiated, it’s precarious and it is contingent. I can have access one day and the next day that one prison officer may have left and I will not have access. And I faced this very interestingly in terms of RTI requests as well. I

thought of RTI requests and positive RTI requests which stated that please come and inspect the records because we don’t have consolidated digitized data for this. That was very interesting because that one piece of paper enabled my physical entry into the entire prison complex.

post which, of course, I also had to enter separate jails. And even there, my access to each jail was contingent and precarious upon the officer in that particular jail. So in some jails, it was very easy. They realize I’m a citizen. I have exercised my right to file a right to information request.

And if they have so enabled my access to the physical space of the prisons, However, in other prisons, they denied me access. They said, we may have said one month ago that you can come and access these records, but now you can’t. So, access is not just contingent and precarious as a researcher, but it was even contingent and precarious when I was exercising my right as a citizen of this country to view public documents. That I found extremely interesting in terms of identity and access being contingent. This is as official as access I could have thought it. But even that was withdrawn at the whims and fancies of these officials.

Kanupriya: Yeah, that’s a very interesting point because I now remember I had written permission to carry an audio recorder and record those interviews. But every time when I would go to a different prison, they would sometimes just say, oh, the audio recorder is not allowed.

Even if I would show them a written documentation that allows me to take an audio recorder inside prison, they would just tell me arbitrarily, like one day, that no, you’re not allowed to record. The other day there will be somebody else on the seat and they would be like, okay, you can take the audio recorder. So it was very much contingent. on which spaces you are accessing, in which prisons, who is sitting, who is the security guard that day. Does that person like you? Does that person approve of you, trust you? All of those things are credible enough to be allowed an audio recorder inside or to be allowed anything inside.

For instance, I remember sometimes that I would carry everything inside, like not, of course, my phone or like any electronic items, but I would be allowed to carry my tiffin, my water, my book, my pen, everything. And sometimes I would not be allowed to carry anything.

Like I have to go empty handed. So that was also based on discretion of the security guards that were stationed that day. And also the political environment outside, so if there’s elections, for instance, that’s going on. So the surveillance increases. The surveillance on you as a person increases as well. So it’s very much also dependent on the socio-political atmosphere that’s on the outside as well.

Do you want to take that first, Shagun?

Shagun: Sure. My access, how has it impacted my access is an interesting question. It enabled my access. That’s because, and you know, in the literature, people strategically, I have read, will position themselves as a naive, young researcher woman.

But that label was sort of thrust upon me by the officers that I was interacting with. And for me it was also a unique experience because I was not researching down, I was researching up in a

sense. Because I was interviewing decision makers, I was interviewing prison officers, police officers, IPS officers and also of course the LG of Delhi.

So in that sense, it enabled my access because they considered me, as also Kanu Priya said, women are considered harmless. They considered me harmless. But what was also interesting was that that access did not neatly sort of translate into rapport building, which is an essential bit when you are doing a qualitative interview.

I have to build rapport with my participants so that they open up and let me into their inner world, tell me, give me detailed answers. And that didn’t happen very neatly because all my participants were middle-aged men. And actually, very interestingly, Jyoti Balur, who is an IPS officer and is now an academic in the UK, and she’s done her doctoral research with police officers who were obviously sort of junior to her.

And she talks about this exactly, where she says that, when I was on the field, I obviously, in terms of my position as an IPS officer, held a lot of… I have a lot more power than my participants who were lower in the hierarchy of the police hierarchy essentially. But she said that despite that my participants were, and I quote her, not quite powerless.

and our participants in that sense hold a lot of power over us even when we are interviewing them. And I feel like my gender played a role in the power that they were trying to assort over in that when I sort of, as I said, in rapport building it made it difficult because when I asked a question they would sometimes just like smirk or giggle a little or tell me that this is such like unserious work, why are you even doing this or ask me my age and call me bacha in the

So it took me a while to develop a sort of thick skin and just wade through the interview, pushing these sorts of remarks aside. Yes, so that’s how gender in one way enabled my access, but did not translate well into rapport building.

Yeah, I mean, just like carrying, like just adding further to what Shagun has said. As a woman researcher, especially like a young one, male officers often treated me as well with a mix of protectiveness, paternalism, and curiosity. And sometimes that meant being taken more seriously.

Other times it meant being patronized or even tested to see how much I could handle the rigors of research, you know. space, tone, boundaries, polite enough to keep access, because you do want to keep your access, so you can’t be rude to them, even if you are not agreeing with some of the things that they say to you. But assertive enough to be taken seriously. And it’s a balancing act, of course.

Kanupriya: You’re not agreeing with some of the things that they say to you, but assertive enough to be taken seriously. And it’s a balancing act, of course. But for me, I think One of the things that really stayed with me was how my caste status also impacted my accent.

I have been treated by the prison officers and prisoners themselves. For instance, on one of my days in a central prison in Rajasthan, I had signed the entry register and the guard calls me back and he tells me to sign it again. And I was confused because I had filled in all my usual details.

But then he points out to this very untitled column and says, I need to write my caste and subcast. And I hesitated because I didn’t feel comfortable putting that down. And I gently refused. And that’s when he looked up and down at me and he says, why are you from a lower caste? Because you don’t look like one. And then when he saw my Aadhaar card, which he insisted on seeing.

And so with my surname, which was Sharma, his entire tone sort of shifted. And suddenly, you know, he called me, oh, you’re a pandit. You’re one of our own. And within seconds, the gates opened, a cup of tea was offered. I was ushered in with this like performative respect. And that moment was very uncomfortable. But more than that, it was very revealing because it showed me very early on that my caste identity wasn’t just like passively rpesent in the field. It was shaping how I was moving through it.

In Punjab, the caste was present but not so much. Caste became the dominant lens through which I was seen. My caste along with my English speaking ability, my foreign educated background smoothened a lot of my bureaucratic hurdles. In fact, in one of the prisons I remember, the superintendent even offered me her seat to sit because she was from a lower caste. So that was how much caste was prominent in all of my interactions. In terms of how the prisoners responded to me, women from upper caste spoke to me freely, but there were others who were visibly very hesitant. I remember there was one woman from a denotified community.

She told me she cannot be seen sitting next to me in the officer’s room because she is from a lower caste and asked me to meet during four hours. I started paying closer attention to how women position themselves during group conversations as well. And how certain women would sit at the back of the room, how they would sit down when I am sitting on the chair or they would insist I don’t sit on the ground with them. That discomfort was very visible because these aren’t just habits, these are very deeply ingrained survival strategies. And that’s when I realized my presence wasn’t sort of neutral. And no matter how well-intentioned I was, I carried my caste class identity with me all on my body. And it shaped every interaction I had. So I had to be sort of deliberate. And I deliberately sometimes moved interviews out of officers’ room into courtyards, into their areas, like I said, into barracks places where women felt more at ease.

I remember in one of the prisons I also conducted English language classes. The dynamics were very visible. People from certain castes would sit at the back. People from upper castes would sit in the front. All of that was very visible. Caste spoke more than my gender. In Punjab, my foreign education status and my nri status was taken into consideration, because there is an obsession in the Punjabi community to be like outside India.

So everyone from jail staff to prisoners wanted to know what it was like to live in the UK. And that sparked a sort of genuine curiosity. It made it easier to develop a rapport as well. Women asked about my life in London, food, weather, marriage abroad.

And you know, they were really thrilled that, you know, a foreign educated person or somebody who’s an NRI in their eyes has actually come into the prison to speak to them. So everything, sort of my positionality influenced by my identity, caste, gender, language, urban background, foreign education, class, shaped every single interaction.

Uday: We talked about how prisoners personally react to criminal law who also come from different sections of society. You mentioned karam’s work and how the contact and reaching out to prisoners often depends on a variety of factors. I am harking back to one of the original tenets of criminology which seeks not to retraumatise the prisoner who is sought to be interviewed. Again reliving painful experiences regarding crime can often be emotional for the people who are interviewing them, but at the same time criminologist has to be careful that they do not risk retraumatising the very victim who they sought to interview. So would you balance that with how privilege and access goes forward in prisons and would you say that your personal experience regarding what might cause retraumatisation in various forms of prisoners, for example Kanupriya talks about women prisoners in general across all castes. Would you feel that your own access and privilege have this, and if not what might have the potential to aggravate that risk?

Shagun: I feel like only Kanu Priya can answer this question. So Kanu Priya, why don’t you go ahead?

Kanupriya: Okay, because I have mainly worked with obviously women in prison who come from very traumatic histories and traumatic backgrounds. I don’t know how to answer this question because I feel like it is traumatizing. For me as well as a researcher. So to be very honest and open, of course, I was going through a very difficult marriage at a time when I was doing my I was newly married. There were a lot of things I was figuring out in my married life as well. Whatever I was hearing from the women was actually also happening in a way in my life as well.

So in terms of like the constraints of marriage, in terms of like subscribing to those patriarchal and caste norms, all of this that, you know, as women we see when we enter a married life. And I think it was like a particularly sort of, no, I will not say interesting, but like a time when I was not comfortable in my personal life, and it affected my fieldwork, and the fieldwork affected my personal interactions with my family members.

I think I document that in my methodology a lot. For both me and my participant, the research became sort of like a safe space. So I don’t know if they were re-traumatized, but a lot of women did confess to me that They thought this was the most cathartic experience that they’ve had in a while and that they have never had the opportunity to talk about their lives in such open, raw and honest forms the way they’re able to do it with me. Especially I was entering the prison, like I said, at a time when their family visits were suspended.

So I was the only outsider they could actually meet. The only outsider who was actually also sometimes carrying messages from them to their family members. So I wasn’t just a researcher. Sometimes I would be like a friend. Sometimes I was a sister to them. Sometimes I was their daughter. Sometimes I was a support worker.

So I had to like… Not just be a researcher. So I think those boundaries were quite blurred. And I think that also helped me to sort of negotiate, you know, I wouldn’t call it just rapport, my relationship with them, because it wasn’t just a researcher-participant relationship. And a lot of them still are in touch with me, still are in contact with me. We’ve formed bonds for life.

And these are not just like research or participant relationship that, you know, Western research sort of talks about. When I say Western research time and again, that’s because that’s where most of the sort of methodological writings come from. But there is this power in making these kinship networks and ties when you are in the field. And I think because I was also going through a troubling time, the prison also became a safe space for me.

I was like prison was the only place I could go to during COVID, especially when I need to go outside because obviously for us as well, the pandemic happened and there was sort of lockdown and restrictions. So I was going from my place to the prison. And for the prisoners, I was the only outlet. So I think that changed the whole researcher participant dynamic for me. And I think that such a powerful time to do research as well. And I think I carried so much with me, like such weight and such responsibility and such accountability because I was given the privilege to access prisons at a time when nobody could, and I had the power to sort of take their voices outside.

And really, sometimes I found the phrase giving voice a bit troubling because it assumes that people that are incarcerated don’t already have one, but they do. And in fact, they have incredibly rich, complex, emotionally layered ways of expressing themselves.

And it’s that the world often refuses to listen to them. So my role was not to give them voice, but to create space for that voice to be heard and to make sure I’m not distorting it in the process. So a lot of times in my writing, if you happen to read my PhD thesis, I’m very intentional about my work. For example, I’m very conscious about how I translate people’s words. So I have kept some of their original phrases in Hindi or Punjabi. I don’t want to over sanitize or over translate what they were saying just to fit academic norms. So there was a rawness, a texture to their word that carries so much meaning. So I try to retain that throughout the writing.

Also, there’s a tendency of italicizing words in Hindi or Punjabi, you know, and sort of italicizing them in like academic texts. I have refused to do that throughout my PhD writing. So if you look at, if you read my thesis, you would see that I haven’t italicized any of the Hindi, Punjabi or colloquial words that I use. I have kept them as we keep the English language.

So in sort of these practices, I have really sort of tried wherever possible to sort of I have also tried to go back to my participants after analyzing their stories. For instance, I would sometimes go to some of them to ask, did I understand you correctly? Does this feel accurate?

And that wasn’t always formal. It was a casual follow-up conversation during a later visit. But it was important for me to understand that the way I’ve interpreted their interviews or their conversations with me is the way they wanted their voices to come out.

Because interpretation is always an act of power, right? And I didn’t want to assume authority over someone else’s experience or voice. So I think, yeah, that’s again my long answer to your question. Thank you.

Uday: Perhaps Shagun you could also walk through how balancing this imperative to provide voice to incarcerated individuals who are thought to not have a voice is often seen in light with how retraumatisation and getting the prisoner to open up also comes in place.

Shagun: I don’t think I’m suited to answer that question. It’s because I interviewed prison officers and I was in the physical space around incarcerated people, but I didn’t get an opportunity to. My research question was such that I didn’t have to interview, speak to incarcerated people.

Uday: Perhaps we could move across to how we have both seen privilege, access and retraumatisation suffers across prisons. Another problem that I can think of is what problems do prisoners feel are underrepresented across both prison authorities and criminologists. I can see tihar example, where we can see a local form of a prison economy run across by prisoners where they play across various roles in both prisons and outside, it operates not in isolation with how the economy works outside the prison but it also facilitates an inner mechanism of how prisoners can support their needs despite being away from their families. So while examples of such a prisoner economy may not be prevalent across many prisons, considering how it was a first experiment run across india, do you feel that various prison experiments which may be run across by the prison authorities or criminologists in general change how prisoners look themselves in the wider scheme of things regarding criminology?

Shagun: Just to quickly clarify a few things, working in prisons is not something that everyone can sometimes opt to do. And this is something that came up a lot of times in my research because I wanted to. One, a person has to be given rigorous imprisonment for them to be given work in prisons. Secondly, because our prisons are so extremely overpopulated, taking the Tihar example, if a prison has a sanction of perhaps 10,000, there are 5,000 inmates in that prison, right?

Given that our prisons are so overpopulated, Only some prisoners even get to work. And how officials make that decision is super interesting. One, it can be sanctioned in the judgment. So a judge will go like, this person should get work because he’s committed X kind of offense, rigorous imprisonment.

That has a very interesting colonial history. So it’s not always a positive thing that a person is getting to work in a prison. Firstly, one that. Secondly, and who the official picks is also dependent on what kind of offense that you may have committed, the kind of behavior or your conduct in prison and how you behave or your conduct is obviously a perception of the officer himself or herself or themselves, right?

So, um, This whole idea of working in prison, etc. is not always very positive. And it’s also something that is Constructed and it leads to things as well. For instance, if I work in prison, my conduct is looked upon as favorable by, for instance, privileges, privileges such as parole or furlough. So if I’ve worked in prison, I am more likely to perhaps get parole or furlough because I’m then seen as a person who is not very risky because I’ve already done work in prisons.

I’ve worked with my inmates. I have behaved well in those aspects of prison life. And hence I am a deserving candidate for those privileges, and not rights, privileges, like parole and furlough. Its complicated who gets to work in these prisons, and how the privilege of working gets translated into the further privileges which are more important, And should not be contingent on something like getting to work in prison.

Kanupriya: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s very nicely put. It is contingent on a lot of factors. Yes, well, like you have mentioned. But in the case of women, it was also… It has a lot to do with the moral nature of their offences. For instance, if you are in for sex trafficking, you would be considered, in fact, you would be considered immoral because you were indulging in sex work, which is not looked by the authorities as a moral offense to begin with. You would not get work in administrative departments or you can’t work as a writer or in the clinic. You can’t hold these honorable work positions in the prison. However, if you have a long time offender and you had murdered your husband, there would be some amount of sympathy towards you by the prison administration, and they might appoint you to these positions which they call trustworthy positions in their day to day language and they would give it to a trustworthy person. Now who is a trustworthy person is subjective because it involves a lot of documentation, handling sensitive information, so they wouldn’t give it to just anybody. SO there needs to be some criteria of who you give it to. And that criteria is always up to the discretion of the jailer or the superintendent and how you are perceived in prison, what your offense is, or how much time are you in prison because they would obviously want long term offenders taking these positions not someone who would be out in a few months. It’s a very political and morally laden, and these things are understood by the prisoners as well, male prisoners have more opportunities to work because it’s a larger prison. Women do not have the same opportunities at all because they are sort of stuck in a prison inside a prison.

So that’s what we call a women’s prison, right? Because most of the women’s prisons do not have their own buildings. They are put in a building which is largely constructed for men, and then they are put into like four barracks. So the four barracks are sort of sanctioned off for women.

So how do you expect women to get any kind of jobs in that sort of an infrastructural setup? Of course, they are then left to do like mundane jobs, like sometimes cutting vegetables, you know, for the larger catering. Or sometimes just like very sort of, I don’t know, gender jobs. For instance, sometimes they would like do the cooking if there’s a major event happening because, you know, women cook well.

So all of these sort of jobs would be given to women instead of men. Whereas the main kitchen would always be in the male prison section. So the main food would always be cooked by men. But when the events would happen, there’s anything special happening, then it would be given to the men.

So these are sort of very… So when we talk about initiatives in prison and reform initiatives, who are these reforms for and for what purpose is the question that we should be asking? And I think prison research in India. Yeah, of course.

Shagun: I was just going to give an example about the class and casting. It was in my interview. What came up was whatever you do outside they expect you to do inside, for example, if you are an engineer we would give you a job in the administrative wing which is obviously a very coveted job because you are sitting in an ac room working on the computer. Your class identity translates from the inside or carries from the outside into the inside as well. And even in terms of caste, we all know about Kanya Chanda’s research and now obviously the judgment that it has led to. So, the work that society expects you to do outside prison is also what in a lot of Indian prisons is expected from you inside. So, your class and caste and gender shape what kind of work, if any, you are given access to.

Kanupriya: Absolutely. And I think prison research in India generally is still sort of quite, it’s not new, but it’s quite sort of nascent. For instance, most of the research if you see is through the lens of policy analysis, like things like implementation failures, infrastructure deficiencies, overcrowding, lack of hygiene, or understaffing. And don’t get me wrong, those are real urgent issues, but so much of the work stays at the level of systemic critique, without engaging deeply with the lived experiences of those actually occupying these spaces. So people in custody, especially women, trans women, caste-manualized communities. And there’s still a real hesitation around qualitative narrative-based or ethnographic work in Indian prison research.

And people often treat such methods as too subjective, too soft, or even risky, right? But without those stories, without voices from the inside, we are left with this one-dimensional picture of what the prison is, that is a dysfunctional building. And that’s not what prison is. It’s a world. It’s a moral universe. It’s a site of negotiation, resistance, survival, memory, and sometimes even care and solidarity. But you only see what you are listening to, when you are listening to the people inside, right? So there’s a disciplinary bias at play as well, because a lot of prison work still comes from, sorry to say, legal scholarship, which often focuses on rights, violations, reform, but not always on how things are felt and perceived by those inside the system.

How does a woman make sense of her sentence? What does honor or shame mean inside prison? How do caste hierarchies get reproduced in everyday routines? These questions are rarely prioritized, and that’s a blind spot. So for me, the biggest gap is not, isn’t just what we study in prisons, but also how. We need more grounded, culturally sensitive, emotionally attuned work, ethnographic work. We need methods that allow for uncertainty, contradiction, and take seriously the knowledge that incarcerated people hold about the systems they’re caught in.

So I think that’s what I think prison research should do.

Uday: So among all of these issues which we have been able to identify so far I think all of us would agree that prisons to a large extent need reform, and such reform is driven both from government side for example, we see the call for law reforms from law commission reports, by various criminologists and socialogists. For example, Angela Davis’ work is very seminal in how we define American prisons and why such sites of isolation and punishment often end up not solving crime but become something else entirely. So when we talk about reforming Indian prisons how do you feel that criminologists like yourself, and work like women in prisons or sex trafficking in prisons can contribute towards improving larger scheme of prisons in India and the world? For example, Angela Davis’ work is very similar in how we define American prisons.

Shagun: So basically, just to confirm, your question is, how does our research contribute to prison reform?

That’s a big question. How does our research and the research of criminologists, if it gets picked up, how does it make a change if at all?

I have found that very difficult to do with my research, especially because as Kanupriya was saying, qualitative research is seldom understood by policymakers or lawyers. It’s dismissed as just words and feelings and emotions. And you know, they ask what lawyers understand or what policy people understand better is numbers.

So that somewhat still can be picked up by a judge, hard facts, numbers. Experiences and the kind of research that we are doing as qualitative researchers is actually, in my opinion, very hard to translate into policy changes because it is simply not understood perhaps by a wider audience other than researchers or people who are trained in the social sciences.

So that’s what I think, that’s the reason why I think that it’s difficult sometimes for criminologists who are social scientists and not lawyers to get their To make sure that their work makes some change in prison reforms. And also, I feel like this whole concept of prison reform, again, as lawyers, we tend to think about it in terms of reform. But what does reform mean? Where do we start from? What is the most important kind of reform that one must look at?

During my research, I realized that because I was again researching decision makers, people who are considered oppressors themselves, and my research revealed in a way that they are also oppressed and vulnerable in various ways. So then reform does not just simply extend to those incarcerated, but also the who we as lawyers especially villainize as the oppressors.

So a lot of things need to be reformed, which is why the conclusion to my thesis was I didn’t know where to start and where to end it because I feel like that’s a very big conversation about reform and what it even means and to whom. Yes. Yeah.

Kanupriya: No, I mean, it’s an important question and honestly something that I’ve asked myself so many times. I remember now when I was a Gates scholar and then I gave my interview, one question I was always asked was how does your research translate into impact or how does it contribute to society. That’s always the first question that they would ask. And I always struggled to answer this. And even then, when I gave my interview, I said that the only thing that I can see is that through this degree, through my academic research, I’ll have more weight.

I mean, my voice will carry more weight. And I think… As academics, we need to often ask ourselves what happens to our research after it’s written? Who reads it? Does it serve? And I think one of the biggest challenges with prison research or any academic research really is that it rarely finds its way into the hands of people who can make concrete policy or any sort of reform or legal changes.

There’s still a big gap between the world of scholarship and the world of governance. Research is being done, but it’s not always being read by policymakers, let alone I don’t think that’s just the fault of the state or the government. I think as researchers, we also need to ask ourselves, are we writing in the ways that are accessible?

Are we building relationships with institutions that can use this knowledge? For me, it’s about finding those points of connection. I have had moments in the field where staff were genuinely curious about the findings. They would ask me what other women had said, what I was observing, and those informal exchanges matter.

Because they plant, these conversations plant seeds and they make people think about the system from another lens. But I also think structural change needs to happen. Academics, especially those working in prisons, should be meaningfully polled in all of these discussions, policy review committees, in training development for correctional staff, for instance, and not just in prisons.

The Indian penal system with all its bureaucracy and ideological layers doesn’t shift easily, doesn’t change easily. So for me, right now, it’s also about doing the work with integrity, making it public where I can, making it accessible for people to read, writing in ways that honor the voices I have engaged with and staying open to different forms of impact, right?

Maybe it’s policy change, maybe it’s just One official seeing something differently. Maybe it’s a student rethinking what justice means and what it doesn’t mean. And I think that too matters. So I think we need to also broaden our perspective about change and impact.

I wanted it to be communicated in a sense that could be picked up and used empirically. I hope this helps debunk myths about doing prisons research and the inner life of a prison. Because these are black boxes that we often don’t think about as law students or as lawyers. Or even as citizens, I think it’s an excellent introduction to

The kind of research that one does, how one does it, and what are some things that are important to think about. Yeah, I think also this kind of work can only happen when the state also starts seeing research not as a threat, It has been used as a tool for reflection. When access isn’t treated as a favor, it is a part of a democratic process. When institutions start recognizing that researchers, especially those working from a place of care and rigor, can play a meaningful role in transforming how we think about punishment and justice, I think change will happen.

And I really hope the field opens up. I hope we see more young scholars like yourself telling stories, doing this important work, challenging the academic canon as well, because until now, present research in India has been very small and often isolated, overly sanitized.

But it has so much potential. And we do read books of scholars that have so much to contribute to this field. We need to just start listening to the stories that are already there Just waiting to be taken seriously.