Reformative justice or just a policy shift?

Think about how frustrating it would be to serve time in jail as an innocent person who has never been convicted of a crime, and understand that this is a reality for over two-thirds of all inmates incarcerated in prisons across India, primarily those being held as undertrial prisoners. Many of these individuals are being held in inhuman conditions that violate every standard you could imagine for the respect of human dignity. The prisons of India have much higher capacities than they were designed for, but at present they are also structurally imploding.

However, the situation appears to be slowly changing. As evidenced by some state legislators and the judiciary nationally, they are beginning to ask a question that has rarely been previously asked, what purpose do prisons serve? The leading answer to that question seems to be shifting away from simply punishing prisoners to rehabilitating them. The 2026 Punjab Prisons and Corrective Services Bill is one of the best examples of this recent change; it provides for the transformation of prisons from cages into corrections facilities. The significant question to be answered is whether this Bill signifies true reform or merely describes a new area of policy.

With the 2026 Punjab Bill which supersedes the Prisons Act of 1894, a colonial holding act of a subjugated nation and existing to only contain that nation will now create a new system or classification for prisoners that considers risk and provides for skill development, educational opportunities, and mental health counselling. Additionally, there are provisions for protections of women, transgendered individuals, and aged prisoners groups that have historically been neglected in the administration of prisons. Security measures, including high-security zones and surveillance with artificial intelligence, are included in the Bill with the intent of creating a safer environment and a truly rehabilitative environment.

Punjab does not stand alone in this. Maharashtra moved in 2025 with its own prison modernisation bill, and Andhra Pradesh followed with significant amendments in 2026. Courts have been pushing this direction for decades, with the Supreme Court’s language around reformative justice growing steadily more emphatic. What is emerging is not state’s experiment it is a slow but real national consensus that the punitive model of imprisonment has failed, and that something more humane, and more effective, must replace it. The shift from ‘Prisons Act’ to ‘Correctional Services’ in legislative nomenclature is not merely symbolic. It signals a fundamentally different idea of what the state owes to those it chooses to incarcerate.

Here is where the optimism must pause. India’s prisons are operating, on average, at nearly 120 percent capacity. Some state prisons hold double or triple their sanctioned strength. In such conditions, the idea of individualised risk assessment and structured rehabilitation is not just ambitious it is, without serious investment, implausible. A prisoner cannot learn a trade in a cell designed for four people that holds twelve. A counsellor cannot provide meaningful support in a facility that has never employed one.

Furthermore, the challenge for those under trial extends even deeper. Individuals awaiting trial are presumed innocent, yet may spend several months to years incarcerated, often exceeding the duration of what the sentence would have been should they have been tried in a timely fashion. Even with the best of intentions, and even if the reform bills are written properly, they cannot change the inhuman environment created by torturous timeliness within the legal system for those being held until their guilt or innocence is determined; nor can they close the gap created by a lack of trained personnel to assist in rehabilitating those found guilty of crimes (this includes the need for rehabilitation counsellors, vocational training instructors, and mental health professionals) in all prisons in India today; most of which have none of those services available; corrections officers outnumber rehabilitative personnel; and the institutional culture of many of the prison systems in India is focused on control, vs care of the inmate.

The courts have been known to assert this position for some time. The Supreme Court ruled in the case of Sunil Batra v Delhi Administration (1978) that imprisonment does not extinguish fundamental rights — that the Constitution follows the prisoner behind the wall. In the case of Hussainara Khatoon v State of Bihar (1979) the Supreme Court identified the brutal failures of the undertrial detention system and provided an early basis for the establishment of the right to a fair and timely trial. While these court decisions did not bring immediate change, they did develop a legal framework around prisoners’ rights based on the Constitution that has yet to be enacted in legislation by legislators, who are just now putting the pieces together. Clearly, the courts have been proponents of reform for a long time. The problem has never been the courts supporting reform; however, the challenge lies with implementation of reforms.

The case for rehabilitation is not merely idealistic. Research consistently shows that prisoners who leave with a skill, an education, and psychological support are far less likely to return. A system that treats incarcerated individuals as reformable human beings ultimately produces safer societies. But consider what genuine reform requires in practice: a young man from a rural district, awaiting trial for three years, learning to stitch leather goods in a functioning prison workshop — that is what success looks like. Contrast that with the overcrowded barrack where no such resources exist, where the social world inside prison teaches not reintegration but deeper criminalisation. The difference between those two outcomes is not the law on the books. It is whether the state has the will, and the budget, to enforce it.

Overall, the 2026 Framework is an exception progressive document. It is rehabilitative and rights-based; the framework’s rehabilitative and rights-based approach is the necessary and overdue replacement for colonial thinking on prisoner rights and the treatment of vulnerable populations in Indian prison law. However, it does not address the issue of overcrowding, nor does it address the undertrial pipeline, there is also no specific funding for the counsellors or instructors needed to implement the vision of the framework. Additionally, because prisons are a State subject under the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, even though it was created as a model law, it would not have force in any State unless the State adopts it or enforces it. Thus, if reform takes place in Punjab only on paper, it is only reform in Punjab, and only if Punjab creates the legal framework to enforce it.

India is, slowly, moving from punishment toward rehabilitation. That shift deserves acknowledgment. But evolution is not transformation. A new law is not a new prison. And a policy shift without the infrastructure, funding, and political will to implement it risks becoming nothing more than a better-worded version of the same failure.

Prison reform in India is not about passing new laws it is about transforming the conditions inside prison walls. Until that happens, reform risks remaining an idea rather than a reality.

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