Reform and everyday practice

International human rights regulations, norms for the treatment of prisoners and welfare state imperatives—institutionalised in numerous national and international regulatory bodies—have helped make the ‘human element’ an imposing factor in processes of imprisonment and punishment. Questions such as whether prisons exist to punish offenders or to care for them, heal their minds and bodies and reintegrate them into society, have become significant in managing prisoner populations. In this article, I explore the idea and practice of reform by drawing on key government documents and reports on reform and ethnographic fieldwork in a central prison in Kolkata, India. First, I critically examine the idea of reform and explore its colonial underpinnings and its implications in actual prison management. I then present the organisational practice of reform through instances from everyday life in prison. Finally, I focus on prisoners’ conceptions of reform to show how they offer a critical perspective on reform. Through this, I argue that there is a disjunction between the idea and practice of reform. The idea of reform entails making a prisoner into a ‘normal’ citizen, fit to return to life in society. In the practice of reform, emphasis is placed on improving the material conditions of prison life, and the reformative practices become strategies of control. The programme of reform then becomes a site for exercising arbitrary control over the prisoners as the facilities for improving the material conditions of prison life are granted arbitrarily. The prison is an institution where the state deliberately maintains opacity by restricting its interaction with civil society. The practices of reform in prison and the issues of prison governance that they entail, are crucial aspects through which the character of the state finds expression.