The open prison, community, and family in India

Lalita du Perron: Today, I am joined on the SASSPOD by Trishna Senapaty, who is a Mellon postdoc and Teaching Fellow in the Crime, Law, and Justice Studies program at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. And her work is on prison reform, the intersections of carceral and familial regimes in post-colonial India, everyday engagements between prisoners and citizen collectors.

Lalita du Perron: Basically, today we're going to talk about prisons and feminism and the family and anthropology. Trishna Senapaty, does that sum it up, more or less?

Trishna Senapaty: Yes, absolutely.

Lalita du Perron: Fantastic, and the reason Trishna Senapaty is joining me today on the podcast is that she recently gave a talk at the center for South Asia at Stanford, and as a kind of new initiative that we started this year, we'd like to invite speakers in the center onto the podcast, A, to kind of give a little bit more of an audience to their work, and B, to ask what it was like to present at Stanford. And, you know, usually, hopefully, we'll get positive responses, but let's… let's see how we go. Trishna Senapaty, thank you so much for making time for us today. How are you?

Trishna Senapaty: I'm doing well, it's great to be here.

Lalita du Perron: How… tell us, maybe, let's zoom out a little bit, because I'm so keen to get going, also because I heard you talk, but many of our listeners will not have heard you talk. Can you very broadly define yourself before we zoom into your research in prisons?

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, you want me to talk about WAM?

Lalita du Perron: Great. Yeah, basically that, yes, I want you to talk about who you are.

Trishna Senapaty: Thank you, that is exactly…

Lalita du Perron: Exactly right.

Trishna Senapaty: I'm Trishna Senapaty, I grew up, was born and raised in New Delhi, India, and a lot of my research sort of emanates from there. I am an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist, and my focus is on political and legal anthropology. I'm also keenly interested in carceral studies, studies of prisons and prison-like institutions, and I'm thinking and interested in continuing to think about what prison abolition can look like, both in the United States where I am currently based, but also in India, where my fieldwork is based.

Lalita du Perron: That's a fantastic introduction. How does… how does anthropology function in the space of prisons? Can we start there?

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, for sure. So, prisons are, an, extremely heavily policed research site. Everywhere, but I think I will just talk about that in India, following, a documentary film made by a British filmmaker, called India's Daughter, where the filmmaker interviewed accused… men in a very, infamous and publicly televised rape case. Very stringent laws of research were, sort of institutionalized in India. And these laws made it really difficult for human rights collectors to intervene, in whatever limited way that they could in prisons. And so, I have used the methods of prison ethnography that are laid out by anthropologists across the world, which is you go into prisons, going into prisons is often like being given a tour. You are able to see what the state wants you to see, and to practice, kind of ethnography or research that challenges the state narrative of incarceration, the state narrative of rehabilitation, is what I sort of set out to do, if that sort of answers your question briefly.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah, I just want to go back to the… to the research limitations. So, the… the rape case you're referring to presumably is the nearby case?

Lalita du Perron: Hmm.

Lalita du Perron: And, the documentary was then made, and the documentary maker, I'm not aware of this story, so I'm just clarifying, had more access to the accused than the prisons would have liked, and so long rules were created afterwards to prevent that from happening again. Is that the story?

Trishna Senapaty: Yes, there was, a lot of… debate on whether she should have had access to those, accused persons in the prison, but it was also that the film, showed India, in a light that was unfavorable to the Indian government and to tourism industry in India as a city that was, one that was essentially… Delhi as a city that was one unsafe for women, right? And, the film and the ethics of making that film had many complications, but it did something that was really bad for human rights work in prisons, because it shut the doors to institutions that are already so isolated, and understudied and under-researched.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah.

Lalita du Perron: Okay, yeah, thank you for clarifying that, and it's also an interesting reminder that sometimes what may start out as feeling like, kind of, cutting-edge activism to go in and, and create some waves and show things as they are in the long term actually have really detrimental effects on people who do similar work, and maybe have been doing it longer. It sounds like this person perhaps didn't fully know. Anyway, we don't have to go into that, but yeah, it's interesting, and I'm… I guess I'm sorry that the ramifications were so intense for human rights workers.

Tell us a little bit, then, about, give us some facts about prisons in India, and if you have it, to hand, maybe juxtapose with some prison stats about the United States, only for comparative, not because I'm interested in saying, you know, Uttapam is like a pizza kind of thing. I don't… I'm not into that. But the numbers might not mean as much, because the numbers are always so high in India anyway, so a little bit of comparison will perhaps help us contextualize. If you want to do that, if you just want to talk about India without any comparison, that's also totally fine.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's helpful, to clarify that prisons in India are state-run institutions.

Lalita du Perron: Mmm.

Trishna Senapaty: There are… there aren't any private prisons. Prisons have vast variations in the way they are administered across different states, but they are all state-run institutions. One thing that this sort of statistic that is helpful to understand incarceration in India is that, over 70% of people in prisons, in all sorts of prisons, like district prisons, jails, short-term stay places, as well as in prisons where people are held for long durations, are under trial. People, so they have not yet been sentenced, so over 70% of them are. And I think that is important to note, because they are largely poor, working-class people, who do not have adequate or good legal representation and are not able to secure bail. And that is something that we know about just ordinary prisoners in India, aside from the category of political prisoner, and other forms of exceptional incarceration.

Lalita du Perron: But that must be true in most places. I don't know what the numbers are in the United States, but the number of people that would get out of jail had they the money to either provide for bail or legal representation is high. This is not an Indian problem, is what I'm saying.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, it isn't a distinctly Indian problem, but I think it's interesting to compare to the US because, the problem that Indian prisons are often flagged for in, sort of, reform reports is that they are overcrowded. And this is something that you also hear about prisons in Latin America, whereas in the US, we know about mass incarceration, we know about really high rates of incarceration, but there is also a sort of industry that is building more and more and more prisons to house these bodies that are going into prison. So, yeah, I think there is something to be said for one, overcrowding being cited as the main problem of Indian prisons.

Lalita du Perron: Yes, and to be very clear, nobody's advocating, or at least not on this podcast, the solution to overcrowding is building more buildings.

Trishna Senapaty: To buildings.

Lalita du Perron: Who is in prison, then? I mean, you say, you know, poor people don't have the means to get out, and there's political prisoners. How does the state use prisons as a way to control whatever the state wants to control?

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, so, like in other parts of the world, disproportionately, people belong to minoritized communities, so scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and other backward classes in India, and in some states, religious minorities are disproportionately represented in the prison system. The state where I conduct my research is Rajasthan, so you also see scheduled tribe communities represented in the prison demographics. And, of course, in places where there are sort of exceptional laws in place, like in Chhattisgarh and Kashmir, where there is a sort of larger apparatus to deal with insurgency, counterinsurgency, there is a militarization to deal with insurgency. The prison is then a different kind of place. And the people represented then are also, in a sense, dissidents of the state.

Lalita du Perron: Right.

Trishna Senapaty: Yep.

Lalita du Perron: You… so you do your anthropology work in prisons, but you're also an advocate, I believe? Can I ask you about that?

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, my advocacy is very li- is… is… comes from my research, and being sort of aligned with organizations that are interested in supporting, in genuinely supporting prisoners' rights. I am not, sort of an activist or an organizer. But I do research on a site called The Open Prison in Rajasthan. And while the Open Prison is an institution, has its own limitations, it's still a prison. I'm really interested in uplifting the ways in which prisoners have built community in open prisons, and have sort of expanded ideas of what rehabilitation means for them. And I think it's very helpful to sort of have podcasts like these, where we can talk to broader audiences about anti-carceral ways of rehabilitation. And that is related to my advocacy.

Lalita du Perron: We will get into that, but I do… I guess I want to shout out the idea that we bring advocacy or activism, however, you know, wherever you feel you are on that kind of spectrum, into our scholarship, because it's so easy to disconnect, to say, well, I'm not here as a human being, actually, I'm here as an anthropologist, I have these funds, I'm writing this book, I'm doing this study, and I think any scholar is potentially guilty of that, and to compartmentalize, and I think it's so important that we do not, and so even if you don't classify yourself as an activist, you're clearly there as a human being, and you see things and you feel things, and you bring that into your scholarship, and I think the Academy is increasingly open to that as a way of being an academic, but yeah, I appreciate it, so thank you.

Let us talk, then, about the open prison, and I have to give a quick spoiler alert, I guess, in terms of the Stanford talk, your Stanford talk was about the open prison, and it was a great talk. Any misunderstanding is 100% my shortcoming, but I still feel I don't fully understand what an open prison is. I think for us as people living in the United States, we think of an open prison as a place that has less security. Like, it's not maximum security. It may have more visitors, it may have a little bit more access to the outside, but it's not actively open. There's still tons of barbed wire and all those… all those things, and you still have a cell that you go to at the end of the day. What is… what is the open prison you work at? What does it look like? Can you kind of describe the map of it.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, so the open prison that I did my research at, and I shall call it the Sitara Open Prison, it has a low boundary wall. Right, one that, you know, I'm about 5 feet 3 inches, I could climb over. It has a gate that is sort of kept open through the day. It has small dwellings, which are made up of brick, the roofs are made up of tin, and people who live inside are about 180 to 200, but about 400 people. This number varies, and the 400 is with prisoners and their families.

Lalita du Perron: Okay, so about 200 prisoners, and then, again, that number of people that… their relatives.

Trishna Senapaty: Yes.

Lalita du Perron: Okay.

Trishna Senapaty: And sort of to know the space is to also know some of the rules that regulate that space. So to go inside, you need to know somebody inside, so you need to be friend, or a relative, someone.

Lalita du Perron: Of someone who is incarcerated, you need to know who's a… it's like a country club, but on the other side of it somehow. Like, you need to be recommended.

Trishna Senapaty: Right.

Lalita du Perron: Okay.

Trishna Senapaty: There is also a roll call system, so for people who are incarcerated, they can go out as usual, the burden of finding work still falls on that individual. And they can return by a certain time in the evening. So there are limits on their mobility. And they have to return to the space at that time. But those rules of mobility only apply to the person who is incarcerated. It does not apply to their family members. It does not apply to their children. It doesn't apply to the other people who are inhabiting that space.

Lalita du Perron: What's… what's… okay, so if you're living there, and you have a family, some small children who are also living with you, I guess there's some kind of a moral imperative to come home in the evening, but what stops people from absconding? Like, I think that's the bit that I didn't get, and I felt… I remember feeling like I must really be missing something here, because it felt like such an obvious question, and it's partially why I didn't want to ask it. This is… this is, I don't know, this is a kind of very undergraduate mindset of, like, I better not ask this question, because I'll look stupid, but I actively felt that during your talk. Like, why do people come back?

Trishna Senapaty: So people come back because they have a place to live, because they have family, and because they have a sense of safety and familiarity that comes from being among other people who have also been formerly incarcerated, who have shared memories of the closed prison, where they all lived before they could apply to be transferred to the open prison. And also some networks of support, financial support, support in finding informal work in the peripheries of the prison. Particularly for women, so female prisoners, a lot of them… the prison is not their first experience of captivity. Their experience of captivity, when I spoke to them, was often first their own homes.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

Trishna Senapaty: And their mobility is extremely confined to their own homes, and when they go to prison, and here I mean the formal closed institution, it's then they realize that there are so many other women who have had similar experiences as them, of being confined in their own homes, of not having access to mobile phones and communication. I remember there was one woman who described to me how she did not know the roads outside her own house, so she wouldn't know where to go if she could go outside. So I think what became important to me was to think about what does freedom then mean? And what is being released from prison as a pathway to freedom then mean for people who have experienced captivity even before their incarceration? And in that sense, the open prison provides a sort of level of safety where women can live, one, without families, two, they can find work. They've often never worked prior to the incarceration. And they can also remake families and build new kinds of families, and that's where my interest in the family sort of came into play, even in a project that began as an interest in incarceration.

Lalita du Perron: Oh my god, I have a thousand questions. Okay, let me just see if I can, if I can get some kind of sense, make some logic into my brain right now.

Okay, so we're talking… let's separate out men from women for a moment, even though I'm sure there's people along the gender spectrum involved in incarceration as well, probably also overrepresented. But women, when you say they were captive in their own homes, do you mean because of tradition, or because they were actively confined through violence in the home, or both?

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, I think there's a spectrum, and I would say both. So, I began this research working with the Human Rights Collective that offers support to young people who are in trouble with their families, and particularly to people who are entering into intercaste and interreligious relationships against the wishes of their families. And in those cases, familial captivity and confinement, that experience for women was very, very reminiscent of their experiences in prison, in a sense that they did not have access to active communication with the outside world, they didn't have phones, and also experiences of very violent corporeal punishments at home, which they didn't actually experience in the prison. So that was one aspect of how women experienced captivity. Men also experienced violence, but not the same kind of captivity.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah, so, and we'll talk about men in a moment, but let's stay with the women, and again, apologizing for the binary. Are open prisons safer for women than closed prisons?

Trishna Senapaty: Well, so the way women talked about their lives in the open prison, I was really interested in how they thought and themselves conceptualized the idea of openness. So for them, it was the freedom to wear their own clothes, to make decisions about whether they want to work, or not work. Even though work is not always a choice, it's very, very difficult to find work, to be able to wear colorful clothing, to wear what they want, and of course, there was vast variation in this. But these were some of the ways that women defined what it meant to be free. And when I asked them if the open prison feels like home, for a lot of them, there were elements of home in the open prison, but in some ways, it wasn't like home, and the reason it wasn't like home is because they were not living next to people who were like them. So by that, they meant they didn't belong to their community, their caste group, their religious background, even. Because we know the way that Indian rural India, as well as to a large extent the cities, are segregated and organized. You know, this part of the city, this group of people live, and this part of this city is where Muslims live. So that was the distinction that they drew, why it didn't feel like home, but there was also a certain kind of mobility that they found at the open prison that they did not have in their lives prior to being incarcerated.

Lalita du Perron: And does the open prison not immediately fall into, like, people start building communities, and this is your… this community is part of the open prison? Does the space not allow it, or do the… presumably there are guards, do they not allow it? Why does that not happen?

Trishna Senapaty: You mean the sort of segregation of… Yeah. I think that over the lifetime of the open prison, people shared a lot of stories, so there was a time when the prison was assigning women houses that were closer to each other, with the idea that this would keep women safer. But over time, the sort of single women, in quotes, they found relationships with other people who were at the open prison, who were prisoners at the open prison, but also with friends, right? People who had no compulsion to live in the open prison, who then started living with them at the open prison, despite not having any sort of compulsion to live there, because they were sort of friends of friends who they had met through this larger community of prisoners.

And there are guards, but they are just two guards at the entrance, who are at the gate, who stand at the gate throughout the day. There isn't an active policing of that space. And so, there is a sort of… and I say this because, you know, you can think about other parts of the city where people experience policing on a day-to-day basis. And my research was also conducted during, a part of it overlapped with the pandemic, where the city just became a very violent space for some people. And I think, so therefore, people's experience of the space did depend a lot on who they were, to some extent. So the houses that they built, some of these houses are a lot more like pakka houses. They are a lot stronger. They have televisions, and like coolers, so there is a class dimension to how people build their houses. But at the same time, all of these people are in the same space, and inside the same gated area, which is an unusual formulation of people living together.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah, it's, it's… it sounds… I don't want to say utopian, because people are incarcerated, but it sounds not like maybe the comparison, if we have to compare, is people getting the ankle bracelet, and then, you know, not having to be incarcerated at all. But in some ways, it feels even less restrictive than that, because people don't have ankle bracelets, they're just kind of expected to come back. But what… where they are while they're out of the prison, nobody knows, and nobody very much seems to care. Do the men… so you've talked about the women, that they're experiencing freedom in a very ironic way in the open prison. Is it similar for men, or only after they've been in the closed prison system that they feel that?

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, so everybody who is in the open prison has first had to be held in the closed prison. So whether men experience it the same way. For men, I think a lot of the reasons why men describe the reasons for their incarceration is conflicts over land and property, specifically in rural contexts where there is a boundary wall, and there is often an attempt by the neighbor to encroach upon others' land, and there's often caste and strong men who kind of support that kind of incursion into other people's land. And so there is tremendous violence that precedes their incarceration, that they themselves have experienced. And there's sort of these cycles of having to build and support a home.

And a lot of them, a lot of the men that I spoke to at the open prison, their home villages… their home is in the village, but they have to come to the city to work and earn a living. And so, for them, the open prison again becomes a support community among men, and the sort of ease in some way of having a dwelling, a house where you don't have to pay rent, which is a very, very basic house, right? It's really small, but there is a certain guarantee that you have that. Also, a lot of the people who have been released from the open prison, they continue to have small vending stalls outside the open prison, where they sell things like tea, or a barbershop. And the fact that they continue to have those stalls there, even once they have been released, and they don't move to a different part of the city far away from the open prison, attests to their ability to support themselves in a way that is tied to that space, and the networks of support, and the clientele who come to them. So the clientele for the person who sells chai is not only prisoners, but it's also people who work in the offices nearby, daily wage workers, etc. And so there is a sense of safety still tied to that space for men as well.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah. Do you think the open prison is a model of rehabilitation? Does it function that way, or do you think it could function that way? I mean, it sounds kind of amazing.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, so what I realized when I was doing this research is when I went there, I had a sense that it was a kind of… it creates a disconnect, right? You don't know how to place this kind of space, and people always ask me, so is this a prison, or is it not a prison?

Lalita du Perron: I think says more about the limitations of our minds than anything wrong with the model, actually. It's just what we think a prison should be, perhaps.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah. So there are aspects of it that are not at all like prisons, which I just spoke about, but at the end of the day, if you study the open prison as a structural relationship, it is a continuation of the closed prison, and this is because you have to go to the closed prison to be eligible to the open prison. You need to have completed a third of your sentence. You have to be convicted of a long sentence to be eligible for the open prison. So the over 70% of people who we spoke about who are under trials in India, there is no way that they have access to the open prison. And so, if you look at it within a larger system, the open prison is very much still a prison. And in some ways, it's kind of a tick mark on the kind of rehabilitative agenda of the state, right? It's a performance of a certain kind of rehabilitation. And the people who live there have their own critiques of the space, of these limitations. They have also built the space. Some of them have actually constructed their own homes, because there were not enough homes there. And there's a way in which this specific, almost utopian open prison has been widely covered by the media by now. So it's a poster project. But in terms of numbers, there are very few people who are benefiting from it, and other open prisons are really not to this scale. They don't have the same large expanse of land that sort of makes the open prison a very livable space, a space that is big enough for people to play a game of cricket in the morning, for example.

And some of this is because, with the support of activists who advocate for the open prison, this land, which is now prime real estate, which was earlier located in the margins of the city, has now become the center of the city, because the city has expanded. People have been able to preserve it, to keep it as it is. And actually, recently, the state was trying to reclaim part of this land to make a hospital, right? And making hospitals is always great, but the argument was that why should the open prison land be taken to build a hospital?

Lalita du Perron: Go somewhere else, do that somewhere else.

Trishna Senapaty: Yes, so that has been actually stayed now by the court. But there are efforts to sort of dismantle this system at the same time.

Lalita du Perron: For sure, yeah. Thank you so much, and any questions I may have had after your talk at Stanford have now been answered, so thank you for that. What were some interesting questions that you were asked when you were at Stanford, or how has your thinking shifted because of maybe a comment or something like that, if at all. It's okay if that didn't happen, but if it did, please share it with us.

Trishna Senapaty: Yeah, I think there were a couple of questions that I had before and after the talk, informally with folks at Stanford. And one of them was about abolition, and where the open prison fit in, sort of, this abolitionist vision. And I think that is something that I could talk a little about, because to me, in India, family abolition and prison abolition cannot be separated from each other, for the reason that familial confinement is often a kind of harm that people are facing. Right. And so, I became really curious about what kinds of families people were making in these sort of spaces. So that was one of the questions that I got.

And what I found through my research was that even spaces that were safe spaces, like shelters for women, often reproduce some of the practices of the prison. So, practices such as body searches, such as taking away people's phone, limited time to talk on the phone, were also practiced in state shelters for women's protection. But at the same time, there were informal arrangements of supporting women who were sort of in trouble with their families in households, in community households, and these sort of domestic arrangements were, for me, kind of like the seeds of how we might think of alternate forms of the family. Yeah. So that was one of the questions that I sort of got towards the end of the chat.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah, thank you for sharing those. I think it's a good reminder for our listeners who do attend academic talks to always ask questions. I mean, I think we all get… or we may get a little nervous about it. Like, maybe I was just spacing out, you know, the 30 seconds that you addressed my question, or whatever, but I think as a speaker, it's so helpful to realize what people are hearing. 

Well, thank you so much for joining me today, and talking about your work. Thank you. And as always, thanks to Manar Fleifel-Keniar for post-production.