By — Hansin Kapoor

Abstract

This article examines the intertwined development of the penal system and economy in British colonial India and argues that colonial jails and laws were not merely instruments of order, but also of profit and social control. Prisons were turned into “houses of industry” where convicts toiled in shops and fields for the Empire’s gain as well as exploring how British legislation has reshaped Indian society and put forth that colonial punishment served imperial priorities such as disciplining a restless population, coercing cheap labour for infrastructure, and cementing racialised hierarchies. 

Introduction

Under British rule (c.1858–1947), India’s justice system was transformed as hundreds of modern prisons, replacing or repurposing older forts and warehouses were built. Historians note that “prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India,” introducing “a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration”. These jails became a pillar of colonial order, but were not simply institutions of rehabilitation; rather, colonial authorities often called prisons “houses of industry” or factories behind bars designed to squeeze profit from the labour of inmates and the law itself was engineered to protect the empire.

Factories Behind Bars: Convict Labour and the Colonial Economy

One of the British Empire’s early tasks was to supply a vast labour force for public works, plantations, and garrisons. In India, convicts became a captive workforce instead of flogging or execution; colonial prisons increasingly used inmates for hard labour. Colonial prisons in India were designed to respond to the demand for a more rigorous mode of convict discipline by implementing a strict penal system based on remunerative labour for weaving, carpentry, stone-breaking, milling and road-building. Prison walls hid a bustling economy, with profit as the unspoken motto.

In addition to it, Indian jails provided a docile, cheap, and constantly available labour force for underpaid tasks to the colonial administration and even private planters, these convicts were drafted out to work “making and repairing the station roads, gathering and breaking stones and repairing jail buildings” among other tasks. Beyond local works, tens of thousands of Indian convicts were even shipped overseas to Mauritius, Singapore, the Andamans, etc. to serve on plantation and dock projects, making India part of a global penal-labour empire. By the 1830s, British administrators quietly shifted from musket to plough: instead of whipping convicts, they worked them in fields and factories. In sum, colonial jails were less houses of reform and more wages-for-whips.

Caste and Criminality: Social Control under Empire

Colonial law did not treat all Indians equally; the prison system reflected and reinforced social hierarchies. British authorities were well aware of India’s caste system and deliberately manipulated it. In an 18th-century anecdote, it was noted that forcing a high-caste Hindu to perform road-sweeping or latrine work would be “‘much more severe than a sentence of death’”. Thus, early penal committees directed that upper-caste convicts should be shielded from manual labour, while lower-caste convicts (barbers, sweepers, weavers, etc.) were made to ply their traditional trades even behind bars.

More explicitly, many tribes and nomadic groups were branded “criminal tribes”, ostensibly to curb crime but actually to surveil and control restive populations, reflecting how social prejudice was written into penal codes. The famed Criminal Tribes Act, in effect until 1949, allowed the police to restrict travel, impose curfews, and register members of designated communities, an institutionalized stigma that has echoed into postcolonial India. Thus, colonizers used criminal law as a railroad to define who was “dangerous” and who was not, often on caste and ethnic grounds.

Furthermore, prisoners were treated as raw labour, to build infrastructure at minimal cost,  becoming a new mode of exercise of power as they saw them as machines of state extraction. Morover, treating them as test subjects in colonial science as they were used for medical experiments under the guise of public health. Administrators also collected biometric and ethnographic data on convicts and their communities, photographing and measuring them to fit colonial racial theories. In the decades after 1857 the British conducted massive anthropometric surveys of “castes and tribes,” literally turning the population and by extension convicts into racialized data points.

Therefore, the colonial prison functioned as a microcosm of power, a laboratory of colonial knowledge, yielding statistics about race, caste, health and crime and by cataloguing caste and tribe in its registers, the regime naturalized prejudice as science. Together, these practices , both exploited and dehumanized convicts, reinforcing imperial claims of racial and caste inferiority while extracting economic and epistemic value from colonial subjects.

The Codified Empire: Laws, Courts and Policing

British rulers also rewrote India’s laws to secure their interests. The Indian Penal Code of 1860, drafted under Macaulay’s Law Commission, and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1882 codified hundreds of offenses. Many of these statutes protected the colonial economy or suppressed dissent. For example, laws against “crimes affecting revenue” or forest products became ways to punish peasants who resisted unfair taxes. Famines, themselves aggravated by economic policies, saw a surge of food theft, for instance, colonial records report that stealing grain to eat was common during shortages, but police “often met such acts with harsh punishment”. Under the Raj, theft of rice could mean flogging or hard labour, even as starving millions died of hunger. Perhaps the most infamous colonial statute was sedition, enacted in 1870, it criminalized any statement “tending to bring into hatred or contempt” British rule. Initially meant for rowdy mobs, it soon became the sword to cut down nationalists. 

After the 1857 Rebellion, the British rapidly restructured Indian policing, the Police Act of 1861 made the police wholly accountable to the colonial executive, explicitly empowering it to suppress dissent and ensure loyalty to the empire. This security‑oriented force had little role in local justice as their operations closely tied to fiscal goals, the colonial police promoted revenue collection and labour practices conducive to heightened commercial exploitation, thus becoming the “iron fist” of the Raj. Therefore, the phrase “safety of the public” in court papers usually referred to the Emperor’s peace, not the welfare of Indian peasants. The codified law reflected a double standard: one foot in British legal rationalism, the other in authoritarian control.

Famine, Uprising, and Punishment

Economic upheavals often drove the punitive impulse as India’s repeated famines, partly caused by colonial revenue policies, produced desperation and sometimes revolt. The Indian Penal Code (1860) was wielded to make famine survival itself a crime, effectively closing off any legal empathy for hunger. Peasants caught stealing or grabbing grain during periods of extreme scarcity for e.g. the Great Famine of 1876–78, were prosecuted under ordinary penal statutes as thieves or dacoits, with virtually no recognition that starvation drove their behavior, underscoring that the crimes were acts of want, not organized banditry. Yet courts treated each incident purely as criminal, meting out punishments under the IPC rather than any exemption for necessity. Colonial officials themselves recorded that the attacks were literally “committed by starving people” who pleaded hunger as their excuse, but the law offered no reprieve. In this way, the penal code and related laws ensured that famine became a matter of policing, not aid: hunger invoked jails and guardposts, not public relief, thus upholding the continuity of colonial extraction and order rather than succor. The jails were fortresses of mental, emotional, physical, and economic extraction, where colonial power slowly leached resistance through an osmotic transaction that absorbed prisoners’ labour, identity, and will and the punishment was not just disciplinary as it turned subjects of dissent into instruments of imperial utility.

Conclusion

The British Raj’s penal system was thus deeply entangled with colonial economics and power. Prisons were not ivory towers of justice, but “cogs in the machinery of empire,” fueling infrastructure projects with convict labour and enforcing social divisions. Through elaborate legal codes and repressive laws, colonial authorities sought to control society for profit and order. Even after independence in 1947, this legacy endured as India’s founding fathers largely retained the imperial Penal Code and Police Act. Only in 2024 did India finally move to “give justice, not punishment” by overhauling these laws, signaling a break from the Raj’s iron grip. In sum, colonial India’s prisons and penal laws were much more than reactions to crime; they were deliberately designed to serve the Empire and also became sites of resistance. The career of the Indian penal system is a harsh chronicle of how law and economics combined under the empire: a legacy that has left deep scars on South Asia’s social and legal landscape.

About the Author

Hansin Kapoor is a third-year law student pursuing a B.A. (Hons.) in Criminology and Criminal Justice. He interrogates justice through the lens of victimology, wielding criminological critique to expose the silences law was designed to keep.

Image Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/prisons-across-the-country-make-rs-200-crore-of-goods-a-year/articleshow/55191216.cms?from=mdr