This paper examines the lives of death row prisoners in India through the Deleuzean framework of ‘becoming’, to consider how they navigate the moral worlds created by death row and the uncertainty of life and death. The death penalty in India creates a unique contradiction: the law expects prisoners to demonstrate that they have reformed themselves, while also imposing an end to their lives and deeming them to be unworthy of living. By charting the individual becomings of three death row prisoners incarcerated in the same prison, we find that unlike the linear and forward-moving expectation of reformation, their lives-in-motion adopt unique trajectories revealing the messy, fallible, humanness of those set apart as ineligible for life. This recognition challenges standards of reformation set by the state and the demonisation of death row prisoners in judicial and public discourse.
BandyopadhyayM (2020) Carceral entrapments: Views from the prison/street interface in India. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology38(1): 15–32.
2.
BandyopadhyayM (2023) Carceral cultures in contemporary India. In: AlivertiACarvalhoHChamberlenA, etal (eds) Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems. 1st ed.Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 125–141.
3.
BankstonS (2017) Deleuze and Becoming. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.
4.
BiehlJLockeP (2010) Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming. Current Anthropology51(3): 317–351.
5.
BiehlJLockeP (eds) (2017) Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham & London, UK: Duke University Press.
6.
CreweBHulleySWrightS (2020) Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood: Adaptation, Identity and Time. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
7.
DasV (2007) The signature of the state: The paradox of illegibility. In: DasV (ed) Life and Words: Violence and Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, pp. 162–183.
8.
GeorgeRM (2015) Prisoner Voices from Death Row: Indian Experiences. New Delhi, India: Routledge.
9.
Human Rights Watch (1991) Prison Conditions in India. New York, NY, USA: Human Rights Watch.
10.
JohnsonR (1981) Condemned to Die: Life Under Sentence of Death. Prospect Heights, IL, USA: Waveland Press.
11.
IevinsAWilliamsR (2025) The moral and ethical worlds of coercive confinement: a prologue. Incarceration 6.
12.
National Crime Records Bureau (2016) Prison Statistics India. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.
13.
National Crime Records Bureau (2022) Prison Statistics India. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.
14.
O’DonnellI (2014) Prisoners, Solitude, and Time. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
15.
O’DonnellI (2018) Psychological survival in isolation: Tussling with time on death row. In: TochHAckerJRBonventreVM (eds) Living on Death Row: The Psychology of Waiting to Die. Washington, DC, USA: American Psychological Association, pp. 193–212.
PeelD (2013) Clutching at life, waiting to die: the experience of death row incarceration. Western Criminology Review14(3): 61–72. http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v14n3/Peel.pdf
