I first arrived at Sanganer Camp, 25 miles from Jaipur in North India, on a warm January morning in 1998. The wall dividing the compound from the outside world was a couple of feet high, low enough for children to climb on to and run, a place where you could sit and dangle your legs. Pet rabbits and chicks nibbled at the ground near a water pump where women were chatting, holding tureens and earthenware pots. Kids ran about flying kites and playing gilli danda, the ancient game of throwing sticks; bullocks and goats lazed in the shade of large trees. The sky was flushed with pinks, a row of white stone huts glimmered in the winter sunlight.
Sanganer Camp is an open prison “village” containing about 170 families. Each family includes a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. There are only two or three prison guards assigned to look after the site. The prisoners are expected to stay at the camp between 6pm and 6am. Other than that, they can come and go as they please and earn a living in the surrounding town; they are expected to support their families. There is no real security, just a roll call morning and evening. Yet, over the past decade, there have been only 16 escapes. The recidivism rates are even more impressive: only a handful of people in the half-century since the prison was opened.
After that first visit, Sanganer came to exert a peculiar power over me, eventually finding its way into my novel, The Village. Like a closed community in a J. G. Ballard novel, the camp seems to have created its own parameters for morality but, unlike a cautionary Ballardian tale, it has not descended into a dystopian maze of human failings. On the contrary, when I returned a decade later, it seemed to be alive and well, prospering as a community.
“Why does no one run away?”, I asked. “Where will they run to?”, came the answer. If you provide everything a person is seeking, where is the need to run away? Why does no one reoffend? Well, where is the need to reoffend? If you reunite a man who has been serving time in a traditional prison with his wife and children then he won’t want to reoffend. He won’t want to throw all that away.
The concept of family is central to the idea of the prison village at Sanganer. Developed by Dr Babu Sampurnanand, the Governor of Rajasthan, in 1963, on a reclaimed refugee camp left over from the partition of India, the place is built on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi. The idea that convicts should not be labelled and deserve a second chance; the belief that restoring responsibility through the family unit was the best way to do this; the Gandhian idea of Swadeshi — an India made up of self-governing, self-reliant, self-employed village communities deriving their livelihoods from their homesteads. Sampurnanand is said to have seen traditional prisons as being responsible for a kind of slow death for prisoners, causing irreversible damage to them and the spouse and children they often leave behind. The mantra at Sanganer is “Trust Begets Trust”.
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Prisoners may transfer from Jaipur Central prison to one of Rajasthan’s 23 open prisons after serving six years of their life sentence and demonstrating good behaviour. Serial killers and those convicted of sexual crimes are not eligible. Another condition of entry is that they have to be ready to be reunited with their families. This caused problems for some female prisoners whose husband remarried while they were serving the first part of their sentence, so the rules were altered to accommodate them.
Most of the offenders at Sanganer are male, and must be prepared to support their wives and children by providing a home and sending their children to school. As a result, Sanganer is full of entrepreneurs. During my visits, I was struck by the varied backgrounds of the inhabitants in terms of wealth. There are a large number working for low incomes — a man operating a phone booth in the town; a vegetable seller— as well as at the more affluent end: a homeopathic doctor and a restaurateur.
“No one has ever called me ‘prisoner’,” said one inmate, who runs his own quarrying business. His employees were labourers from the local town, not prisoners. “They have treated me with respect,” he said. “When I applied for the loan to start my business, I put Sanganer Jail as my address. I’ve bought a plot of land in the main town and when I finish my sentence I’m going to settle there. I’m marrying my daughters here, this place is now my home.”
The huts at Sanganer were built by the inmates, using bricks, plastic sheeting and corrugated tin that they had paid for — there is no cost to the taxpayer. If anything, the prisoners are expected to pay tax on their earnings. There is not much to differentiate the inmates in terms of living conditions. Holes in the wall function as windows, and family members sleep in one room on charpoys, beds made from woven rope. Some people have a small television balanced on a chest of drawers and, in the basic kitchen sectioned off at one end, there is the occasional refrigerator. Dishes are washed under a low tap; laundry is beaten out under the same tap.
Time and time again, the families with whom I spoke talked of the education of their children. “I’m no saint,” said one inmate, who had killed a family member in a property dispute, “but I have got a chance to send my children to school again. I’m trying my best and they are the ones who have a second chance.”
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With reoffending rates for crime in the UK climbing — 46 per cent of adults jailed last year had at least 15 previous convictions or cautions — we have to ask what impact traditional forms of incarceration are having on our population. In Discipline and Punish, the philosopher Michel Foucault talks of how prison is always going to produce delinquents. It’s the nature of the system, he says: it isolates inmates in their cells, even though man is a social being; it gives them useless tasks to do, for which they will never find employment outside. Prison also creates delinquents indirectly, because it makes the families of the prisoners destitute, so the children of the prisoner are in line to become delinquents too.
Sanganer has attempted to deal with these problems directly, in spite of the risk it poses — after all, pretty much every inmate at Sanganer has killed someone. Confronted with so many families, I am troubled by thoughts of the families of the victims. Any discussion of offenders has to include a discussion of the victims, surely.
Rani Shankardass, the woman who got me access to Sanganer, and who heads Praja (the Penal Reform and Justice Association), agrees — families that have lost someone through homicide are unlikely to be admirers of a place such as the Sanganer open camp. “But in reality,” she continues, “there are only a handful of prisoners in any normal prison that need to be regarded as risks; the rest are not.”
Sanganer would seem to be an example of “non-vindictive” justice that works, rather than the kind of incarceration that breeds career criminals and mental health problems. Would somewhere like this work in the UK? Shankardass thinks there are a lot of features that could be transferable: “Dynamic security rather than the harsh security of bars and chains; spaces where prisoners can socialise, a feature of life that is essential for mental wellbeing.”
I was recently asked to speak of my experience of Sanganer at an event in London that featured the former hostage Terry Waite and the former bank robber Noel “Razor” Smith. Both spoke very movingly of how confinement affects the mind. The Mental Health Foundation quotes the current UK statistic for the number of prisoners with two or more mental health disorders as a staggering 70 per cent. It is the archetypal chicken and egg situation — is mental illness the cause or the effect of being in prison? Probably both, Smith claims. He first went behind bars as a young petty criminal and learnt his trade inside, graduating to more serious offences upon his release.
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In the years since I first visited Sanganer, I have wondered how it might work here. Gandhi said that we should conquer our opponents with love, that forgiveness is the attribute of the strong, and that you can judge a nation by how it treats its weakest members. It is a difficult ideal to live by, especially when there is the irreversible loss of a loved one through a killing. I have found myself haunted by the village, the questions it raises about our own moral judgments. How it challenges ideas of punishment and proves, by its success, that forgiveness can be a powerful weapon.
The Village by Nikita Lalwani, Viking, 256pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £10.99 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134