Project Lead
Ruchita Vaidya
Abstract
Reform policies aimed at care-based approaches to incarceration are regularly enacted in India's criminal justice system, yet they consistently fail to produce systemic transformation. This research investigates why by examining the gap between policy intention and ground-level reality in Rajasthan's prisons. The study asks: How do reform policies travel from official mandates to ground-level implementation? How do officials at different hierarchical levels interpret and work with reform directives? What does examining the processes of implementation reveal about the structural constraints on institutional change?
The research addresses a fundamental gap in existing literature: the mutual constitution of care and power. Care and power are not separate domains but deeply entangled. Power relations determine what gets recognized as care, whose definitions prevail, and how care can operate as legitimization even when officials genuinely attempt to help. Conversely, care orientations shape how power operates institutionally. Existing accounts fail to examine this mutual constitution, leaving invisible how reform policies can be well-intentioned yet still reproduce hierarchies and control.
To investigate this, the research employs three interconnected approaches. Document analysis traces reform policies—the Model Prisons Act 2023, Rajasthan Prisons Act 2022, and earlier guidelines—to reveal how successive policymakers have framed prison reform. Sustained ethnographic fieldwork in 2-3 prisons examines how officials at different hierarchical levels (superintendents, deputy superintendents, jailors, frontline staff) interpret and implement these directives, attending to their differing perspectives, priorities, and constraints. Analysis of "behind-the-scenes" factors brings to light the informal hierarchies, resource scarcity, competing directives, and power dynamics that remain invisible in official documents but fundamentally shape practice.
The analytical framework is grounded in critical care ethics applied to institutional analysis. Care ethics traditionally emphasizes relationships, vulnerability, and interdependence; this framework extends it by foregrounding care and power as mutually constitutive. Care attitudes and relationships shape how power operates within institutions, while power relations fundamentally determine what counts as care. This provides analytical tools for examining reform implementation: How do processes of implementing reform recognize or deny human interdependence? Do they enable collective decision-making about what care means, or are definitions imposed hierarchically? How do institutional constraints foreclose particular ways of practicing care while enabling others? By centering relationality and interdependence as fundamental facts of life, the framework enables normative policy analysis that recognizes care as central to daily prison administration—even when unframed in those terms—and reveals how care practices are negotiated through power within institutions.
Policy reform often assumes a straightforward model: write good policy, and well-intentioned bureaucrats implement it. Ethnographic investigation reveals complexity. Officials genuinely attempt reform, often at personal cost, yet their efforts are shaped by structural factors—competing directives (punishment vs. rehabilitation), chronic scarcity, informal hierarchies, and concentrated power. Rather than obstacles to reform, these are structural features of how institutions operate. Understanding these processes through a care ethics lens reveals that systemic transformation cannot happen through policy reform alone.
Preliminary findings show that officials interpret reform differently across hierarchical levels: superintendents emphasize rehabilitation, lower-level staff prioritize discipline. Reform depends on exceptional individuals rather than institutional structures, making it fragile. Officials navigate contradictory directives by prioritizing immediate institutional pressures over reform mandates. A gap exists between reform rhetoric and daily realities, partly functioning as institutional legitimacy. These patterns reveal not implementation failure but structural tension: care and power are mutually constitutive in ways that make genuine institutional transformation through policy reform alone impossible. This analysis contributes to literature on policy implementation, institutional change, and care ethics by demonstrating how care operates as a political concept negotiated within bureaucratic structures, offering a framework for understanding both the limits and possibilities of reform in punitive institutions.
Supervision
Prof. Dr. Julia Eckert (University of Bern) and Dr. Rimple Mehta (Western Sydney University)
Discipline
Social Anthropology
