Three students of Indian felony legislation introduced archival analysis on the historical past of punishment in India throughout a webinar panel Monday morning hosted by Harvard’s South Asia Institute.

The webinar featured Himanshu Agarwal, an affiliate professor at Jindal Global Law School; Sebastian Spitz, a doctoral scholar in Sociology at Harvard; and Rohit Sharma, a researcher on the Mittal Institute. The occasion was moderated by Adaner Usmani, an assistant professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard.

The students mentioned a variety of subjects through the 90-minute webinar, together with the historical past of corporal punishment in India and civil efforts to mobilize knowledge in Indian public coverage.

Usmani launched the occasion by discussing India’s traditionally low incarceration charges, saying the nation imprisons “around 40 people per 100,000, which is roughly one-sixteenth the rate of incarceration in the United States.”

He additional highlighted the United States’ excessive charge of incarceration by evaluating it to the Soviet Union’s incarceration charge below Joseph Stalin.

“The fact that the United States stands in this company is kind of an extraordinary social science fact,” Usmani added.

He additionally pointed to the decolonization of India after it achieved independence in 1947 as a central motive behind the nation’s decrease charge of incarceration.

“Over the last 150 years, we do see, unmistakably, the effects of decolonization on the Indian penal state,” Usmani stated. “The severity of the colonial state gives way to the comparative — and I would here just stress the comparative — leniency of the post-independence state.”

Agarwal adopted Usmani’s presentation, sharing his findings on the hyperlink between corporal punishment and the economics of India’s felony justice system.

Prior to the suspension of whipping as a technique of felony punishment, addressing unpaid fines utilizing corporal punishment was “more helpful, instead of overcrowding the jails by sending the offender to prison,” Agarwal stated.

The Indian authorities abolished whipping as a type of felony punishment for the final time in 1955.

Agarwal stated every punishment meted out by the Indian penal system “was imposed in tandem with the others to minimize costs.”

After overcrowded jails economically burdened the federal government, “it was purely for financial reasons, ultimately, that whipping became introduced,” he added.

Spitz’s presentation continued the financial theme, noting that class inequality in India — in contrast to race within the United States — was not an element that affected the nation’s incarceration charge.

Spitz in contrast the scheduled caste, a deprived class in India, and the final caste, a extra privileged class, by utilizing the metric of incarcerated individuals per lakh — that means prisoners per 100,000 individuals.

“The incarceration rate for scheduled caste — the SC — is about 34 per lakh population, and for the forward or general caste, it’s about 35,” Spitz stated. “The incarceration rate of African Americans is over 1,400 per lakh population, whereas for whites, it’s above 200.”

“So in India, shockingly to us, the scheduled castes actually have a slightly lower incarceration rate than the forward castes,” Spitz added.

Sharma concluded the webinar by presenting analysis on Project Second Chance, a Delhi-based nonprofit that makes use of scholarship on the Indian jail system to rehabilitate and help previously incarcerated individuals and other people at present ready to face trial.

Sharma mentioned how the excellent dataset he labored on to analysis the historical past of punishment in India supplied necessary social insights on patterns inside the authorized system.

“Data cannot compensate for the stories, or the high incarceration rate for a lot of marginalized communities,” he stated. “But, of course, we can see it can actually give us some logic, some insights behind that.”

Usmani stated he believes Sharma’s database “might be the most extensive dataset that anyone has built upon the history of punishment in India.”

But Usmani stated it’s important for analysis to have each a scholarly and sensible affect.

“We would like not just to understand the world, but to change it,” he added.