This chapter attempts to break the āconspiracy of silenceā1 around prison escapes. Everyday prison life; the ethnographic telling and its analysis; and the notions of escape, freedom , confinement and subversions form the conceptual terrain within which this chapter is located. The analysis of prison life has the capacity to reveal these notions in unique ways (Bandyopadhyay et al. 2013; Rhodes 2015). More significantly, prison ethnographies also potentially disrupt acknowledged ways of seeing and representing these concepts. Escapes are central to life in prison. They are an open secret; yet all those who are part of everyday prison life commit to not talking about escapes openly and, thus, collectively conspire to recognize the centrality of escapes while silencing them. The ethnographic enfolding of this paradox helps uncover multiple meanings of escape, their implications for everyday life in prison and the emergent critiques of the notions of escape, freedom , confinement and subversions .
From an organizational and structural-functional reading of prison escapes (Peterson et al. 2016; Culp 2005; Anson and Hartnett 1983), they are both disruptive and productive forces in organizational practice and in shaping organization life. An entry in the Model Prison Manual developed by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, under the government of India , clearly marks the significance of escape in the administrative plan and in the management of everyday prison life. In addressing the question of emergencies, a long list of possible emergencies begins with escapes and ends with other disasters such as terrorist strikes and nuclear disasters.2 In October 2016, eight prisoners, allegedly members of an extremist Islamic student organization, escaped from a jail in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in the early hours of the morning, only to be ruthlessly killed by the police in an encounter 3 in a nearby village. The escape and the ensuing encounter were justifiably controversial. The escape resulted in the death of a guard and was labelled as an insider job, and the encounter a fake one.4
These instances emphasize the organizational and structural-functional reading of prison escape. The binaries of complete control and its demonstrable lack, attempted escape and successful escape, the failure and success of the prison itself in resolving a state of transgression, security and its breach, danger and safety are significant. Escape, as an idea, as a register that is always imagined and yet real in terms of its potentiality thus reproduces prison practice and the prison as an organization. Precisely this potentiality also represents the prison as a subversive site (Bandyopadhyay 2016), a site from which a dissenting voice against a powerful state can begin to be heard. In this sense the prison is not merely an extended arm of the state, enabling its punitive, violent and threatening functions; it is also an institution that conveys a critique of the state. Historically this was marked through the use of the prison to resist a colonial state. In contemporary India , the voices of political prisoners from the āred corridorā,5 from the struggles against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant,6 and in Niyamgiri7 and the rights of tribal groups frame the prison as a site of resistance (Ugelvik 2014; Bosworth 1999; Welch 2015), both to the power of the state and its neoliberal policies. Escape, as a final act of rebellion that challenges the raison dāĆŖtre of the prison, is an extraordinary manifestation of such acts of resistance . The understanding of prison escapes tends to move between these two metanarratives of the reproduction of the institution of the prison and the ways in which escape has the potential to break the prison and call into question its legitimacy and, by extension, the legitimacy of the state. For the prison and the state, then, escape is the most significant emergency.
Representing escape in this manner falls within the domain of a familiar narrative of the prison. Part of the difficulty of studying a prison ethnographically is that the ethnographer is trapped in very powerful hegemonic narratives. Ethnography can also interrupt the terms of debate, enabling a rethinking of prison life and the place of the prison within an understanding of the sociology of organizations (Rhodes 2001; Wacquant 2002). I attempt to do this by reclaiming the understanding of escape from its binary metanarrative āthat of the agency and self-determination of the prisoner and the collective that the prisoner represents and the reproduction of the prison. I explore multiple meanings of escape for prisoners and draw out from different instances of successful and attempted but failed escapes the braiding of this extraordinary event into the ordinary everyday lives of prisoners. This enables a conceptual and theoretical rethinking of escapes, as well as their place and content in relation to prison sociality. An ethnographic analysis of escapes both illuminates and challenges one of the defining shifts in the characterization of prison regimes towards ānormalizationā, marked by humanization, a focus on rights-based perspectives of governance and a definite plan to rein in the exercise of coercive power (Cunha 2014). While some aspects of the escapes that I describe in this chapter reveal such normalization, the responses of the state and prison authorities also articulate the unveiling and assertion of crude, violent, coercive power.
The everyday is a fundamental conceptual plank in this chapter, and one that I consider central to the study of the prison, a project that is otherwise heavily motivated by dominant statist and disciplinary agendas. Focusing on the everyday makes possible the sort of āsilent witnessingā (Zerubavel 2006) that allows for multiple, chaotic perspectives and views to emerge, and that resists neat and singular characterisations of phenomena or happenings. Everyday life refers to the ordinary lived, experiential and expressive worlds of prisoners, staff and all those who go in and out of those large iron grill gates throughout the day and have some interaction, direct or indirect, with the prisoners (and this includes the ethnographer). I use the terms lived, experiential and expressive to suggest a focus on the actual practice and doing in peopleās daily lives, but also an interest in how people, especially prisoners, represent their here and now and how it compares to their worlds outside. The everyday in prison is mundane, ordinary and extraordinary at the same time . I draw from Dasās (2000, 2007) conceptualization of the everyday with regard to violent events, which does not locate violence in extraordinary acts but shows how violence comes to reside in the ārecesses of the ordinaryā. The grotesque and the subtle worlds of violence coalesce in the everyday lives and narrations of the prisoners. Escape too is located simultaneously in both these realmsāwith the potential to become grotesque and its resolute, but varied presence in daily life.
Escapes signify failure. Escapes also herald freedom . These two senses of escape tend to be pitted against each other, representing either the organizational/institutional logic or an individual prisonerās point of view, respectively. What then is the meaning of escape? Simply put, an escape is an illegal act of breaking out of prison, and consequently, significantly altering the hold that an institution, the prison and the judicial system have on a prisoner. There are successful escapes and attempted escapes and these create conditions for forceful reactions from the prison as an institution. The ethnography of prison escapes holds allegorical significance (Clifford 1986), but a motivated privileging of one narrative, justified as it were in terms of its origin either in the logic of the punitive mechanism or in the voices of the marginalized and unheard, is symptomatic of the power of dominant institutional spaces to shape narratives and counter narratives. Presenting the messiness implicit in the act of escape and the multiple readings within which this messiness may be located and understood is therefore the guiding idea in this chapter as it attempts to steer clear of such binaries. There are three overlapping and competing senses in which this ethnographic foray into prison escapes conveys allegorical significance: as a way of describing cultures of prison governance (Bandyopadhyay et al. 2013; Brown 2009; Garces et al. 2013; Piacentini 2004; Reed 2004), as a way of revealing resistance (Bandyopadhyay 2010; Bosworth 1999; Ugelvik 2014) and as a way of narrating relationships between the inside and the outside of the prison (Cunha 2013; Clear 2007). Cunha (2013) discusses the issue of connections between the inside and the outside in...