Book Review: Women, Incarcerated: Narratives from India by Mahuya Bandyopadhyay and Rimple Mehta (eds)

Abstract

presidents in shaping punitive policies in the post-colonial Uganda, and puts forward a punishment marked by a hyper-rigid verticality of power (Atenga, 2007: 9). Although this analysis is highly relevant to the understanding of the institutional history of states, it does not give us enough details about the agency of inmates. It does not tell us about the relational prison and the porous prison (Martin and Jefferson, 2019), the degrees of permeability (Schneider, 2020) that allow prisoners to adapt, circumvent the rules of punishment, or to forge links with their executioners in order to take advantage from their stay in prison. Such a micro-analysis of incarceration is not given enough prominence, despite the author’s desire to quote and interpret prisoners’ self-writings. Moreover, the author states from the outset that she wants to produce an analysis that adopts ‘a different approach, moving away from reformist prescriptions or sensationalized stories of brutality to instead focus on how incarceration was conceptualized, enacted, experienced, and contested in postcolonial Uganda’ (p. 17). It is difficult to develop such a reflection on prisons in the age of sensory criminology without highlighting a sensational story that triggers emotions. The political brutality described in his book is itself part spectacle, part theatre of violence. This spectacle and this theatricality of violence convey emotions that readers may interpret as sensational stories. It was therefore difficult, even for the author, to develop a historical analysis of prisons in authoritarian regimes without causing a sensation, so to speak.