Interview with Kanupriya Sharma (MPhil in Criminology, PhD in Criminology)
What inspired you to research this women’s imprisonment?
I first entered women’s prisons in India in 2014, while completing my Master’s in Social Work in Criminology and Justice at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India. I was working as a legal aid student worker, and like many people entering prison for the first time, I expected women to talk primarily about violence, deprivation, hardships and the pains of imprisonment.
The prison literature tells us a great deal about women’s experiences of separation from their children and families, their histories and the harsh prison conditions, and the uncertainty of life after release. And women certainly spoke about all of these things. What I wasn’t prepared for was how often our conversations quickly turned to love, marriage, intimacy, hope, and the futures women were trying to build.
Initially, I thought these relationships might resemble the same-sex intimate or pseudo-kin relationships already documented in the literature on women’s imprisonment in the West, often understood in terms of companionship, emotional support and economic survival within prison. But I kept encountering experiences that didn’t quite fit those explanations. Women spoke about meeting prospective husbands in prison, forming intimate relationships with men both inside and outside, many of whom they had met through co-prisoners, and imagining the possibility of marrying these men after release. They were arranging marriages for themselves and, in some cases, for other women who were imprisoned alongside them.
I became fascinated by why love, marriage and intimacy mattered so much within a space we primarily understand through violence, hardship and deprivation. What could these relationships tell us about how women experienced imprisonment, the lives and futures they were imagining beyond it, and the wider society to which they would eventually return.
Those conversations stayed with me long after I left the prison. They raised questions that the existing literature on women’s imprisonment had not fully answered and ultimately became the starting point for my doctoral research.
What was the subject of your MPhil?
For my MPhil at Cambridge back in 2017-18, I returned to the topic of women’s intimate relationships in prison, through a relatively smaller study. And the more I explored it, the more I realised this wasn't simply an interesting observation. It pointed to a much larger gap in how we understand women's imprisonment, particularly in post-colonial contexts, such as India, where marriage, family, caste, and kinship play such a central role in the everyday life of women.
I was particularly interested in how women formed these relationships in the first place. Many had experienced considerable restrictions on their choices around love and marriage before imprisonment, yet they were finding ways to meet men, form intimate relationships and imagine different futures within prison. I wanted to understand how they negotiated both institutional restrictions and wider social expectations, and whether imprisonment, despite its many constraints, could create opportunities to exercise intimate choices that had previously been denied to them.
Ultimately, I wanted to understand what these relationships meant to women themselves, how they shaped their experiences of imprisonment, and what they could tell us about women’s agency and the relationship between punishment, gender and the wider social worlds that shape life both inside and beyond prison.
What was your PhD about and what are the key findings?
My PhD examined women’s pathways to and experiences of imprisonment through the lens of family, kinship and intimate relationships in India. I conducted ten months of ethnographic research across seven closed and two open prisons in Punjab and Rajasthan in India alongside in-depth interviews with 127 incarcerated women, many of whom were serving life sentences for the murder of husbands or other members of their natal or affinal families.
At its heart, the thesis asks what happens when we take seriously the social and moral worlds in which women’s imprisonment takes place. In particular, it examines how ideas surrounding love, sex and marriage, and their intersections with caste, class, religion, and gender, shaped women’s pathways into violent offending, their experiences of imprisonment, and the ways in which they imagined and negotiated their futures.
The thesis traces this across three interconnected dimensions. First, I found that women’s acts of violence could not always be understood in isolation from their marital and kinship contexts. Many had experienced abusive arranged marriages, child or exchange marriages, or levirate marriages where they were forced to marry a deceased partner’s brother. These constrained the possibilities for leaving relationships, or intense expectations surrounding caste, sexuality and family honour. Marriage and kinship were therefore not simply part of the background to their offences. They were often integral to understanding the circumstances in which violence occurred.
Second, these social and moral worlds did not disappear once women entered prison. Prison did not represent a clean break from the outside. Ideas about marriage, sexuality, caste and family honour continued to shape the support women received from their families, their relationships with staff and other prisoners, and how they understood themselves and their offences. What mattered morally was not necessarily just what a woman had done, but whom she had committed an offence against, with whom, and for what perceived reason.
A woman whose violence was understood as protecting her family or its honour could occupy a very different moral position from a woman whose offence involved a lover or was perceived as violating accepted marital or sexual norms. Some women expressed profound guilt about transgressing expectations surrounding marriage or sexuality rather than about the violent act itself, while some whose offences emerged from abusive marriages or were understood as protecting familial honour expressed relatively little remorse. For some, imprisonment was even understood as divine or fated retribution for having violated a moral order. This revealed how legal culpability and punishment became deeply entangled with culturally specific ideas about morality.
Third, I examined how women responded to these forms of moral condemnation. One of my most striking findings was the significance of intimate relationships and remarriage during imprisonment. Women who had experienced violent marriages or had been rejected by their families did not necessarily reject marriage itself. Many actively sought new relationships and the possibility of remarriage, drawing on co-prisoners, kin and community networks and, sometimes, prison staff to meet prospective partners. The same caste, class, religious and community logics that governed marriage outside could therefore be reproduced within prison.
There is an important paradox here. Marriage and domesticity have historically been used by both penal institutions and wider society to regulate women’s intimate and sexual lives. Yet women were also strategically engaging with these same institutions to pursue their own desires and futures. Away from the immediate scrutiny of families and communities, some women wrote love letters, chose prospective partners or formed relationships across caste, class or religious boundaries.
I am careful not to romanticise this as liberation or freedom. These choices were made within profoundly constrained circumstances, and remarriage could potentially expose women to new vulnerabilities after release – something the PhD was not able to follow longitudinally. What interested me was how women simultaneously accommodated, negotiated and, at times, pushed against the boundaries of two deeply patriarchal institutions: the prison and the wider society. Their agency cannot easily be categorised as either resistance or submission. Women could work through the very institutions and moral frameworks that constrained them to pursue intimacy, legitimacy, survival or a different future.
Taken together, these findings challenge the idea of prison as a bounded institution understood solely through surveillance, deprivation and suffering. The prisons I encountered were porous social spaces: caste, kinship, community, marriage and historically rooted ideas about femininity travelled through their walls. For some women, imprisonment represented another point along a longer carceral continuum; for others, it unexpectedly created possibilities to renegotiate aspects of their lives that had been heavily constrained outside.
Ultimately, my PhD argues that we cannot understand women’s imprisonment in isolation from the societies in which it takes place. We need to situate it within the longer histories of colonial governance, caste, patriarchy and kinship that shape women’s pathways into prison, their lives within it and their possibilities beyond it. In doing so, the thesis makes a case for a decolonial, feminist and culturally situated approach to imprisonment, taking women’s experiences in South Asia not simply as another empirical case, but as a starting point for rethinking how we understand punishment, agency and the boundaries of the prison itself.
Can you explain how colonialism and India’s caste system shape women’s incarceration in India?
Both colonialism and India’s historic caste system are central to understanding women's imprisonment today, but perhaps not in the ways we usually imagine.
Many of the institutional arrangements that were introduced under colonial rule continue to shape prison life today. These include the segregation of women into small enclosures within predominantly male prisons, systems of prisoner co-governance, and the idea that women require moral reform through domesticity and marriage. Colonialism also reinforced a particular image of the ‘criminal woman’. Victorian ideals of purity converged with Brahminical notions of honour and Indian nationalist expectations of womanhood, to portray women who transgressed norms around marriage and sexuality as not simply lawbreakers, but morally deviant. Those ideas of moral deviance continue to influence how women are judged and treated within prison today, including by staff and fellow prisoners.
In my research, caste was not simply another demographic characteristic; it was central to understanding how women’s lives were organised before imprisonment. Marital arrangements and caste endogamy could significantly constrain women’s choices. For many of the women I interviewed, violence emerged within these social worlds, where leaving a marriage, marrying outside one’s caste, or pursuing a relationship of choice could carry profound consequences for both women and their families and, in some cases, shape the circumstances through which they eventually came into prison.
What I found particularly striking was that these caste and honour-based frameworks did not stop at the prison gate. They continued to shape women’s moral standing, their relationships with other prisoners and staff, and the support they received from their families. Colonial prison governance also became intertwined with these existing social hierarchies, reinforcing particular ideas about femininity, moral purity, marriage and rehabilitation.
I observed a particularly interesting parallel around marriage. Colonial penal regimes frequently treated marriage and domesticity as mechanisms through which women could be morally reformed and their sexuality regulated. Echoes of this remained visible in contemporary prisons, where staff sometimes facilitated women’s relationships or marriages, or viewed marriage as a means of resettlement and rehabilitation after release. Yet there was also an important reversal: women themselves could strategically use the very institution that had historically been employed to regulate their intimate lives. Some pursued relationships and remarriage to seek companionship, social legitimacy or a different future, and sometimes to exercise choices around intimacy that had been unavailable to them before imprisonment.
For me, this captures the complexity of colonial continuities particularly well. These histories do not simply reproduce themselves unchanged. Colonial forms of governance became entangled with caste, patriarchy and existing social institutions, and their legacies continue to be reproduced, negotiated and sometimes repurposed within contemporary prisons. Understanding women’s imprisonment in India therefore requires us to look beyond the institution of prison itself and examine the longer social and historical structures through which punishment, morality and rehabilitation have come to be understood.
What changes would you like to see as a result of your research, either in India or more broadly?
I hope my research contributes to change in several ways.
First, I hope it contributes to a more decolonial understanding of crime, punishment and imprisonment. For me, decolonising criminology is not simply about conducting more research in the Global South or including more diverse voices. It is about questioning why theories developed in the Global North are so often treated as universally applicable, while research from places like India is seen primarily as providing empirical evidence.
When we begin from the lives of women in India, we are compelled to ask different questions about crime, imprisonment, punishment, morality, surveillance, and what it means to survive imprisonment. I hope my research demonstrates that South Asia is not simply a context in which existing criminological theories can be applied or tested, but a place from which new concepts and theoretical understandings can emerge, challenging and reshaping how we understand imprisonment and punishment more broadly.
Second, I hope the research encourages practitioners and policy makers to recognise that intimate and family relationships are not peripheral to women’s imprisonment. They are central to women’s survival, both within prison and after release. This means investing more seriously in helping women maintain or rebuild relationships where they are safe and desired, providing greater support for family engagement and resettlement, and recognising that successful reintegration depends not only on the individual, but also on the social relationships that sustain them. It also means recognising that families can be sources of both support and harm, and that women need the resources and autonomy to decide which relationships they wish to maintain.
Finally, I hope my research encourages us to broaden our understanding of punishment itself. One of the central arguments of my thesis is that punishment does not begin and end with imprisonment. For many women, experiences of violence, restricted autonomy and social exclusion precede incarceration, while stigma, family rejection and community surveillance can continue long after release.
If we are serious about rehabilitation, then our interventions cannot stop at the prison gate. We also need to work with families and communities because these are ultimately the spaces where women are either accepted, excluded, or given the opportunity to rebuild their lives. This is also where my Leverhulme Early Career fellowship at Oxford takes the research forward. By following women’s lives after imprisonment, I hope to understand how the relationships they formed or sought to rebuild during incarceration develop after release, and how caste, and community norms and expectations continue to shape their experiences of punishment, belonging and resettlement.
What have you gone on to do since completing your PhD?
Since completing my PhD, I have been working as a research fellow at the University of Nottingham on a Leverhulme-funded project examining ethnicity and desistance. We are conducting longitudinal research with people on probation from different ethnic backgrounds in Leeds, England, to understand how they move away from offending and how their experiences of the criminal justice system shape that process. My work has been particularly concerned with how racialised experiences of punishment affect people’s sense of belonging, their relationships with institutions and their opportunities to rebuild their lives.
I have also been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford, which I will be starting in May next year. Building on my doctoral research, I will explore the post-release lives of women convicted of serious violent offences against members of their own families or kin in India. Through longitudinal interviews and relational mapping, I will examine their experiences as they move from prison into open camps and the wider community. I am particularly interested in how family and kinship relationships, caste hierarchies and moral expectations surrounding sex, love and marriage shape women's negotiations of stigma, belonging and life after imprisonment.
Although these projects focus on different populations and contexts, they are connected by a question that has increasingly shaped my research: when does punishment really end? A prison sentence may have been served, but its consequences can continue through racialised surveillance, institutional mistrust, family rejection and community stigma. I am interested in broadening our understanding of punishment beyond the formal criminal justice system, by examining how it may be reconfigured through social relationships, communities and institutions, and how these processes shape people’s opportunities for recognition, belonging and desistance.