The Supreme Court judgement in Suhas Chakma v. Union of India (2026) on 26 February 2026 represents a significant intervention in the long-standing crisis of social reintegration of prisoners. Emerging from a writ petition filed during the pandemic, the case sought to address systemic failures in their rehabilitation and underutilization of open correctional institutions (OCIs) across the country. The prison conditions reveal a deep tension between constitutional ideals and penal practices.
The Court Approach
The Court framed the issue of inhuman conditions of living in prisons not merely as an administrative failure but as a constitutional crisis. It acknowledged that the strength of a constitutional democracy lies in how it treats those at its margins, including prisoners. The court insisted that the constitutional guarantees of life and liberty extend beyond prison gates. It recognized that prisons are institutions of social exclusion, which deeply undermine this constitutional promise.
The court reaffirmed its earlier judgement in In Re: Inhuman Conditions in 1382 Prisons (2018), in which it held that open correctional institutions are a humane alternative to the regular prisons. However, its directions in that case remained on paper. As the petitioners argued that the open institutions are a solution for the dangerously crammed prisons, the court recognized deeper illiberal tendencies in their management. Their rigid penal practices in fact mostly reflect the punitive approaches of the criminal justice system as a whole. For instance, the persistent overcrowding of prisons is the result of illiberal bail practices. However, in this case, the court rightly recognizes that the underutilization of OCIs is the result of rigid and punitive approach of the governments. It also attempted to reframe the prison practices in constitutional terms to address the structural causes of congestion.
The Normative Framework
The judgment advanced a normative framework that situates OCIs within constitutional values of dignity and social justice. It insisted that incarceration must remain consistent with evolving standards of human dignity and fairness. Its directions include formulation of common minimum standards for governance of OCIs, living conditions, healthcare, education, vocational training, and family integration. Insisting that these institutions must be gender-sensitive and inclusive, the court said that the OCIs must ensure that women, transgender persons, and vulnerable categories are not excluded. More than 13 states categorically exclude women prisoners from OCIs. Even those states with provisions for women, too failed to create these facilities to overcome the processes of their exclusion. They face systematic disadvantages. They are less likely to receive education, vocational training, bail, or transfers to open prisons; in many states there are no autonomous open prisons for women, and where “open” wards exist they are often remote or functionally closed. This gender gap deepens their social vulnerability on release and undermines the stated objective of open prisons to restore dignity and social functioning. Since their exclusions are open and blatant, this gendered nature of incarceration should have been recognized long back. The “security-obsession” disproportionately govern the penal policies, restricting women’s access to rehabilitative spaces. Consequently, the court insisted on focussing the reformative potential of the prisoners rather on length of their incarceration. This framework reflects a normative shift from punishment to individual healing and social reintegration.
Wages and Labour Rights
The discourse on the social reintegration of prisoners with dignity will remain vacuous without a position on the prisoners’ right to equal and fair wages. The court should have revisited its earlier decision in State of Gujarat v. High Court of Gujarat (1998), in exempting the prisoners from protections under Article 23. It should have recognized prisoners’ rights to wage parity as integral to human dignity. Prison labour, without fair wages, perpetuates exploitation. As the court then left the question to the state discretion, stark discrepancies in their wages abound across the country. The court should have extended its dignity framework to prison wages. Without binding standards in this regard, prisoners’ social reintegration with dignity remains elusive.
Consequently, prison labour and wages vary widely. The study I had done in 2022 demonstrate that open prisons are primarily agricultural colonies and offer low wages ranging from Rs. 55 to 252 per day across states. These wages hardly uphold their economic independence. Even in closed prisons industries are primitive and outdated. For them, industrial or market-linked employment is rare as they are often located far from industrial towns without employment markets. Hence their access to higher-paid, diverse jobs is very limited. They have to “find their own work” under time restrictions that make stable work opportunities difficult. Consequently, their financial survival continues to be fragile and their transition from prison wages to sustainable livelihoods is often incomplete.
While these prisons can soften the harshness of incarceration and restore social ties, yet in practice they often reproduce scarcity, inequality, and institutional neglect. The lived experiences of their inmates depend on whether the open prison is truly “open,” whether families can live with inmates, the availability of meaningful work, access to education and health care, and the generosity of parole and premature-release policies of the states.
Prisoners’ Living Experiences
Restoring family contact is the clearest positive effect where open prisons are genuinely autonomous and nearby. In Rajasthan many open prisons allow prisoners to live with their children and spouse and send children to school, which greatly facilitates their contact with families and friends and social life. When open prisons are only nominal like in several states, however, inmates experience little real freedom: they treat an “open prison” as a barrack or a ward of a closed prison, so prisoners cannot live with families or move freely, and the promise of reintegration remains unfulfilled. States with few open prisons (Assam, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh) force prisoners to choose between staying near family or accepting transfer far away, weakening social support that is crucial for post-release adjustment. The apex court should have clearly ruled out this nominal practice of running ‘open prisons’.
Restorative Justice Sans Organized Effort?
Since open prisons are mostly agriculture colonies, they provide no educational programs for their inmates. Moreover, penal policies mandate that only illiterate prisoners from hard labour background are transferred to open prisons. My study demonstrates that less than one-third of released prisoners had participated in any educational program, and female prisoners are disproportionately illiterate—conditions that blunt the rehabilitative potential of open prisons. Many prisons offer little or no vocational training; where training exists, it is often mismatched to market needs or lacks continuity after release, reducing the practical value of time spent in prisons. Without systemic investment in market-relevant skills and sustained support, prisons fail to translate into stable post-release employment.
Restricted Process Generates no Hope
Parole regimes of prisons shape morale of the prisoners. States with liberal parole policy (Kerala, Madhya Pradesh) give inmates regular leaves that sustain family ties and hope; states with restrictive parole or opaque premature-release practices leave many prisoners spending decades without realistic prospects of reintegration. A liberal policy of paroles and sentencing reviews, as in Rajasthan, creates clear pathways back to society, while inconsistent or punitive premature-release policies erode their rehabilitative promise.
Open prisons have real potential to transform incarceration into a phased reintegration—restoring family life, offering work, and building skills—but that potential is realized only where liberal premature release policy, staffing, health services, market linkages, and parole practices are aligned. The evidence from the field shows that design deficits such as nominal open prisons, inadequate education and vocational training, weak medical care, and gendered exclusions turned many open prisons into a halfway compromise rather than a true bridge to society. Meaningful impact requires state commitment to autonomous open-prison infrastructure, market-relevant training, reliable post-release support, and parity for women.
Implication for Prisoners’ Lived Experience
Ultimately, for prisoners who benefit from genuinely open, well-resourced prisons, the experience should be restorative: daily life should have family contacts, purposeful work, and incremental freedom that rebuilds their social identity. For many prisoners, however, the label “open” masks continued marginalization—low pay, poor health care, limited education, and uncertain release prospects—so the lived reality remains one of constrained agency rather than renewed citizenship. The difference between these outcomes is policy and practice: where states invest in true openness, the living experience shifts from survival inside a system to preparation for life beyond it.
In the backdrop of these field realities, the judgment represents a bold attempt to confront the insularity of penal system. Its attempts to humanize treatment and reintegration of prisoners will remain elusive without confronting the above realities as well as punitive instincts of judiciary. If the responses of state governments to this case are any clue, they reveal their deep reluctance to transform the lived realities of prisoners. Realizing this, the court underscored the fact that the strength of a constitutional democracy lies not in the severity of its punishments but in its commitment to restore dignity and hope even to those who have transgressed the law. Open correctional institutions embody this promise, but realizing it demands constitutional convictions, sensitivity to human suffering, and societal commitment to justice as fairness by all. By situating carceral institutions within constitutional values of dignity and equality the Court sought to transform them from punitive exclusion to rehabilitative inclusion. Let us see how long will it take to realize these promises.
Author Bio – Dr Murali Karnam Professor of Human Rights and Executive Director, Access to Justice for Prisoners Program, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad
[Ed Note: This piece was edited by Aditi Bhojnagarwala and published by Vedang Chouhan from the Student Editorial Team.]
