Carceral culture: On prisons and disability-related facilities

The Supreme Court of India’s directions last week to provide disability-related support in prisons arose from a petition seeking to implement the existing disability law in places of detention, drawing on the experiences of G.N. Saibaba and Stan Swamy. Both men had serious physical conditions and asked for allowances that would have allowed them to cope with prison life; the state delayed or refused them these accommodations, with grave consequences. Dovetailing to the constitutional guarantees of equality and life with dignity for prisoners, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 obligates governments to ensure support for all services in their control. Many failures in implementing the Act are structural, however: prisons are a State subject whereas the Union government shapes policy through a model prison manual, laws and advisories. Recent national guidelines on prisoners with disabilities acknowledged special needs and called for accessible infrastructure and procedures whereas many State prison manuals still reflect older assumptions about a prisoner who is physically able. In a separate matter, the Court has held that caste-based segregation in jails is unconstitutional and suo motu said that it would monitor discrimination in prisons along caste, gender, and disability lines.

Colonial and postcolonial prison rules encoded social hierarchies, resulting in a routine assignment of sanitation tasks to Dalit and Adivasi prisoners, who are also over-represented among prisoners relative to their population, and the absence of specific obligations on prison authorities to support prisoners who cannot move or use sanitary facilities without assistance. The NCRB also records a nontrivial number of inmates with mental illness. While the Court had already censured it — in Muruganantham (2025), whose mandates the new order expands nationwide — for not disaggregating data by disability, it is reasonable to assume that many prisoners experience the intersection of caste bias and disability together. Yet, prison rules and oversight mechanisms have repeatedly normalised the idea that the discomfort faced by some bodies is part of the sentence rather than something the state needs to prevent. Following on from the new order, the Centre and States need to amend prison manuals to include clear duties about disability-related accommodation, and screen for disability at admission and support individuals. These measures require more funds, which means the state also needs to confront its carceral austerity, wherein it expands the punitive and security capacity of prisons at the expense of dispensing rights-related functions. Prison budgets have to be redesigned to treat accessibility and non-discrimination as core obligations. Finally, independent inspections and routine publication of disaggregated data on caste and disability inside prisons should support public oversight, or the Court’s directions will remain paper tigers.