In the wake of the 1857 uprising, the British found themselves with more prisoners than prisons. To manage the overflow of captured rebels, they turned to the remote Andaman Islands, where they established a penal colony that would eventually become the infamous Cellular Jail, also known as Kala Pani, in Port Blair in 1906.The journey to these islands was punishment in itself. Prisoners were forced to violate caste and social norms: food was shared, water came from a common pump, and men of all backgrounds were shackled together. Disease ran rampant, and hygiene was nearly absent.The nineteenth-century Urdu poet Munir Shikohabadi alluded to the impact of Kala Pani in the following verses:When they had to leave India and come to this islandThe prisoners’ evil fate made the water blackOther scholars interpret ‘black water’ a metaphor for the apparent religious or caste transgressions experienced by convicts of high caste or status when they travelled across the sea.Prisons had existed in the Indian subcontinent since the third century BC, but they were mainly used to confine political rivals or rebels till their trials. Punishments such as public shaming (tashir), fines, banishment from a place, amputation, and mutilation were far more common expressions of disciplining. The British East India Company, however, began replacing these traditional punishments with imprisonment and overseas transportation.“The prison, in fact, is a modern response to crime and punishment,” explains Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Criminology and Justice, School of Social Work at TISS. Tracing the evolution, he notes, “Crime and punishment were always largely seen through the lens of retribution — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. But over time, this philosophy began to shift, especially with the institutionalisation of prisons. Yet, while the methods of punishment have changed, the severity of captivity remains.Story continues below this adIndigenous methods of punishmentIn the Vedic period, the administration of justice in most cases, especially ordinary crimes, was not part of the state’s responsibility. While offences like murder, theft, and adultery are mentioned, there is no indication that the king or a judge was involved in passing judicial orders in these cases.“Largely, the system to deal with crime and punishment in India was through community-administered systems. Only a small percentage of cases reached the king’s court. Most crimes would be dealt with either at the village level, through the panchayat system, or the system of a few hundred villages coming together, what we can call the taluka level, and so on,” says Raghavan in an interview with indianexpress.com.The Dharmasutras and the Dharma Shastras, in contrast, mention the presence of a well-developed judiciary. Foreign travellers such as Megasthenes and Fa-hien, who visited India between the 4th and 5th centuries BCE, describe Indians as law-abiding and note that criminal activities were rare. However, the accounts of Hiuen Tsang, who visited in the seventh century CE, detail increased crime and harsh treatment meted out to prisoners.In Indian Prison: A Sociological Enquiry (1979), academic Indra Jeet Singh writes that “Hindu law did not always work in favour of the privileged. Manu lays down that as the penalty for theft the Shudra…” The penalty for theft varied by caste. A Shudra was to pay a fine equal to eight times the value of the stolen goods; the Vaishya, Kshatriya, and Brahmin were to pay sixteen, thirty-two, and sixty-four times the value, respectively. “The privileged caste was expected to follow higher standards of conduct than the lower, and their criminal acts were correspondingly more vigorously punished,” he writes.Story continues below this adAlso read | From the Mauryas to the British: Budget allocation, revenues and taxes in Indian historyIn ancient India, there is no vivid mention of the construction of prisons. “Many critics have suggested that abandoned and small fortresses served the purpose of prisons,” notes Singh. Academics Amarendra Mohanty and Narayan Hazary, in Indian Prison System (1990), add: “In India, the early prisons were only places of detention where an offender was detained until trial and judgment and the execution of the latter.”In simple terms, explains Raghavan, prisons have largely been used to care for two categories of people. “One is prisoners of war, and the other is enemies of the state”. Discretionary punishments such as public disgrace, fines, banishment from a village or town, amputation, and mutilation were common expressions of disciplining. Penal colony in the Andaman Islands (1890s, Wikipedia)In the early years of Ashoka, there was a prison in which most of the traditional tortures were inflicted and from which no prisoner is said to have come out alive. “But from his moral edicts which belong to his later period of rule — when he was influenced by Buddhism — it appears that many reformatory measures were taken,” writes Singh.Story continues below this ad“One of Ashoka’s edicts,” says Raghavan, “talks about how prisoners are to be treated, how their welfare is to be looked into, and how their children are to be cared for”.There were, however, occasions when prisoners were released. According to Chandragupta Maurya’s advisor Kautaliya, the young, old, disabled, and destitute prisoners had to be freed on the king’s birthday and on the full moon days. “Prisoners were also released on the acquisition of a new territory, on the anointment of the crown prince, and on the birth of a son to the king,” note Mohanty and Hazary.During the Mughal rule, crimes were dealt with by the Sharia laws. “The Sharia laws, too, had some cruel punishments. So right from the ancient period till the coming of the British, prisons were not a common form of dealing with offenders,” says Raghavan.The British RajThe nature of confinement in India underwent major shifts with the arrival of the East India Company in the seventeenth century. Mohanty and Hazary note, “The institution of jail, as understood these days, is of British origin and was introduced in India as a part of British Administration. Before the institution of jail, the system of punishment did not require any financial burden on the part of the Government”.Story continues below this adAfter 1790, the Company began to use imprisonment as a punishment extensively. “It converted existing buildings, including military forts and barracks, into prisons, and purpose-built dozens of new institutions. It placed them under the control of district magistrates,” notes historian Clare Anderson in The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (2007).In 1836, a jail enquiry committee was appointed with Thomas Babington Macaulay as a member. The committee, tasked with reforming the Indian prison system, recommended extensive changes after two years of sittings. “The enquiry committee was a landmark in the history of penal administration in India. Prison was given different treatment, the nature and character of the institution assumed a changed meaning, though it remained punitive basically,” writes Singh. The Alipore Gaol, Calcutta, in 1870 (Wikipedia)It was after the committee’s recommendations that a chain of central prisons was constructed. In 1848, a Central Prison was built in Agra, followed by Bareilly Central Jail. In 1854, the Banares, Meerut, and Jabalpur Central Jails were established. In 1860, the Lucknow Central Jail was built.Further, the East India Company set up a series of penal settlements across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. Examples include the Andaman Islands, Mauritius, Melaka and Singapore, and Burma (now Myanmar). By 1857, there were 40 jails in the North-West Provinces and 55 in the Bengal Presidency.Story continues below this adThough there were a few large jails, like Alipur in Calcutta and Agra in the North-West Provinces, these did not typically resemble the prisons of the country. “Most jails were simple constructions of mud and thatch holding a few hundred prisoners; some had no secure walls or gate,” notes Anderson. This lack of infrastructure, however, would cost the British their stability.The 1857 revoltThe British were faced with serious challenges in the aftermath of the 1857 revolt. Thousands of prisoners had escaped, and several jails were either damaged or destroyed. “There was no space to imprison those who surrendered or were recaptured, let alone those who were convicted of mutiny offences,” notes Anderson.More from Express Research | How Delhi was destroyed and rebuilt after the revolt of 1857Forty-one jails across north India had been broken open during this period. In the North-West Provinces, Anderson writes, rebels broke open 27 jails, including Meerut, Muzzaffarnagar, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Moradabad, Bareilly, Agra, Kanpur, and Allahabad. They also opened several jails in Bengal, Bihar, Hazaribagh (now Jharkhand), and Chittagong (in Bangladesh). “In the Panjab, the affected jails were Delhi, Gurgaon, Hissar, Rohtak, Sirsa, Ludhiana, and Sialkot,” Anderson notes. Over 23,000 prisoners had escaped from jail, causing damage worth Rs 220,350. Most prison records, too, had been destroyed.Story continues below this ad Attack of the mutineers on the Redan Battery at Lucknow, 1857 (Wikipedia)Frustrated, the Bengal government decided to transfer all prisoners sentenced to more than three years’ imprisonment to its penal settlements in the Straits in August 1857. Those sentenced to a term of more than three years would go to Melaka (now Malacca), and those sentenced to life to either Pinang (Penang) or Singapore. Amidst rising resistance from the Straits and difficulty in transporting prisoners, a penal colony, also known as Kala Pani, was opened up in the Andaman Islands in 1858.In 1862, the Indian Penal Code was enacted, which defined each offence and prescribed punishment for it. “The Indian Penal Code talks about three types of punishment. It talks about imprisonment, fines, and death — capital punishment. And that’s when the whole penal system gets codified across British-ruled India. Before this period, we did not use prison as a formal mode of punishment,” says Raghavan.The present dayAccording to the India Justice Report (IJR) 2025, Indian prisons today still function under the colonial-era Prisons Act of 1894.According to Mohanty and Hazary, the Prisons Act of 1894 restricted and regulated the use of whipping, cellular confinement and penal diet. “It provided for the classification of different offenders and tried to secure uniformity of treatment of all offenders in jail.”Story continues below this adToday, most prisons suffer from extraordinary overcrowding and infrastructural inadequacy. Inmates’ regime begins at the crack of dawn, around 5 am. Lunch is served between 9 am and 9:30 am, and is among the two full meals served in a day, says Apurva Vivek, Prison Reform Advocate. Some rehabilitative programmes start around 10:30 am, ending at noon when prisoners are locked up briefly. Vivek notes that dinner is served at 3:30 pm. “They’re locked up again at 5”.In 2023, the Ministry of Home Affairs framed the Model Prisons and Correctional Services Act with the vision to replace the antiquated Prisons Act of 1894 and the Prisons Act of 1900. “The new Act,” as per IJR 2025, “is aimed to formally shift policy on incarceration from retributive to rehabilitative and reformative..” It includes schemes for vocational training, education, and welfare of prisoners. It also aims to bring in technology to ease prison administration, and improve safety and security measures. The Act also provides separate accommodation for women and transgender prisoners. However, as prisons are a state subject; this Act is only a ‘guiding document’ for states. “It therefore remains to be seen how many states will actually adopt the new provisions in the legislation,” notes the report.Meeran Chadha Borwankar, a former IPS Officer and author, tells indianexpress.com: “Overcrowding of prisons and an overworked prison staff are among the key challenges today. Prisons have around 70% undertrials, which is a travesty of justice. As we do not have enough medical facilities, and due to overcrowding, skin and lung infections abound. Security is often breached as inmates smuggle mobile phones inside. Free legal aid, too, is not readily available to prisoners, especially the undertrials”.An alternate setup, suggested by Vivek, is an open prison. She says, “The biggest open prison in India is in Sanganer, Rajasthan. Imagine it to be a village where people live with their families, are allowed to go outside to work, and their children have schools to attend”. She explains that such prisons curb any desire for defiance or escape. “The costs of maintaining open prisons are also much lower, and it is an actual rehabilitative system, even when very few people are eligible for it,” she argues.Among the elements that continue to reflect the colonial system is the discrimination inside prison premises. “I think the class-caste system exists especially in an institution like prison because custodial institutions are the melting pot of the ostracised. They are made up of people who have fallen through the cracks. So there is an overwhelming population of poor people, many of whom belong to minority communities. Within them is a category of prisoners who are destitute. No one ever comes to visit them,” explains Vivek. On the other end of the spectrum, she notes, are a tiny minority of privileged prisoners — those who get food from the canteen, pay somebody to do their work, have access to a lawyer, have family support, etc.“And yet the prison as an institution of punishment has proved remarkably enduring in independent India, as in post-colonial nations elsewhere,” concludes Anderson, adding, “Even the architecturally imposing cellular jail at Port Blair, which opened in 1906 and incarcerated all subsequent freedom fighters, was used as a local prison until it was designated a national memorial in 1969”.References:Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel FoucaultIndian Prison: A Sociological Enquiry by Indra Jeet SinghIndian Prison System by Amarendra Mohanty and Narayan HazaryThe Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion by Clare AndersonColonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India by Deana HeathIndia Justice Report (2025)