“Institutional Segregation in Correctional Facilities: Network Formation, Governance Failures, and the Limits of Rehabilitative Reform”

Prison segregation, criminal networks, rehabilitation, constitutional rights, prison gangs, inmate reformation.

This research investigates the process of inmate segregation in India's prison establishment and assesses how those practices create and reproduce criminal networks and inhibit inmate rehabilitation. Through doctrinal legal analysis, the study concludes that segregation is established as a conscious choice. While this decision is framed as a security measure, it is often arbitrary and wilfully discriminatory based on caste, religion, gang associations, and perceived risks; it lacks governmental oversight, is amorphous and opaque, and does not evince legal or constitutional calculations of limitation. Segregation practices try to benignly identify authors of criminal behaviour while not addressing the welfare of first-time or minor offenders, exposing them to dangerous convicts. Segregation a breeding spaces for criminality that transfer criminal ideologies, criminal financing, skills, and fulfils social networks to not dip back into previous criminal habits, leading to greater recidivism and to perpetuate cycles of recidivism. Marginalised identities endure further spatial and systemic exclusions of segregation that amplify psychological harms and perpetuate social disparities embedded in existing prison cultures. The study challenges the continuity of the colonial time-temporal peculiarities of prison governance that fail to comply with Article 21 of the Indian Constitution and the internationally sanctioned obligations embodied in the Mandela and Bangkok Rules. It proposes three significant reforms: (1) that international human rights law be first integrated into India's domestic prison law and then open to review of transparency; (2) that an independent custodial oversight mechanism be adopted; and (3) that custody does not define access to education, healthcare, and legal aid.