Description

Laws, Justice and Rights for Women in the Modern Era
Editor: Prof. Dr. Yogesh Kumar Gupta, Ishan Ahmad and Premananda Murmu
Published by Universal Academic Books Publishers and Distributors,
New Delhi (India)
ISBN: 978-81-686113-5-1, 2026

Chapter 30

Behind Bars and Beyond Justice: Evaluating the Human Rights Conundrum of Women Prisoners

Surya S. Aathreyas
Student, CMR University, School of Legal Studies, Bengaluru

Abstract

Women’s use of the criminal justice system is dramatic, if not exclusively, unequal to men, with the criminal justice system largely overlooking designed around male incarceration norms, resulting in systemic neglect of their distinct legal, medical, and psychological needs. This chapter reflects a critical analysis on the situation of women in custody covering five interwoven approaches. Like structural invisibility of women in prisons due to prison architecture and prisoners space, socio-legal abandonment of women being detained, awaiting trial (pre-trial) because of poverty, delay in court processing, and lack of legal assistance. Further due to state’s lack of clarity on the rights of a child born or raised in prison, regarding a child’s right to care, development and dignity, the lack of reproductive health services and systems, where the shortfall in services can impair their health and compound their prison trauma and alienation, and the gender specific stigma of reintegration by citing the landmark judgments like R.D. Upadhyay v. State of Andhra Pradesh (2006).

In some occasions, rehabilitation programs promote gender stereotypes in place of empowerment of post-release reintegration through deploying constitutional principles, international human rights treaties and codes, prison manuals and judicial decisions. The chapter examines the paradox between legal norms and everyday experiences in prison with reference made in the cases such as Sheela Barse v. State of Maharashtra (1983). It calls for a penological approach marked by reformative justice which emphasizes the need to improve healthcare services reform, humane child-care services, accelerated adjudication of pending cases and destigmatizing access to reintegration. Ultimately, the chapter contributes to socio-legal scholarship advocating for women prisoners’ rights as an essential, yet neglected, frontier of human rights jurisprudence.

Keywords

Female Incarceration, Human rights Jurisprudence, Carceral Spatiality, Gender-responsive penology, undertrial abandonment.

1. INTRODUCTION

The first impression that a visitor gets from entering almost any prison in India, or most parts of the world, is not on what is there but on what is missing. The walls, the wards, the work-sheds and even the rules that govern life within were designed for one prisoner: the man, the adult male offender. Women arrived at these institutions almost as an afterthought, squeezed into a corner of a men’s prison or, at best, given a separate enclosure that borrowed every one of its assumptions from the male experience of incarceration, where this is not a matter of architectural inconvenience alone but it is the visible manifestation of what has to be seen as a deeper legal and moral failure, that of viewing women prisoners as a quantitatively marginal, therefore administratively insignificant, class of offenders when in fact they should be treated as full rights bearing individuals.