Biometric and the Civil Death of Indian Prisoners

All postcolonial states have adopted a decolonisation project lately. Indian state has overhauled the entire body of criminal law, representing the intention to decolonise all colonial legacies. However, the colonial logic of governing through difference under the guise of digitalisation movement, continues to be at the kernel of the decolonisation project. This paper uses the lens of governmentality to critique two such criminal laws - Model Prisons and Correctional Services Act, 2023 which allows for technological interventions and other high security enclosures in the prison premise and the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 which legalises the collection, storage, usage and retention of a wide range of biological and behavioural measurements of convicts, accused and others. This research challenges the current drive to make prisons “smart” and “futuristic” by relying on Mark brown’s framework on colonial penal power. Albeit Model Prisons Act uses Foucault’s disciplinary power and governmentality by relying on constant examination by creating scientific classification of inmates and segregation of inmates as a reformist initiative, this research argues that instead of merely producing a docile body fit for reformation, these statutes create a technological counterpart to the colonial category of “dangerous classes” through almost forever biometric storage, thereby reinforcing the same colonial logic. This classification is done through the powers provided by the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 to collect and use biometric measurements. Through a textual analysis of the two statutes, it is argued that Indian prisons have transitioned from a Foucauldian disciplinary institution of Panopticon to what Didier Bigo calls Ban-opticon, where the function of technology is not to reform, but rather to govern through exclusion. This article observes that 2023 Act’s segregation coupled with the 75-year retention of biometric measurement of not just convicts but also accused and any other person in 2022 Act creates what Colin Dayan calls “civil death”. This produces a legal ghost who will never be digitally free from the state’s database of dangerous classes. The research argues that despite being physically free, an individual is always digitally trapped, making the physical release irrelevant.