Prison Matters: On Women, Prisons, and the Pandemic

During the pandemic, the language of exclusion to decongest prisons numbed judicial concern about women prisoners’ rapid descent into extreme rightlessness, affliction, and death. In this article, I describe the effects of the penal logic of inclusion and exclusion that sorted women prisoners into deserving or undeserving of interim bail. Without displacing the assimilation of majoritarian and patriarchal politics in the method of decongesting prisons, appellate courts named the culture of denial of bail as a technique of targeted harassment, a form of penal pedagogy that taught women a lesson. The culture of denying bail as a form of social and political control expanded and normalised impunity under the sign of exclusion .