In Indian society, prisons are a taboo. They are spaces that evoke curiosity, disgust and fear. Whoever enters a prison, whether convicted or not, carries the social stain of incarceration for life. Society perceives it as a place that needs to be kept segregated, people that need to be punished and locked up. Hence, what goes inside those walls is unknown to most, or to put it differently, ignored by most. Prisoners’ rights or prisons are absent from election manifestos or legislative actions. Rarely any active attempt is made to rehabilitate, and most changes come by way of public action litigation. But what really goes on inside those walls? Are the people there really so dangerous to be locked away from the rest of society? What makes a person prisoner? These are the questions that Sudha Bhardwaj’s book, From Phasi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada answers, offering a rare, empathetic window into the everyday realities of incarceration.
Simran Kaur
LLM Student, National Law University, Delhi