CCL214 | Carceral Landscape in India : Historical, Legal and Social Perspectives

This course provides an in-depth exploration of the corrections aspect of the criminal legal system, with a specific focus on the Indian context. The course will equip participants as change agents by enabling them to use legal and policy knowledge and skills to amplify the experiences of justice-impacted individuals in venues where laws are made and power is exercised.

This course develops on foundational courses of Criminal Law, Gender Studies, and Sociology, but students will not require prior exposure to these courses before enrolling for this course. It extensively examines the intersection of law, society, and the prison system, and approaches it from a critical and comparative lens. The course will cover historical developments, legal frameworks, human rights issues, and contemporary challenges within the Indian carceral system, as well as motivate students to reimagine carceral policies, institutions, and norms that continue to be taken granted. It will also provide a brief introduction to the carceral system in the U.S., which incarcerates the largest number of people in the world, and provide a glimpse into the responses that are emerging from civil society and academia to address this.

The course includes a balanced mix of incarcerated people’s narratives, human rights reports, case law, national and international law. It is important for students to learn the law as it stands (especially determined through case law in this space) first to be able to truly engage in a critical assessment of it, and then to be able to understand the realities of the carceral system from people who have experienced it first-hand. The focus of this course is ascertaining the gap between law and praxis, understanding law as a tool of liberation and trauma, and critically discussing the foundations of criminal law institutions.

The course adopts a seminar style discussion. Students signing up for this class should be ready to read materials and watch videos allotted with a critical eye in preparation of each class, and be willing to participate in discussion by respectfully articulating their opinions in class. Class activities would include pairing students into groups to discuss policies from different perspectives.

Students will also be required to submit response papers for four (4) themes of their choice, before discussions for the respective weeks.

The course will begin with an introduction to the objectives of the criminal legal system, what justice means to students, and then deep-dive into the legal framework on carceral policies. The course will then proceed towards understanding lived realities in Indian prisons, and try and map them with the stipulated objectives of policies, and then encourage students to imagine alternatives.

I would also bring in a formerly incarcerated individual as a guest speaker, for the students to gain a holistic perspective about the facilities available in prisons. This would underscore the importance of relying on the pedagogical tool of “lived narratives” to build awareness in the space.