Tackling discrimination in Indian prisons

Hey there,

Journalists often end up working alone. But there’s so much more their journalism can achieve when it is paired with other forces.

Sukanya Shantha knows this well. She’d been working as an investigative journalist for more than a decade when, in 2023, she decided to bring law and journalism together by filing a legal petition based on her story on the inner workings of Indian prisons. 

She didn’t do this as an activist, but because her sources – as people who are or were in prison – were too vulnerable to do it for themselves. The result: a 200-page landmark judgment from the Indian Supreme Court. The court read out some of the evidence she used in the petition and described it as “most disturbing”. 

What had she uncovered that was so powerful?

Sukanya had a long track record of reporting on prisons. But this time she had got hold of several prison manuals – key documents that stipulated how prisoners were treated inside the walls of prisons. And she’d uncovered that prison manuals for several states across India were enforcing caste-based discrimination and segregation. Labour rules were laid along caste lines too.

A caste is a hereditary social group whose members traditionally share an occupation. There is a social order to this system, which at its most simplified has Brahmins on top and Dalits at the bottom. A person’s caste is assigned at birth. (There is a lot more complexity to this system rooted  in Hindu sacred texts and the legacy of British colonialism. Here is a journalist's guide to reporting on caste and its socio-economic implications.) 

Caste-based labour rules for prisoners meant that when it came to cleaning the toilets a lower caste person was summoned. Meanwhile, tasks in the kitchen or legal documentation jobs were reserved for the “purer” higher castes.

Beyond the prison manuals, Sukanya also collected evidence on the lived experience of her sources. Through letters from inside prison and interviews with former prisoners, she captured the nuanced discrimination.

One experience she highlighted was a young man in pre-trial detention who seemed to be given only cleaning jobs, including once being asked to clean an overflowing sewer by hand. He had been identified as belonging to a washerman caste and so he was given the “lowest jobs” in the prison. In his actual job, he was a trained electrician – but that didn’t matter.

It took her six months to report on the story, but three years to actually file a petition to the courts; she didn’t want to be with one to do it. She didn’t want to “become the story” – and she hadn’t experienced the injustices herself. But she finally resolved that it had to be her. Her sources were not in a position to do it – it could have had repercussions for their lives both outside and inside prison.

While working on her legal research for the petition, Sukanya found even more angles to the story. She learnt that whole communities of marginalised people were branded as "habitual criminals” in these manuals – a term that was first introduced under British colonial rule.

The court judgment paid particular attention to this long history of stereotyping against certain tribes. It ruled that labelling a whole group as having “a strong natural tendency to escape or by habit accustomed to theft” was basically treating them with extreme exclusion. Sukanya told me that she feels that journalists only have “one greed” when reporting on issues of social concerns, and that is: “something needs to change”.

Now, on the other side of her original hesitation, she said: “If change comes through petition, there is no reason why we should not be looking at judiciary also as one of the strategic ways to actually make our work have some kind of impact.”

Prisons are opaque spaces, and sometimes the shining light of journalism isn’t enough. What really took this story from a revelation to actual change was taking the evidence to court.

“Sukanya and I had been in touch through the investigation. She interviewed me when she first uncovered the prison manuals.

When the story came out, we were hopeful that something massive would come out of it. One state-level court took the initiative to order changes in the prison manual of Rajasthan. We expected a cascading effect across different high courts. We waited for two years, but that didn’t happen.

This is when we decided to approach the Supreme Court – the highest court at the national level – because there were around 18 states’ prison manuals involved.

Journalists and lawyers are constantly working in parallel with each other. As a lawyer, you start feeling for the issues you are working on and you want an impact: if not in the courtroom, then outside the courtroom. Journalism has that power in the public domain, where it can stir conversations. As a result, lawyers often send journalists stories. On the other hand, if a journalist is reporting on an issue and comes across an individual who is suffering, they direct them to lawyers they know for legal assistance.

In India, we have a jurisprudence called the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) which means that an individual [acting to secure the] public interest – even if that individual is not a directly affected party – can approach the court for the enforcement of the rights of people who are not able to approach courts. Often this is because of reasons like illiteracy or lack of financial resources.

Sukanya is not the first Indian journalist to file a petition with the Supreme Court. In the 1980s, Olga Tellis, a journalist and activist, filed a petition challenging a local authority’s decision to displace slum dwellers. It led to a historical moment in human rights and Indian constitutional law. And Sheela Barse spearheaded multiple petitions around prisoner’s rights especially women prisoners and juvenile rights that resulted in legal reform.  So, it is a jurisprudence that has been around in India and has been actively used. 

In this case, we felt that if a journalist who has written the story approached the court in the PIL realm, it would have the desired impact, without having a negative outcome on the lives of those who are impacted and sharing their stories.

Incarcerated people – even those who were formerly incarcerated – are made vulnerable when their details are made public.

Instead of getting them to petition, Sukanya made the petition and then brought the testimonies of those directly impacted on record before the court. In this way, their names were not revealed through an affidavit.

When the court judgment was passed, we expected the court to just say that it would strike down the provisions. But the grand manner in which the 200-page judgment was ruled, has changed and shaped the discourse on prisons in a positive way. Now, if anyone says there is casteism in prison, no one can dismiss it.

The court also went beyond caste discrimination, to take cognisance of all kinds of discrimination in prisons. Whether it is disability-related, gender-related, sexuality-related, religion-based.

There are multiple judgments and multiple cases that end in courts relating to prison reform. All this while, they were addressing issues of prison reform: overcrowding or inhuman conditions inside prisons. But this is the first time that discrimination based on identity in prisons has been ruled on by the court. I think that is quite a brave step taken by the court.

Outside of prison, caste in society is very much an everyday reality. An average Indian experiences caste from the time of birth to the time of death. You are told where to bury people based on caste in this country.

The way I look at it is, you cannot end caste inside prisons, unless you end the prison of caste overall. Caste as a system is a prison, it stops you from realising your potential in so many ways … your human potential.”

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And that’s all! Thanks for reading and have a lovely week,