This project investigates how penal authorities, in both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, deliberately downplay prisoners' poor health for a variety of reasons, using a repertoire of statistical and rhetorical techniques. It poses "big questions" about the operational logic of modern penality and bureaucracy, specifically through the lens of prisoner health management and epidemic control. It scrutinises British metropolitan, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the emergence of the Western penitentiary in the late modern period through to the present day.
1. To trace the origins of the "governance by indicators" (Davis et al., 2015), a bureaucratic obsession with quantification and resultant attempts to game the health reports in the early 1800s to their legacies in present-day institutions. To delineate how and why these malpractices changed over time. To reveal penal administrators' motives to conceal inmates’ morbidity and death and identify the most significant statistical and rhetorical techniques to do so in the case studies.
2. To identify similarities and divergences in malpractices to conceal health data between and within liberal penal systems (e.g., British metropolitan, convict lease in the American South, and present-day US) versus authoritarian ones (e.g., colonial Indian jails), including extreme cases (e.g., the Gulag). Most crucially, to expound why they appear, avoiding false equivalences and monocausal explanations.
3. To determine whether medical release and transfer procedures were animated by a similar rationale across all case studies – to sanitize reported data to avoid scrutiny and project an image of efficacy for intended audiences. To uncover if these procedures obfuscated the bureaucratically organised murder of several million prisoners in the extreme case of the Gulag. To assess if the Gulag was a death camp and if medical release comprised a crime of commission or omission.
4. To investigate the inter-imperial connection by testing the broader continuity thesis between the Gulag and the colonial concentration (e.g., British India) or overtly racist regimes (e.g., the American New South) using manipulations of health data as a case in point. To understand whether it is indeed a verifiable causal link or, conversely, a terminological rather than empirical similarity misidentified for causation.
5. To examine the intra-imperial exchange of practices to hide prisoner sickness and death between British metropolitan prisons and Indian colonial jails. To understand how indigenous prisoners' allegedly distorted health data reified the racial and cultural hierarchies of colonial society in India. To uncover the multivalent relationship between the prisoners’ health, death, and race/ethnicity in administration reports of convict lease penitentiaries and present-day US prisons. To compare colonial Indian and US patterns of essentialising to distinct othering of ethnic minorities in the Gulag’s medical reporting.
The following questions are considered:
Question 1. Did a universal propensity to occasionally conceal the poor health of inmates truly exist in Western total institutions? What were the material and intellectual underpinnings for it to emerge?
Question 2. How did this alleged pattern spread across time and space? Did it survive until the present?
Question 3. Are prisons and camps the only total institutions that seek to minimise the appearance of reported sickness and mortality of their inmates?
Question 4. Did British, Indian colonial, and American prisons sometimes misapplied the procedures of early release and transfers with identical rationale as in the Gulag – to massage reported health data?
Question 5. If this universal release-to-die practice indeed existed, what were the phenomenological similarities and divergences between the liberal cases (the UK, the US) versus authoritarian ones (colonial India) in causes, effects, and concrete types of deception? Why and when did they appear? What causal factors made extreme examples of this pattern (e.g., the Gulag) aberrant?
Question 6. Was the Gulag a death camp, as Alexopoulos argues? Did six million Gulag’s victims die, concealed by releases?
Question 7. Where did the Gulag's malpractices originate? Were they somehow foreshadowed by antecedents in the deadly, racist Indian colonial or convict lease contexts? (colonial boomerang thesis) Or were they driven by a unique constellation of factors, following a Sonderweg, a special path (a sui generis thesis)?
Question 8. How seriously, in quantitative and qualitative terms, were the health reports in the chosen case studies vitiated?
Question 9. Was the degree of their unreliability in the case of colonial India so drastic that it reduced jail health reports to an elite representation of the empire to justify conquest? (Dirks, 2001; Chatterjee, 1998).
Question 10. Did the presumed obfuscation of health data in Indian jails in some ways exemplify the "essentialised difference between coloniser and colonised" (Chatterjee, 1993)?
Empirically, the project binds together diverse cases through their shared use of early medical release and transfers of dying prisoners — procedures that predate the Gulag and persist today. While these mechanisms were ostensibly humanitarian, whether they were in fact misused to sanitise official reports remains an open and central question for this research. The project sets out to trace these practices rigorously, to establish the extent and nature of their use across liberal cases (UK, US), authoritarian contexts (colonial India), and especially in the extreme Gulag case. At every turn, the project takes a deliberately careful approach, firmly resisting the temptation to collapse vastly different regimes into one another. Rather than seeking false equivalences, it strives to understand each context on its own terms, respecting its particular historical, institutional, and political specificities.
The inquiry goes beyond the prison gates. It situates its findings within broader debates on modern state violence, colonial legacies, and the dark undercurrents of Western modernity. It rigorously tests whether the Gulag’s concealment of deaths can be traced to earlier colonial or racialised penal practices, such as the British Raj’s jail systems or America’s convict lease, or whether it represents a sharp break or an entirely sui generis development.
The project investigates the concept of manipulation, not as the product of grand conspiracy or broad-scale ill intent, but by following two principle kinds of evidence. Firstly is the 'silver bullet,' or acknowledgment of manipulation by contemporary data producers such as prison officials or inspectors. Manipulation of statistics such as death rates served as points of contention in political and public debate not only between prison officials, but also contemporary legislators, activists, doctors, and journalists. The second type of principle evidence is 'structural contextual' proof, or the wider incentive structures and socio-political contexts which promote or discourage officials to manipulate data. The project assumes that death reporting in prisons and its relevance is highly socially constructed and dependent on various larger social expectations, customs, and factors such as but not limited to transparency, interinstitutional competition, capitalist profit structures, or racism.
To tackle this demanding agenda, the project will assemble a dedicated team of three early-career postdoctoral researchers, each specialising in one of the core case studies: British metropolitan prisons, colonial Indian jails, and the American penal system. My role as PI is to lead the research on the Gulag and present-day Russia, to coordinate the team’s efforts, and to contribute archival research and broader framing across the cases. Together, we will build new empirical databases, cross-examine sources, and collectively author outputs that push the field beyond its current limits.
The project will deliver the first comparative, integrated history of bureaucratic malpractice in prison health reporting, combining methods from history, medical statistics, penology, sociology, and bioethics. It will produce a systematised database of concealment techniques, at least ten peer-reviewed articles, and a monograph with a leading academic press. The research will also engage with human rights organisations and prison reform advocates, contributing directly to contemporary debates on transparency, accountability, and carceral ethics.
This project examines and compares the manipulation of health data—particularly mortality and morbidity statistics—across four penal systems: the United Kingdom, colonial India, the Southern United States, and the Soviet Union–modern Russia continuum, each operating in vastly different historical contexts over a 200-year period. Addressing such a wide temporal and institutional range poses significant challenges. Chief among these impediments is the risk of retroactively projecting present-day assumptions about what constitutes deception or falsification onto historical actors.
Equally muddling is the tendency in comparative penal literature to attribute deceptive agency or explanatory force to reified abstractions such as Modernity, the Enlightenment, or state rationality, rather than grounding such interpretations in specific institutional contexts and source-based evidence.
Closely related is the habitual use of vague explanatory shorthand—terms such as path dependency, continuity, precursors, antecedents, blueprints, templates etc., which appear frequently without clear definitions or empirical substantiation.
To avoid these risks, the project adopts a deliberately narrow working definition of manipulation:
Manipulation refers to the contemporaneous acknowledgment by actors within a custodial system that data—especially mortality data—was distorted, misrepresented, or concealed, and that such distortion was understood at the time to be misleading, deceptive, or in conflict with prevailing standards of accuracy or truthfulness.
Crucially, this acknowledgment must come from those directly involved in data production or oversight—privileged insiders such as prison physicians, wardens, inspectors, or bureaucrats with institutional responsibility. Their proximity to the process ensures that manipulation is not merely inferred but attested from within the system itself.
This stringent definition serves several purposes:
By requiring contemporaneous recognition—preferably in the words of those who produced or supervised the data—this definition sets a high evidentiary threshold. While it reduces the number of cases that qualify as confirmed manipulation, it improves analytical precision and guards against two perennial interpretative fallacies:
This disciplined approach ensures that the project’s findings remain grounded in what historical actors themselves knew, said, and did—not in assumptions introduced by later observers.
To separate manipulation from honest error or bureaucratic “noise,” the project employs two complementary standards of evidence:
This project applies a structured analytical framework to each case study to determine: why manipulation occurred, how it was carried out, who was responsible, and to what extent the manipulation distorted the historical and institutional record in measurable terms.
What compelled officials to manipulate mortality data?
The project prioritizes silver bullet evidence: explicit admissions from prison physicians, wardens, inspectors, or others directly responsible for data production. Such testimony confirms both awareness and intent.
At the same time, motive is notoriously difficult to prove with incontrovertible evidence. Deceptive intent may coexist with other drivers—such as fiscal restraint, bureaucratic routine, or genuine humanitarian concern in the case of medical release. The project is therefore careful to distinguish deception conclusively, avoiding speculative claims and grounding its conclusions in documented pressures and incentives.
In the absence of direct admissions, the project considers structural factors:
This inquiry maps the conditions that made manipulation attractive, even without explicit directives.
How did manipulation occur?
This includes a range of bureaucratic practices:
The project also investigates how contemporaries justified or rationalized these actions—as administrative routine, institutional necessity, or benevolence.
Who carried out or condoned manipulation?
This question identifies specific actors involved (principal–agent dynamics):
The goal is to clarify whether manipulation was isolated or encouraged within chains of command.
How serious was the manipulation in measurable terms?
This component assesses:
Manipulation mattered not only because it altered statistics in the moment, but also because it shaped how penal systems were judged—both by contemporaries and by future generations of interpreters.
To support consistent cross-case analysis, the project uses a standard set of units of comparison across all four core case studies:
This full framework applies to four major penal systems:
the Soviet Gulag, the convict leasing system in the American South, colonial Indian prisons, and British metropolitan prisons.