What do experiences of incarceration and policing in varied cultural contexts tell us about power, social relationships and institutional reform? While prisons world over are sites of historical injustice and racialized violence, narratives of imprisonment equally illuminate spaces of creativity and emergent forms of politics. This course invites critical reflection on histories and practices of prison reform and prisoner rehabilitation in transnational perspective. Through a series of multidisciplinary texts that focus on the everyday work of archetypal figures of law enforcement scenarios like the prisoner, the prison guard, and the policeman we will locate reform as an object of ethnographic and social enquiry. 

 Prisons worldwide are widely acknowledged as institutions that impose strict limits on individual autonomy and mobility. Yet people’s freedoms are regulated through spatial and disciplinary technologies that exceed the prison. This course will explore how prisons and carceral systems are interconnected and operate globally. We will ask questions such as why are young women in India’s university hostels subject to routine surveillance and “curfew” hours? How do checkpoints and other restrictions on mobility shape everyday living in Occupied territories? To explore these we will look at how technologies of surveillance, bodily regulation, time, and labor popularly associated with the prison are exported to different domains of our everyday lives. And how families, communities, and institutions engage, embrace, resist, and reinvent these technologies from a cross-cultural and dynamic perspective. We pay particular attention to how they interact with structures of caste, and race and differentially impact people across a range of institutional and intimate sites such as psychiatric institutions, shelters, homes, and neighborhoods.