Conclusion

Summary

Chapter 6 explores the simultaneous and contradictory projects of protection, detention, reform, and rehabilitation at a state-run shelter in Mumbai. It discusses the challenges of doing research in a carceral institution, explaining, in particular, the use of film screenings as a research method. The chapter describes how women placed in shelter detention experience profound uncertainty about their release, an indefinite curtailment of their mobility, interaction with kin and partners, and ability to earn a living. It examines how NGOs participate in shelter detention through programs providing livelihood skills training that appeal to foreign donors and the Indian state because of their neoliberal objective of facilitating women’s exit from both prostitution and state custody. It demonstrates how, from the perspective of detained women, however, these rehabilitation programs are questionably useful and rarely sustainable or lucrative. The chapter also highlights how Bangladeshi women are targeted by an immigration control agenda that joins the existing forms of governance shaping shelter detention. The chapter ends by tracking tabloid reports of an incident of escape from the shelter and the Bombay High Court’s subsequent intervention. The author argues that these responses by the media and judiciary ultimately extend and intensify, rather than question, shelter detention.