Guest Post: Between Administration and Abolition - Reading Black Warrant Along side Angela Davis

(This is a guest post by Aishwarya Nabh)

The debate on prisons is usually framed as a choice: reform the system or abolish it. But that framing may be too narrow. Read together, two very different books, one written from inside a jail superintendent's office and the other from the vantage point of an activist-scholar challenging incarceration itself, suggest that the more useful question is not which side to choose, but what each side sees that the other misses.

Sunil Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury's Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer and Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? could not be more differently positioned. Gupta writes from decades inside India's largest prison system. Davis writes as a scholar questioning the very foundations of incarceration. Yet neither romanticises prisons, and read side by side, they open up an important conversation about punishment, power, dignity and the future of criminal justice, one that has particular urgency in India today.

The View from Inside: Black Warrant's Administrative Realism

Black Warrant is fundamentally an insider's account. Gupta does not ask whether prisons should exist; he accepts their existence as a given and focuses on the realities of running one. Through accounts of notorious inmates, executions, institutional crises and everyday prison life, the book exposes overcrowding, corruption, violence, political influence, administrative constraints and the psychological burden borne by inmates and staff alike. Prison administration, it turns out, is not merely about enforcing confinement. It is about managing human beings under constant tension and scarcity.

The strength of Gupta's account lies in its realism. The prison that emerges from these pages is not a neatly functioning institution governed solely by legal rules, but a complex ecosystem where law, bureaucracy, politics and human behaviour intersect. Officials must maintain order among thousands of inmates while complying with judicial directions, government policy and public expectation, often making difficult decisions where no ideal solution exists.

The book also illustrates, almost incidentally, how prisons become repositories of society's failures. Poverty, illiteracy, addiction, social exclusion and mental illness do not stay outside prison walls; they enter alongside the people who are incarcerated. What struck me while reading Black Warrant was how many of the people who entered Tihar seemed to carry histories that began long before their imprisonment. Gupta observes these realities as a jailer; he does not set out to explain them. But their presence raises an uncomfortable question: if prisons keep absorbing the consequences of broader social failure, can prison reform alone ever be enough? Black Warrant stops short of interrogating the structures that produce these conditions. Its concern is not why prisons exist, but how they function.

Angela Davis and the Case Against the Prison

Angela Davis begins from a different premise altogether. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, she argues that incarceration has become society's default response to social problems, one that conceals deeper issues such as poverty, inequality, racial discrimination and failures of public welfare. Her concern is not merely that prisons function poorly, but whether they are capable of fulfilling the objectives claimed for them at all.

For Davis, prisons have become so normalised that society rarely pauses to examine their necessity. Crime is treated as an individual failing rather than a phenomenon shaped by economic and political conditions, and incarceration becomes the default fix while the underlying causes go unaddressed. In her analysis, the prison functions not just as a place of confinement but as a mechanism through which society distances itself from uncomfortable realities.

Two Lenses on the Same Problem

At first glance, Gupta and Davis appear to be speaking about entirely different things: one occupied with prison management, the other with prison abolition; one concerned with what happens inside prison walls, the other with the conditions that make those walls necessary in the first place. Yet the distance between them is smaller than it looks. Gupta writes from inside the institution; Davis questions it from outside. Both are grappling with the same underlying problem: what prisons do to human beings, and what society expects prisons to achieve. Gupta's narratives repeatedly expose institutional failure and the limits of state control; Davis theorises these failures as consequences of a system built around exclusion rather than rehabilitation.

This distinction is visible most sharply in how each treats capital punishment. In Black Warrant, execution appears as an administrative responsibility: death warrants must be carried out in accordance with law, irrespective of personal views, and the emphasis falls on procedure, compliance and the burden placed on the officials who implement one of the law's most severe sanctions. Davis approaches the same subject from an entirely different direction. She treats capital punishment as an extension of a punitive culture that prioritises retribution over restoration, asking not whether executions are lawfully conducted but whether a society committed to human dignity can justify them at all. The focus shifts from implementation to legitimacy.

A lawyer reading both works quickly notices that each addresses only part of the larger problem. Administrative accounts explain how prisons function but rarely question the assumptions that sustain them. Abolitionist theory identifies structural flaws but can underestimate the practical realities of maintaining public order and responding to serious crime. The task, then, is not to choose between Gupta and Davis, but to see what each reveals and what each leaves unanswered.

India's Constitutional Bridge

This conversation carries particular weight in India, where prisons continue to face persistent overcrowding, understaffing, inadequate healthcare and limited opportunities for rehabilitation. A substantial share of the prison population consists of undertrials who have not been convicted of any offence, and delays in investigation and trial often mean that incarceration operates as punishment before adjudication. These are not merely administrative concerns; they are constitutional ones.

It is here that Indian constitutional jurisprudence offers a bridge between Gupta's institutional realism and Davis's normative critique. The Supreme Court has consistently rejected the idea that prisoners lose their fundamental rights upon incarceration. In Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration, (1978) 4 SCC 494, the Court held that prison walls do not place state action beyond constitutional scrutiny, and affirmed that the guarantee of life and personal liberty under Article 21 extends to prisoners. Around the same time, in Charles Sobhraj v. Superintendent, Central Jail, AIR 1978 SC 1514, and later in Sheela Barse v. State of Maharashtra, (1983) 2 SCC 96, the Court emphasised humane treatment, access to legal safeguards and protection against arbitrary prison practice.

The principle animating these decisions is simple but far-reaching: imprisonment may curtail liberty, but it does not extinguish personhood. The Constitution does not stop operating at the prison gate. In many ways, this vision reflects the concerns of both Gupta and Davis at once. It accepts the necessity of prison administration while insisting that the exercise of state power remain accountable to human dignity.

Even capital sentencing has gradually moved toward a rights-based framework. In Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, (2014) 3 SCC 1, the Supreme Court held that procedural fairness, mental health considerations and human dignity continue to apply even to death-row convicts, marking a shift from viewing prisoners merely as subjects of control to recognising them as individuals entitled to constitutional protection.

What Neither Answers Alone

This is perhaps where the conversation between Gupta and Davis becomes most interesting: neither offers a complete answer. Gupta's experience shows why institutions matter, since no criminal justice system can function without trained personnel, procedures and mechanisms for maintaining order. Davis reminds us that institutions should never become immune from moral and political scrutiny. A prison system focused solely on control risks losing sight of rehabilitation; a theory focused solely on abolition risks overlooking the realities faced by victims, communities and administrators.

Conclusion: Beyond the False Choice

The debate between prison reform and prison abolition is often presented as a binary. Gupta and Davis suggest that this may be a false choice. Gupta's account makes it difficult to deny the practical necessity of prison administration; Davis makes it equally difficult to accept prisons as the inevitable answer to social harm. Read together, they expose the limits of both certainty and ideology.

For India, this conversation is especially urgent. The Constitution increasingly speaks the language of dignity, fairness and rehabilitation, yet the realities of overcrowding, understaffing, inadequate mental healthcare and prolonged undertrial detention continue to test those commitments. The gap between constitutional promise and institutional reality remains wide.

Perhaps that is the enduring value of reading Black Warrant along side Angela Davis. One reminds us that prisons are real institutions staffed by real people making difficult decisions every day. The other reminds us that no institution should become so familiar that it ceases to be questioned. The future of prison reform may not lie in choosing between administration and abolition. It may lie in letting each perspective challenge the other.