Five Lakh Stories

Epiphanies and reflections on second chances

“If you get these f*ers to do some boxing, all their issues will get solved.”

That is what Mohit and Saanchi heard at a meeting from a CSR leader, when they were pitching for their Project Second Chance Fellowship, an opportunity for ex-prisoners to find a second chance in life.

I want you to sit with that line for a moment. Not because it is unusual, but because it is ordinary. It is the kind of thing that gets said in 1:1 meetings in well-lit conference rooms by people who write charity cheques for a living. The assumption underneath it is simple: people in prison are broken in a way that a punching bag can fix. That their problems are theirs alone.

Funders of all hues find it quite difficult to grasp the issue of prisoners and why they need a second chance at all. Despite the arduousness and some arbitrariness of state processes, those who have never experienced jails look down upon those who have been to jail or been incarcerated in some way. The view is understandable, but limited, because of social, cultural, and economic reasons. Which is why we hear the kind of responses I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

Last week, on March 21, I was at the Dr. Ambedkar International Centre in New Delhi for the first ever India Prison Voices Festival, organized by Project Second Chance. I went as a friend and someone who cares about this work. I came back as something closer to a witness.

This day long festival had several former prisoners come on stage, share their stories in TED-style talks and articulate their journeys through prison and thereafter. Prison officials from various states showed up and shared their stories of improving prisons and engaging with prisoners as humans. There was art, murals, and a wall showcasing the ebbs and flows of prison life. The audience was a diverse gathering: prison leaders, philanthropists, field-based organizations working in the justice space, and prisoners themselves.

The focus of the festival was to surface lived experiences, and that is exactly what it did. This was not a room of policy experts talking about prisoners from a distance. It was a room where the people who had lived it shared the stage with those who had the power to change things, and anyone willing to listen.

The experience of the festival pushed me to write and explain the story around prisons. The data around prisons sheds light on why this problem is entirely addressable and solvable. But data without narrative is hard to grasp.

So let me try to bridge the two. What follows is an attempt to look at India’s prison crisis through three lenses: economic, social, and cultural. Not as an academic exercise, but as a way of understanding why what I saw in that hall in Delhi matters for everyone, including those of us who have never been inside a jail.

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The Cost of Caging

Prisons are spaces designed to punish “offenders”, those who in one way or another have crossed red lines defined by the law. Punishment sometimes takes years to come, but the real punishment is in the process. The gruelling grind of police procedures, repeated visits to courts, and the social stigma at the end of the whole process can break some of the most spirited people. We have seen this in the movies, and for some of us, also experienced this first hand.

Think of India’s prison system as a bathtub. Water flows in, water flows out, and the tub has a fixed capacity.

India has 1,332 prisons, built to hold about 4.4 lakh people. They currently house somewhere between 5.3 and 5.8 lakh inmates, depending on whose count you use. That is a national average occupancy of 131%, according to the India Justice Report 2025. Some 176 prisons are running at more than double their capacity. A dozen are at 400% and above. If a hotel ran at 400% occupancy, we would call it a humanitarian crisis. When a prison does it, we barely notice.

The inflow side is grim. India has roughly 5 crore pending cases in its courts. Lower courts, which typically handle bails have vacancies hovering around 20%. This means those who need bail especially the poor don’t get access to it. Only about 15% of prisoners access timely legal aid. The proportion of undertrials, people who have not been convicted of anything, has escalated from 66% to 76% in a single decade, according to IndiaSpend’s analysis of NCRB data. The overall prison population has surged roughly 50% in ten years.

The problem is straightforward: the tap is running faster than the drain can handle, and the tub was too small to begin with.

India invests nearly a billion dollars a year in its prison system, according to a DW investigation from 2025, yet much of that money sustains confinement rather than rehabilitation. In Tihar Jail, inmates earn as little as nothing per day for their labour; in Brazil, the legal minimum for prison labour is roughly $10 a day.

The economics of Indian incarceration are, at their core, an economics of warehousing.

But the spending is only half the picture. The other half is what we lose. Consider the demographics: 49% of undertrials are between 18 and 30, the most productive years of a working life. Over 18 lakh people flow through Indian prisons in a single year, as Economics Declassified documented using NCRB data. Even at a conservative estimate of minimum wage earnings (roughly Rs 350 per day), the productivity locked inside Indian prisons, just counting the young undertrials who have not been convicted of anything, amounts to nearly Rs 2,000 crore annually. Factor in all prisoners and the annual flow through the system, and the figure climbs to over Rs 16,000 crore in lost output per year. Research from the Brennan Center for Justice in the US context has shown that people who spend time in prison see their subsequent annual earnings reduced by an average of 52%. The damage does not end at the prison gate; it follows people into the labour market for years.

So we spend nearly a billion dollars a year to warehouse people, and in the process, we destroy several billion dollars’ worth of productive capacity.

We are, in a very literal sense, paying to make people poorer. In a country where 7-8 million young people enter the labour force every year and youth unemployment already runs at double-digit levels, locking up hundreds of thousands of working-age men and women, most of them un-convicted, is not just a justice failure. It is an economic one.

But there is evidence that spending differently works. A 2025 study by Jana and Kar in the Economic and Political Weekly found that expenditure per inmate has a positive, statistically significant impact on rehabilitation outcomes, with about a one-year forward lag.

Spend more today, fewer people return to prison a year from now.

Which brings me to open prisons. Rajasthan has been running them for decades, and the numbers are striking. An open prison costs roughly Rs 24 lakh per year to operate. A conventional jail costs around Rs 18 crore, as reported by the The Indian Express. That is a difference of nearly two orders of magnitude. Prisoners in open institutions live with their families, work in the local economy, and reintegrate into society while serving their sentences. In February 2026, the Supreme Court directed a massive expansion of Open Correctional Institutions across the country, calling them “rationally and constitutionally aligned” with the goals of the justice system, as The Indian Express reported.

Effective rehabilitation, some estimates suggest, could save up to Rs 1,200 crore annually, according to the India Justice Report 2023. That is not charity. It is fiscal common sense. But common sense, as the CSR funder’s boxing suggestion reminds us, is not always common.

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Life After the Lock

The numbers I have cited so far describe a system. But systems are made of people, and the people inside India’s prisons are not who most of us imagine them to be.

Start with the basics. Of the five-plus lakh people behind bars, 76% are undertrials, people who have not been found guilty of anything. They are legally innocent. Nearly half of all undertrials, 49%, are between 18 and 30 years old. Close to two in three are educated below Class X or are illiterate, according to IndiaSpend’s analysis of NCRB 2023 data. This is not a population of hardened criminals.

It is overwhelmingly a population of young, poor, undereducated men and women who got caught in the gears of a slow machine.

The caste and religious composition of India’s prisons tells its own story. Dalits make up 22% of the prison population, Adivasis 13%, and Muslims 16.5%, each group represented at rates significantly higher than their share of the general population, as documented by Sabrang India’s analysis of NCRB data. Prisons, in India as elsewhere, tend to collect those who were already at the margins. Incarceration does not create inequality on its own, but it deepens the grooves that are already there.

Then there are the women, who make up 4.3% of the prison population. It is a small number, and that smallness is itself the problem. India has only 35 designated women’s jails for 21,510 female inmates. The remaining 80% are housed in general prisons, in annexes or wings that are afterthoughts of a system designed almost entirely around men. Open prisons in 13 of the 17 states that have them admit only men. The system’s gender blindness is not malicious. It is simply total.

What happens when people leave prison is, in many ways, the real story. And it is not a good one.

A TISS survey found that 78% of Indians perceive former prisoners negatively. That perception translates directly into economic exclusion: 52% of employers are hesitant to hire someone with a prison record, according to the Centre for Criminology and Victimology. Only 40% of former offenders manage to secure formal employment after release. One in four faces outright rejection from their own families.

The vocational training offered inside prisons does little to close the gap. The training rate stands at a meagre 13.81%, and the programmes that do exist often teach skills disconnected from what the market actually needs. You can learn to weave a carpet in prison, but if there is no carpet market in your town, the skill sits idle.

India’s recidivism rate i.e. the re-arrest of prisoners for similar offenses, sits at approximately 56%, as noted in a 2024 study by Adusumilli, drawing on NCRB data. Norway’s is 20%. Canada’s is 28%. When you spend Rs 3 a day on rehabilitation and then release someone into a society that does not want them, recidivism is not a mystery. It is a prediction.

At the Festival, I met people who were living proof of this. A man who now runs a small business. A woman who works as a social worker. Their ordinariness was the point.

Reintegration is not about dramatic redemption arcs. It is about someone being allowed to be ordinary again.

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The Prison We Imagine

Here is a question that does not show up in government reports: what does India think a prison looks like?

The answer has changed over time, and the change reveals something important about the country itself.

In pre-independence India, prison was, for a certain class of people, a space of dignity and defiance. Jawaharlal Nehru spent nine years in British jails and wrote The Discovery of India during his imprisonment at Ahmednagar Fort between 1942 and 1945, producing what remains one of the most important books on Indian civilisation. Gandhi wrote portions of My Experiments with Truth in Yervada jail, and his method of courting imprisonment turned the act of going to jail into an expression of moral courage. As David Arnold and other historians have documented, prison writing became a form of political resistance under British rule, a counter-hegemonic act against the colonial state. Almost every major figure of the freedom movement, from Maulana Azad to Govind Ballabh Pant, from Sarojini Naidu to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, spent time behind bars. To have been imprisoned was, in that era, a mark of patriotism.

Post-independence, the prison lost that moral halo. As Mark Brown documents, the colonial structures of repression were not dismantled after 1947; they were inherited and repurposed. Prisons continued to function as spaces of confinement and control, but without the nationalist narrative that had given incarceration meaning. Over the decades, the public imagination of the prison split into two: a place where the corrupt and the powerful were occasionally sent (and from which they often emerged unscathed), and a place where the poor and the marginal disappeared into, often without conviction, almost always without a voice.

The prison went from being a site of national honour to a site of social shame.

This cultural shift matters because it shapes who we think deserves a second chance. If prison is what happened to Nehru, it carries a certain dignity. If prison is what happens to a young Dalit man from Bihar who could not afford bail, it carries stigma. Same institution. Different occupants. Different story.

For most of us today, the answer to what a prison looks like comes from the movies.

And the movies have a complicated relationship with the truth.

The most progressive Indian prison film may also be one of the oldest. V. Shantaram’s Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) tells the story of a jailer who rehabilitates six convicted murderers through work, trust, and community. It won the Silver Bear at Berlin and treated prisoners as redeemable human beings when most cinema did not.

What followed, largely, was spectacle. The dominant mode in Hindi cinema has been the prison as a backdrop for heroism. Consider Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan from 2023. As Scroll.in noted, chunks of the film take place in a prison, but none of the terrible conditions associated with incarceration make it to the screen. The prison in Jawan is a stage set. The suffering is implied, not shown. The hero walks out. The system is never questioned.

But 2025 brought two productions that, in different ways, pushed the conversation forward.

Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh’s Black Warrant (Netflix, January 2025), based on Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by Sunil Kumar Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury, does something rare: it takes the viewer inside Tihar Jail in the 1980s and keeps them there.

Then there was Anurag Kashyap’s Nishaanchi (September 2025), a crime drama in which a foiled bank robbery sends the protagonist to prison for ten years, tracing what happens to family and relationships in the aftermath. Kashyap has said he was reimagining 1970s storytelling traditions — Mother India, Ram Aur Shyam, Sholay — for contemporary audiences. Kashyap’s revival of that tradition suggests a cultural appetite for stories that treat incarceration not as a backdrop but as a condition with human consequences.

This matters because popular culture shapes what we think is possible. When every prison film ends with a breakout or a pardon, we learn to think of justice as an individual event, a hero’s triumph, not a systemic problem. When the conditions inside are never shown, we do not develop the vocabulary to discuss them. The CSR funder who suggested boxing as a solution was not being cruel. He was drawing on the only framework he had, one in which prisoners are stock characters who need toughening up, not complex people navigating a broken system.

The gap between the prison we imagine and the prison that exists is where some of the most interesting work in India is happening.

Take Studio Nilima, an action research collective based in Guwahati, Assam, working across five correctional homes. They released Assam’s first prison music album, a collaboration between incarcerated poets and outside musicians. The songs are about longing, regret, home — the ordinary emotions that the word “prisoner” tends to erase. Studio Nilima also runs reading circles, health camps, and wellbeing programmes through two initiatives: Pratidhwani (legal services) and Sarothi (psycho-social wellbeing and re-entry).

The India Prison Voices Festival itself belongs to this category of cultural intervention. What Project Second Chance has built with this inaugural edition is not just an event. It is a new grammar for talking about prisons in this country. When a former prisoner stands on a stage at the Dr Ambedkar International Centre and speaks in her own voice about her own life, she is doing something that the criminal justice system was never designed to allow. She is being heard as a person, not processed as a case number.

And finally the Justicemakers Mela, a pioneering two-day gathering by Agami that brings over a thousand justice change-makers together and has in many ways seeded connections between different actors in the justice community. It provides the cultural milieu that allows social connections to thrive - among all kinds of people, at all scales - who are passionate about the idea of justice and rule of law.

India has, for decades, lacked a cultural infrastructure around prisons. We have a robust culture of protest, of social justice movements, of legal activism. But the specific experience of incarceration has been largely invisible. What Studio Nilima, or the Prison Voices Festival are building is the beginning of that infrastructure. It is imperfect and incomplete. But it exists, and it did not exist twenty years ago.

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Second Chances, and Who Provides Them

I want to return to the CSR funder and their boxing suggestion. Not to mock them, because I think their reaction is honest. It is the reaction of someone who has not been given a reason to think differently. And giving people a reason to think differently is, ultimately, what the organisations working in this space are trying to do.

Project Second Chance, founded by Mohit Raj, along with Saanchi Marwaha in April 2017, is India’s first prison reform programme specifically designed for incarcerated youth between 18 and 40. Over 25 fellows have graduated from the programme. Seven interventions have been incubated. The project has collaborated with more than 11,000 prisoners. Fellows go on to become social entrepreneurs working on prison reform, which means the programme does not just help individuals. It builds a constituency. Project Second Chance also created India’s first helpline for released prisoners, which now receives roughly 150 calls a week. That number alone tells you something about the scale of unmet need. More recently, they have built a legal tech platform for inmates, both innovations made possible by trust-based, flexible funding from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, which provided the kind of unrestricted, multi-year support that allowed the team to experiment and iterate without the burden of project-by-project justification.

Prayas, the pioneering field action project of TISS’s Centre for Criminology and Justice, has been at this since 1990, long before prison reform had any currency in India’s philanthropic circles. Based in Mumbai, with work extending across Maharashtra and Gujarat, Prayas focuses on legal aid, rehabilitation, and vocational training. In 2003, they initiated a placement programme modelled on apprenticeship, which remains one of the few structured pipelines from prison to employment in the country. Prof. Vijay Raghavan of Prayas, who has worked in prisons for 33 years, has observed that the only way NGO work sustains inside prisons is when the DG Prisons is convinced of its value. It is a reminder that in this space, change happens from the top down as much as from the ground up.

The India Justice Report, created by a collective of multiple law and justice focused organisations, and backed by some of India’s leading philanthropists, now in its fourth edition, has done something deceptively simple but profoundly important. It ranks states on their capacity across police, judiciary, prisons, and legal aid, using entirely government data. It holds a mirror up to the state using the state’s own numbers. In a landscape where prison data is often scattered, inconsistent, or simply unavailable, the IJR has become the closest thing India has to a common factual ground on criminal justice.

And then there is the Centre for Social Justice, which has been a steady presence in legal empowerment work in some of the most difficult geographies in India.

I mention all of these not as a directory but as a corrective.

When people ask me, as they sometimes do, “Is anyone working on this?”, the answer is yes, and they have been working on it for longer than most of us have been paying attention. The challenge is not a shortage of good organisations. It is a shortage of funding, attention, and the basic willingness to believe that people who have been to prison deserve a shot at ordinary life.

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When Work Happens, Narratives Form

There is an argument I have come to believe in: when the work happens on the ground, narratives start forming. And there is evidence that the narrative around prisons in India is shifting, not just among NGOs and activists, but among policymakers who hold actual levers of power.

Consider the foreword that former Chief Justice of India Uday Umesh Lalit wrote for the India Justice Report 2022. “I would like to urge all agencies involved in the justice system to take heed of the IJR’s findings and insights,” he wrote. “Reports like this are a testament to our democratic ways of participatory functioning and must be welcomed as contributions of active citizens to their own governance.” When the former head of India’s judiciary endorses a civil society report and calls it a contribution to governance, it signals that the data and the work behind it have reached a threshold of credibility that is hard to ignore.

In November 2024, President Droupadi Murmu released the Supreme Court’s publication Prisons in India: Mapping Prison Manuals and Measures for Reformation and Decongestion. At the release, she said that the status of undertrial prisoners has been “an abiding concern” for her, according to a PIB press release. The President of India calling undertrial prisoners an “abiding concern” is not a throwaway line. It is a statement of institutional attention.

Then, in March 2026, the Supreme Court delivered what may be the most consequential judicial statement on prisons in recent memory. In the open prisons case (Suhas Chakma v. Union of India), Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta wrote: “The strength of a constitutional democracy is tested not merely by the liberties it guarantees in abstraction, but by the manner in which it treats those who stand at its margins, including persons deprived of their liberty with due process of law.” The Court went further, observing that the response of several states to its earlier directions on open prisons was marked by “rank apathy and indifference,” as documented by Supreme Court Observer. This is the highest court in the country naming the problem not as a resource constraint but as a failure of will.

The math is not complicated. The politics is.

But the fact that a former Chief Justice, a sitting President, and the Supreme Court are all speaking a language of dignity and reform, and that their words are being informed by the work of organisations on the ground, suggests that we are at an inflection point. The narratives are forming. The question is whether funding and political will can keep pace.

I left the Festival in the early evening. Delhi was doing its Delhi thing, honking and dusty and indifferent. On the ride back, I kept thinking about a word that came up repeatedly during the day: dignity. Not as an abstraction, but as a practical demand. The dignity of being heard. The dignity of being seen as more than your worst day. The dignity of being allowed to try again.

The quest for a just society is probably all about second chances.

Not the cinematic kind, where a hero walks out of prison into a swelling soundtrack. The ordinary kind. Where someone fills out a job application and does not have to lie about the last five years. Where a mother comes home and her children do not flinch. Where a young man who made a mistake at twenty is not defined by it at forty.

That is not a radical idea. It is the most basic promise a society can make: that failure is not final.

The question is whether we believe it enough to fund it.