Abstract
Extending parole scholarship to compare parole punitivity, this paper contrasts two understudied lifers’ parole systems: India and Israel. A qualitative comparative analysis of parole decision-making in both contexts reveals that despite distinct structuring of parole fields, both systems manifest punitivity, reflected in low release rates. Contrasting the construction of (a) punitive consideration (formal versus informal), (b) victims (individualised versus aggregated), and (c) public trust (judicial legitimacy versus political stability) we show how parole punitivity is fluid, adapting to specific contexts. We further argue that this fluid punitivity also serves a generative purpose: (a) it orients parole as a site of mobilising different goals beyond parole determination, and (b) enables a bifurcated parole field that differentiates ‘citizen’ from ‘enemy parole’. This extra-penological generativity exposes the potential and limitations of regulating punitivity through rules-based parole. The fluid and permutable nature of punitivity and its potential generativity, have implications for correctional administration, the carceral experience of lifers, and the legitimacy of the parole system.
Introduction
Recent years have seen burgeoning scholarly interest in comparative penology in questions of ‘what’ to compare and ‘how’ to undertake comparison (Brangan, 2020, 2023; Liebling et al., 2021; Nelken, 2009; Newburn and Jones, 2022). These studies focus on convergences between penal regimes and socio-legal cultures, and penal trends between and among systems. Scholars of ‘penal populism’ (and similar conceptions) increasingly engaged with the politics of punishment to develop more nuanced accounts of penal change (Brangan, 2020, 2023). While comparative penology has made significant progress (Newburn and Jones, 2022), the current literature’s focus has several limitations.
First, current comparative literature focuses more on ‘grand narratives and macro-structural perspectives’ (Brangan, 2020: 596) including comparing broad legal (e.g. comparing constitutional values, norms and ethics) (Whitman, 2003), sociological and structural analyses (e.g. comparing imprisonment rates) and less on more particular examinations at the micro-level ‘on the ground’ decision-making between systems (Barker, 2006; Garland, 2013; Newburn and Jones, 2022). As Brangan (2020: 608) put it, comparative criminologists ‘tend to favour breadth to depth, drawing a statistical silhouette of the prison using population numbers. What happens inside the prison, however, is rarely systematically set out’. Thus, despite being widely discussed, ‘punitiveness’ as a concept remains ‘thin’ and under-theorised, and there is a necessity to find a wider range of indices to capture the differentiated nature of ‘punitiveness’ when comparing penal cultures, methods, and discourses (Matthews, 2005; Newburn and Jones, 2022).
Second, current literature focuses more on the seemingly obvious punitive phases of sentencing and imprisonment and dedicates far less attention to parole boards and other back-end authorities. For example, comparative penologists explore the increasing shift in structuring sentencing discretion (Tonry, 2016) but offer significantly little attention to similar trends among parole decision-makers (Mackey and Rudes, 2021; Rhine et al., 2017). Similarly, while scholars have compared ‘exceptional’ and ‘punitive’ prison cultures (Liebling et al., 2021), there is significantly less interest in comparing parole ‘parole punitivity’, that is, tendency of parole authorities to prioritise punishment over rehabilitation (Pfeffer, 2024).
This gap is significant considering that parole scholarship is increasingly aware of the symbolic power of parole to demonstrate ‘toughness’ for violent offending, to express solidarity with the victims of crime, and reaffirm a ‘populist credo’ that purportedly stands in opposition to an unaccountable and out of touch ‘penal elite’ (Annison and Guiney, 2022; Fitzgerald et al., 2022). Parole was also found, especially in the US and British systems (Griffin, 2018), to promote stigma and prison/community boundary-making (Herbert, 2024; Pogrebin et al., 2015), reinforcing censure for prisoners’ past crimes (Hawkins, 1983; Rhine et al., 2017), reaffirming victim’s expressivist retribution (Griffin, 2018), promoting general deterrence (Rhine et al., 2017), satisfy punitive public opinion (Fitzgerald et al., 2022) or ‘obsessive’ punitive risk elimination (Barry, 2021).
Parole is a highly discretionary sphere even in systems with parole guidelines, where gendered and racialised (Greene and Dalke, 2021; Hannah-Moffat and Yule, 2011) considerations are often mobilised through conceptions of the ideal rehabilitated individual (Hawkins, 1983; Mackey and Rudes, 2021), or the risk subject (Barry, 2021; Hannah-Moffat, 2005). To understand how parole punitivity works we must look beyond the formal legal-administrative institutions to consider the organisational and discursive settings that include the symbolic, cognitive scripts, and moral templates that provide the ‘frames of meaning’ guiding parole decision-making in reality (Guiney, 2023).
Third, there is a need to shift attention away from a preoccupation with Western Anglo-American liberal democracies to other parts of the globe (Brangan, 2020). If scholars repeatedly argue that despite their theoretical and policy importance parole hearings are notoriously understudied (Ruhland, 2020; Young and Pearlman, 2022), this seems especially true beyond the US-oriented parole literature.
The ‘secretive world’ of parole, decided behind closed doors, makes the comparison both important and complex to conduct. This paper aims to fill this gap by comparing the construction of punitiveness by parole decision-makers in two understudied parole systems: India and Israel, in the case of parole from life imprisonment. It explores two intersecting questions: (a) how is punitivity constructed, mobilised, and legitimised by parole decision-makers? and (b) what purpose does punitivity serve in the two systems?
Conceptualising punitivity: The conceptualisation of punitivity remains theoretically underdeveloped despite its widespread application in criminological discourse. Matthews (2005) identified this gap early, noting the field’s ‘little attempt to define or deconstruct it’, particularly concerning parole systems. At its most fundamental level, punitiveness refers to approaches ‘involving or inflicting punishment’ (Ostaszewski et al., 2024), though this basic definition masks considerable analytical complexity. Contemporary scholarship recognises punitivity as operating across multiple institutional levels. Ostaszewski et al. (2024) distinguish between macro-level punitiveness – expressed through legislative and judicial functions shaped by broader social and political punishment discourses—meso-level punitiveness in sentence enforcement practices, and micro-level punitiveness reflected in public attitudes towards harsh punishment. Matthews (2005) offers a more expansive conceptualisation, identifying punitivity through its reliance on coercion, formalism, moralism and state-inflicted pain, while also encompassing ‘less visible and discreet mechanisms through which social control is realized in contemporary society’.
Recent theoretical advances have sought greater precision in defining punitivity’s core dimensions. Pfeffer (2024) proposes disaggregating the concept into three distinct components: ‘(1) a commitment to punishment over rehabilitation, (2) the degree of harshness of response to crime, and (3) the lack of a logical progression of punishment based on the severity of crime committed’. This multi-dimensional approach provides a more robust foundation for analysing punitive practices across different institutional contexts and jurisdictions.
Methodology
India and Israel: Situating a comparative inquiry
Comparing India and Israel has been productive in socio-legal scholarship, like human rights in counterterrorism (Bhoumik, 2005; Kaura, 2017) and personal laws (Lerner, 2014; Sezgin, 2013), to analyse how postcolonial states have responded to legal systems inherited at the time of independence. Building on this tradition, we demonstrate why India and Israel, in relation to each other, offer compelling cases for expanding punishment scholarship beyond Anglo-European contexts and for comparing parole punitivity.
First, similar origins divergent evolution: Both countries’ parole systems originated during the British colonial period. While both gained independence within a year of each other (1947–1948) and inherited a similar common law system, their postcolonial parole evolution set out in divergent trajectories. In Israel, parole was judicialised and formalised under specific legislation (Parole Law, 2001), reorienting parole from executive clemency to ‘quasi-judicial’ and shifting discretionary power from executive to judicial actors. However, in India, despite suggestions from various expert committees (All India Committee on Jail Reforms (AICJR), 1980; United Nations (UN), 1958), parole was never formalised under specific legislation. Lifers’ parole in India continues to be marked by ‘legal liminality’ (Chacón, 2016), determined as per a normative patchwork of judicial precedents, prison manuals, and government orders. Unlike Israel, parole determination is viewed as purely ‘administrative’, retaining discretionary power with the executive.
Second, different stages of system standardisation: Israel’s post-2001 statutory framework represents a relatively mature, standardised parole field with a centralised legal framework detailing uniform procedure, criteria, and grounds for decision-making. However, in India, the lifers’ parole field has largely remained the same since its inception in the colonia period. It is completely decentralised, with no uniformity in decision-making criteria (Gokhale, 2018), and provisions for standardised risk assessment, post-release monitoring, and legal representation are absent in most states (Tripathi and Dagan, 2024). Studying parole discretion across these distinct stages allows for analysing whether legal certainty and bureaucratic professionalism impact the manifestation of punitiveness.
Third, dual penal regimes: Both countries have institutionalised ‘dual penal regime’ where criminal law for ‘citizens’ runs parallel to an illiberal ‘enemy penology’ (Krasmann, 2007) employed ‘to treat particular groups and categories of cases with an iron fist’ (Ben-Natan, 2021: 742). India’s ‘special laws’ on terrorism, sex offences against children, and preventive detention curtail due process rights and exist alongside the general penal code (Ambasta, 2020). In Israel, the dual penal regime is maintained by increasing use of emergency statutes for prosecuting Palestinians before military courts (Ballas, 2021, Ben-Natan, 2021).
Fourth, plural democracies with majoritarian nationalism: Despite its secular-democratic commitment, majoritarian authoritarianism, sectarian violence, and state partisanship have persisted in postcolonial India – particularly in Kashmir and the northeast (Bhatt, 2025). However, since 2014, ‘Hindutva authoritarian legality’ has intensified, systematically marginalising Muslims through state power for political control (Bhatt et al., 2022). Jewish-majority Israel is officially an ethnic democracy that has limited Palestinians’ rights (Cohen-Almagor, 2015). Such dualist mechanism in both countries, where democracy co-exist with majoritarian authoritarianism, distinctly shape their criminal justice approaches (Bhatt, 2025).
Fifth, constitutionalising parole: Constitutional courts in both jurisdictions have significantly shaped the parole field, recognising lifers’ right to meaningful parole consideration as part of their constitutional right to dignity (Horev v. State, 2004 (Supreme Court of Israel); Mohinder Singh v. Punjab, 2013 (Supreme Court of India)) and using judicial review against arbitrary parole discretion (Tripathi and Dagan, 2024).
India and Israel present a significant pairing: historically linked yet institutionally distinctive; democratic yet deeply divided; committed to dignity yet enmeshed in security exceptionalism. Their parole systems sit at the crossroads of these tensions, making them rich sites for comparative penological enquiry.
Context
Indian Context: In India, life imprisonment theoretically extends to the natural life of the convict. However, the legal framework provides for ‘premature release’ consideration after completing 14 years of imprisonment (Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, ss.473-475). The parole system operates through state-specific policies outlined in prison manuals or government orders, which broadly conform to criteria established by the National Human Rights Commission (1999) and various Supreme Court judgments (Dhanuka, 2016). This research examines Delhi’s parole framework, governed by the Delhi Prison Rules (2018). The Lieutenant Governor holds ultimate decision-making authority, exercised upon recommendations from the Sentence Review Board (SRB) (Government of NCT of Delhi [GNCTD], 2018: rule 1257). The SRB represents a primarily administrative body, convening quarterly with six of its seven members drawn from the state’s executive bureaucracy (GNCTD, 2018: rule 1247). The state’s home minister chairs the SRB, and notably, lifers are afforded no opportunity for oral, written, or legal representation during proceedings (Tripathi and Dagan, 2024). For the period under research (2018–2022), all SRB members were male and Hindu. 1
The Delhi Prison Rules (2018) establish parole’s primary objective as rehabilitating and integrating lifers into society while ensuring societal protection (rule 1244). The SRB evaluates applications against specific criteria through assessment mechanisms (GNCTD, 2018: rule 1251): (a) reformation – assessed via the prisoner’s commutation roll maintained by the prison department, (b) ‘propensity to commit crime’ – evaluated through police reports evincing criminal background, (c) ‘reintegrative potential’ and (d) ‘socio-economic conditions’ – both examined through probation reports that assess family support, employment prospects, financial status, and housing arrangements, and (e) ‘nature of crime’. Constitutional courts have established that discretionary powers must not be exercised arbitrarily or punitively (Sangeet v. Haryana, 2013), requiring the SRB to adopt a ‘balanced approach’ (Sushil Sharma v. GNCTD, 2018) which mandates equal consideration of all factors in the decision-making criteria.
Israeli Context: Israel’s legal system mandates life imprisonment for unprovoked murder, meaning imprisonment extends till the convict’s natural life (Horev v State, 2004 (Supreme Court of Israel)). However, parole consideration becomes available after serving a minimum of 20 years (Parole Law, 2001: ss.29-30). Parole is determined through primary legislation (Parole Law, 2001), prison ordinances, and parole jurisprudence, overseen by the Special Parole Board (SPB), a permanent, quasi-judicial authority within the judiciary. A district judge heads the SPB, accompanied by two clinical experts who participate in voting decisions (Parole Law, 2001: s.3). This composition reflects a more judicialised approach compared to India’s administrative model. The SPB’s mandate centres on determining whether the applicant’s release ‘is appropriate and would pose a risk to public safety’ (s.3). The board employs risk-based assessment through discretionary application of statutory criteria that includes prison conduct, criminal history, crime severity, prison treatment programmes, and professional reports from police, probation officers, prison staff, and community rehabilitation officers (s.9; Dagan, 2023).
The Israeli system emphasises procedural transparency and due process. Detailed procedures govern parole hearings and processes (Dagan, 2023), with administrative appeal mechanisms available on grounds of unreasonableness, proportionality, or illegality (s.25). The state receives representation through attorney general counsel, while prisoners typically secure private or public counsel. Unless classified for security reasons, lifers and their counsel receive all documentation submitted to the SPB (s.17; Parole Guidance, 2022). Lifers mostly attend the hearings in person (Parole Guidance, 2022).
Data collection
The study draws on two larger projects on lifers’ parole conducted independently in Israel and India. A qualitative multiple-case study comparative method, commonly used in social sciences (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017; Stewart, 2012) was used to explore, describe, and compare parole punitiveness across Israel and India. This approach enables detailed examination within and between cases to identify similarities and differences (Schoch, 2020). In this comparative study, such identification becomes important to understand how and why punitivity manifests and functions in both jurisdictions despite the distinct structuration of parole fields. However, penological comparison must caution that legal, cultural, and political meanings often coincide, clash, and intermingle in empirical reality (Brangan, 2023).
Israel: Data were collected through three sources. First, the Israeli Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority (IPRA) archives (Parole Law, 2001: s.9(8)), containing 329 transcripts of Special Parole Board (SPB) hearings from 2018 to 2022. All lifers had adult murder convictions. On average, their maximum determinate sentence (after commutation) was about 31 years, and their mean age at hearing was around 55. Most were men (94%; n = 123), a few women (6%; n = 8), two-thirds Jewish, and one-third non-Jewish (mainly Arab).
Second, in-depth semi-structured interviews with former SPB chairpersons (judges) were conducted in 2020. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling, a method frequently used in similar qualitative studies on parole decision-making (e.g. Ireland and Berg, 2008). The sample was drawn from a roster of 55 Israel Parole Board (IPB) chairpersons obtained via email from the Israeli Judicial Authority. All 55 chairpersons were approached through a group email; 20 chairpersons (16 male; 4 female; all Jewish) agreed to participate through written consent. This sample size (N = 20) matched those employed in previous qualitative studies on parole decision-making in the United States (Ireland and Berg, 2008; Ruhland, 2020) and the United Kingdom (Padfield, 2017). The interview guide comprised 25 open‑ended items grouped under three key topics: (a) the participant’s professional background as a parole board chair; (b) their views on the aims and functions of parole; and (c) their impressions of how parole decisions are made in serious cases. Interviews were conducted in-person during the first half of 2020, lasting 1–3 hours each. All interviews were recorded, conducted in Hebrew, transcribed verbatim by the IPB’s secretary, and translated to English by a Hebrew–English bilingual expert. Third, search in the Nevo legal database identified case law on parole punitiveness. Ethics approvals came from the IPRA ethics committee, the University IRB, and the President of the Supreme Court of Israel.
In India, research focused on Delhi because, during data collection, its prison department was the only one nationwide systematically recording and publishing SRB decisions. The data were gathered in 2022 from: (a) the Sentence Review Board (SRB) decision dossiers obtained via Right to Information requests to Delhi’s prison department, covering eight SRB meetings (2018–2021) and 1183 applications. Most concerned murder (n = 870), followed by sex offences (both adult and child sex offences) (n = 247) and terrorism (n = 66). Almost all lifers were men (n = 1180), with an average age of 48. The dossiers do not include information on the lifers’ caste or religion. However, as religious minorities (Muslims, Christians, Sikhs), and historically marginalised caste groups (like Dalits, Adivasis, and Vimukta community) are disproportionately represented in Indian prisons (National Crime Records Bureau [NCRB], 2022), they are more likely to be the targets of parole punitivity.
Second, in-depth semi-structured elite interviews with eight SRB members – five still in office during data collection and three who had served previously. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling, popular in qualitative research involving ‘hard to access’ state actors (Goldstein, 2002). Gaining access to the closed world of parole determination proved time‑consuming and relied on several channels – emails, phone calls, and in‑person meetings with the interviewees’ assistants (PAs). The PAs were fully briefed on the project, its aims, and the measures in place for data protection and anonymisation. Seven interviews were held face‑to‑face in participants’ offices in Delhi; one session was conducted over Zoom. Each interview lasted around 70 minutes. The interview guide comprised 18 questions organised around four focal areas: (a) how members describe the decision-making process, (b) their views on parole’s nature, aims, and objectives, (c) how they frame and interpret broad considerations for decision-making, and (d) how they explain ‘rejections based solely on crime severity’ (RBCS). RBCS refers to decisions where the sole reason for denying an application was the seriousness of the crime and the circumstances surrounding its commission. Interviews were conducted in ‘Hinglish’ as interviewees kept ‘code-switching between English and Hindi’. The author transcribed every interview and completed Hindi‑to‑English translations. Ethical clearance was obtained from the University of Oxford’s IRB.
Findings
The Indian and Israeli data were analysed in three stages. Stage 1: we analysed the full data set from both systems to extract key themes. Stage 2: we conducted a comparative analysis of the themes identified in Stage 1, ‘bounding’ them to locate what mobilises parole punitivity (Yin, 2014), employing an inductive approach (Van Den Beemt et al., 2023). Stage 3: we synthesised similarities, differences, and patterns considering the research questions, iteratively (Schoch, 2020).
Formal v. informal punitivism
Israel – formal punitivism: In Israel, punitivity manifests formally, that is, punitive considerations such as retribution and general deterrence are explicitly authorised by the statute as legitimate grounds for denying parole in very serious cases. Punitivity in parole is formalised through two legislations: (a) Section 10(a) of Parole Act, 2001; (b) Section 40A of Counterterrorism Act, 2018:
Section 10(a) of the Parole Act, 2001 empowers the Board to deny release in ‘cases of special severity’ if it believes such release ‘will severely harm the public trust in the justice system, law enforcement, and public deterrence’, despite positive prison behaviour and rehabilitation. Although section 10(a) lets the SPB reject parole for punitive reasons, which are often referred to as ‘public interest considerations’ by the board and the prosecutors in the parole hearings, it offers no explicit guidance on identifying ‘cases of special severity’ or for assessing what would ‘severely harm the public trust in the justice system’. Therefore, in deciding which cases qualify, the Board uses a legal ‘tool-kit’: (a) referencing prior SPB decisions as ‘precedents’, (b) consulting sentencing or administrative case law to rank severity, and (c) balancing the crime’s seriousness and the length of actual imprisonment to be served. In practice, section 10(a) is invoked almost exclusively in aggravated cases of murder (e.g. multiple crimes, extreme cruelty).
Section 40A, introduced by the 2018 Counter-Terrorism Act (Amendment No. 4), authorises the SPB to remove a lifer convicted of murder from parole determination outright by classifying the offence as a ‘terror act’ by the SPB or the sentencing court. Such prisoners are categorically excluded from parole consideration on both retributive and deterrent grounds, as the Chair of the Joint Parliamentary Committee who legislated this law put it:
The purpose of this Amendment Bill is clear: to eradicate terrorism . . . we know how to create greater deterrence against those terrorists, lest they think that perhaps after they commit a terrorist act, at some point their imprisonment will be shortened and they will be released. (Knesset, 2018: 78)
Israel’s formalised punitivism disproportionately impacts Palestinian lifers as nearly all those labelled as terror acts are Palestinians (Hefetz, 2023). Therefore, all Palestinian lifers face complete exclusion from parole consideration owing to their security classification. Even Palestinian prisoners serving non-life sentences encounter systematically higher barriers to release, subjected to a greater burden of proof in demonstrating risk reduction compared to their Jewish counterparts (Dagan, 2023). This differential treatment results in disproportionately lower parole release rates for Palestinian prisoners compared to non-security prisoners (Noah and Rosenfeld, 2021).
India – informal punitivism: Unlike Israel, punitivity in Indian parole manifests more informally, that is, through discretionary, extralegal, ‘discursive practices’–constructing and maintaining knowledge about lifers through language (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982) rather than sanctioned by law. Punitive considerations like retribution, general deterrence, moral censure, and carceral public opinion appeared in (a) decision-making patterns, (b) reasoning for decision-making in dossiers, particularly for rejections based solely on crime severity (RBCS), and (c) frames mobilised to justify such RBCS in the interviews.
SRB’s decision-making strongly reflects a ‘retributive approach’ to parole, that is, parole determination which privileges crime severity over other considerations like reformation and rehabilitation. The SRB reviewed 1183 applications over eight meetings held between 2018 and 2021. Of these, 917 (77.52%) were rejected, while only 266 (22.48%) were recommended for release. Out of the 917 rejections, 55% (n = 507) were RBCS. Moreover, the rate of RBCS steadily increased over the period, from 50% in 2019, 51% in 2020, to 64% in 2021. Even among the remaining 45% of rejections that were not RBCS, 19% were determined by a combination of ‘criminal history’ and ‘nature of the crime’, while 21% factored in ‘unsatisfactory jail conduct’ along with the ‘nature of the crime. Therefore, only 5% of the rejected applications were decided by giving due consideration to all the factors constituting the decision-making criteria. This overwhelmingly retributive approach endures even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that parole rejections solely based on the nature or seriousness of crime violate the lifer’s fundamental right to dignity (Shor v. UP, 2020; Satish v. UP, 2020). In the decision dossiers, retributive approach becomes apparent in the reasoning given for RBCS: ‘The convict had committed rape with a minor girl, we cannot fold our arms at such heinous crime’ (case 6), ‘Considering the gravity, cruelty, and perversity of crime, it might not serve the interest of justice to release him’ (case 142).
Exploring the justification for retributive approach during the interviews revealed further punitive considerations that inform SRB’s decision-making. In justifying RBCS, the interviewees drew from punitive ‘frames’ (Hawkins, 1983), such as (a) moral censure: ‘he sodomised a young boy, shows his diseased mentality . . . should forever be shunned’ (interviewee Ind 2), (b) general deterrence: ‘we cannot appear as going easy on such serious prisoners, cannot go easy on rapists . . . it will reduce the fear in the eyes of public’ (interviewee Ind 1), and (c) carceral public opinion: ‘we cannot ignore the public anger . . . they [public] don’t want such people to ever come out’ (interviewee Ind 7).
Lifers convicted of sexual
2
or terrorism related offences (hereinafter referred to as ‘serious offenders’) were disproportionately represented in SRB’s punitive decision-making. While they constituted only 34% of total rejections, their share in RBCS was 60% (sex offences – 47%, and terror offences – 13%). Technically included in the sentence-review process, they were rarely given meaningful consideration: every terrorism application and 96 % of sexual-offence applications were RBCS. During the interviews, such a significantly punitive approach towards serious offenders was justified by (a) constructing them as ‘incorrigible’, and (b) ‘deserving’ longer incarceration: I don’t think one can reform them. Prison programmes like yoga, vipassana (meditation), art therapy – are meant for prisoners who can be reformed, you know, who have it in them to become better. These programmes cannot change a perverse mindset, there is no point in making any such investment. (interviewee Ind 1) life means end of life, it means they [serious offenders] will have to die here, 14 years is too less for them. (interviewee Ind 2)
Particularly for terror offenders, interviews revealed how the SRB punitive reasoning also reflects ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’ (Malik, 2010) that operates through a communalised construction of ‘suspect population’ (Cole and Lynch, 2006). Terror offenders face additional layer of discriminatory reasoning as their parole assessment is de-individualised and reimagined as a site for managing ‘ongoing threat of Jihadi terror’ (interviewee Ind 1). Some members justified ‘incapacitating’ (interviewee Ind 1) terror offenders through indefinite incarceration as releasing them can ‘potentially activate the sleeper cells in the community’ (interviewee Ind 1), as ‘such (Muslim) youth are quite vulnerable to radicalisation’ (interviewee Ind 3). Such discriminatory logic exemplifies India’s broader counterterrorism regime that operates by ‘constructing entire communities as suspect populations in the eyes of law and people’ (Singh, 2007: 166). This ‘jurisprudence of [communal] suspicion’ (Rao and Singh, 2015: 305) works through ‘differential construction of majority and minority violence’ (Eckert, 2012: 328), enabling the disproportionate targeting of religious and ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, under exceptional regimes of anti-terror laws (Ahmad, 2017). The parole system thus becomes another site where this communalised suspicion manifests, transforming what should be individualised assessments of rehabilitation and reform into mechanisms for managing perceived collective threats from minority communities, particularly Muslims.
The juxtaposition of Israel’s formal and India’s informal punitivism reveals two distinct but equally effective mechanisms for embedding exclusionary practices within parole systems. Israel’s statutory framework creates ‘legitimised legal exclusion’: Section 40A enables categorical denial of parole consideration through terror classification by the SPB or court, while Section 10(a) provides broad discretion around ‘public trust’ and ‘special severity’ that lacks concrete definitional boundaries and could be applied to all other lifers (‘criminal’) based on the board’s broad discretion.
This formal architecture effectively creates a pathway to permanent incarceration by systematically channelling Palestinian lifers towards exclusion through terror classification. The formal nature of this system provides a legal veneer for punitive outcomes by law: first, a categorical exclusion of all terror-related crimes; and second, an exclusion of some serious ‘criminal’ lifers based on the SPB’s broad discretion under an exceptional punitive clause in parole law. In contrast, India’s informal punitivism operates through ‘extralegal reasoning’ that prioritises crime severity over rehabilitation, despite judicial precedents prohibiting such a retributive approach. SRB’s 55% rejection rate based solely on crime severity demonstrates how informal practices can systematically circumvent legal protections, with terrorism and sexual offence cases receiving virtually mechanical denials (100% and 96%, respectively). This informal system enables the mobilisation of punitive frames that construct certain offender categories as inherently unreformable. While Israel’s formal system requires legal justification for exclusion, India’s informal approach allows for more fluid deployment of discriminatory reasoning, particularly anti-Muslim sentiment that characterises Muslim youth as ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’. Both systems ultimately achieve similar exclusionary outcomes through different operational logics: displacing rehabilitation and reproducing majoritarian anxieties.
Constructing victims: Individualised versus collective
Israel: Individualised victim
Crime victims have a right to make a written statement or appear in person before the Board in serious crimes (State v Ganame, 2009). In some hearings, victims attend in-person (often through their own legal counsel), and in some, they just submit a Victim Impact Statement (VIS), which is almost always punitive. The SPB may postpone a hearing just to make sure that the victim can attend the hearing.
As the parole transcripts reveal, the SPB constructed the VIS as embodying the personalised account of ongoing harm of the crime: ‘we heard painful words regarding the family fate since the horrific murder, especially regarding the victim’s mother, that is hard medical and mental condition’ and ‘[the victim] describes the extensive suffering caused to the family due to the act of murder. The murder led to the family’s devastation and significant harm to the health of both parents . . . [the prisoner] should continue and fulfil his debt to society completely’ (63771-03-15/19). In some cases, the SPB used the VIS to refer to the potential harm of the lifer’s release: ‘the VIS convinced us that releasing the prisoner now will harm greatly the victim’s children and all the family members’ (C-7934-02-16).
The interview data further show the ‘communicative purpose’ (Dagan and Segev, 2015) of the decisions to victims: ‘the woman needs to know that the system protects her and punishes severely’ (interviewee Isr 1). Several interviewees referred to the need to ease the individual victim’s suffering: ‘we want to ease [the victim’s] suffering’ (interviewee Isr 7), ‘releasing this prisoner before time would severely impact the victim’s feelings’ (interviewee Isr 5). Such reasoning reveals how the SPB conceptualises its role beyond risk-assessment to having a communicative function – sending a message to victims about the justice system’s commitment to their protection. It emphasises the potential of punitive decisions to ease the victim’s suffering. Through this, the Board significantly posits victim satisfaction and symbolic communication as legitimate considerations for parole decision-making.
India: Retributive collective victim
As SRB hearings are deemed administrative, victims are not given any representation. There is no statutory requirement to consider the opinion of the victim’s family. The probation report may record the potential impact of lifer’s release on victim’s family, but there’s no mandatory requirement to do so. In absence of direct representation, victim is discursively constructed by the SRB through and in justification of its decision-making. Analysing decision transcripts and interviews reveals that victim is almost always constructed as punitive through two frames: retributive victim and collective victim. The punitive construction of victims is selective, mobilised in only those cases where victim construction is deemed a strong justification for the decision.
Retributive victim: In some cases, victim is constructed as wholly retributive – perpetually trapped in immutable and perpetual suffering and always demanding their due: ‘He (lifer) sodomised a 12 year-old boy, can you imagine his [victim’s] pain, had he [victim] been here he would never have let such a person to be set free’ (interviewee 1); ‘‘what about her [victim’s] family, they are cursed to suffer forever, they will never heal . . . while we cannot make them (lifers) suffer the same way, we can at least ensure no injustice is caused to the victim’s family by the untimely release’ (interviewee Ind 7); ‘we are answerable to the victim’s family, when the court sentenced this person to life, the family [victim’s] deserve to see them in prison for life’ (interviewee Ind 3). This demonstrates that retributive victim construction privileges abstract idealised notions over evidence-based understandings of what victims actually want and experience. Instead of impact statements, it is based on facts and circumstances of the crime – reproduced before the Board through trial records.
Collective victim: In other cases, the victim constructed is often ‘aggregated’ – invoking ‘victim’ not to refer to an individual but to a group or a class of persons. Unlike Israel’s SPB, SRB often views victimisation not in individualised but collective experience: ‘These people [terror offenders] target innocent civilians, children, women . . . they have no regard for human life. We cannot risk the safety of our people by releasing them early’ (interviewee Ind 2). Invoked mostly in cases involving sex or terror offences, such victim construction frames ‘women’, and ‘women and children’, as monolithic, inherently vulnerable groups. It neglects the subjective and complex processes that underscore victimisation, recovery, and resistance – affronting the moral agency of the victim (real or imagined), offender, and individuals constituting a class/group.
The comparative findings reveal that despite vastly different provisions for victim participation, both systems effectively mobilise victim narratives to justify and expand punitive parole practices. In Israel, individualised victim testimony provides direct channels for expressing punitive demands in cases of denial. In India, the absence of actual victim voices enables decision-makers to construct imagined victims who are invariably retributive. Paradoxically, both the presence and absence of victim participation serve identical functions: legitimising punitive decisions through victim-centred discourse. Both systems use victim construction to fundamentally expand parole consideration beyond traditional risk assessment and rehabilitation to include some form of ‘victim justice’: where victim satisfaction, symbolic communication, and emotional repair become legitimate considerations for parole. Israeli SPB explicitly acknowledges this communicative purpose, while Indian SRB invokes hypothetical victim demands to justify continued incarceration.
Constructing public trust: Judicial legitimacy v. political stability
Israel’s judicial legitimacy
In Israel, both the interviews and decision transcripts reveal how the SPB justifies punitive considerations in parole not merely for ‘risk management’ (Hannah-Moffat, 2005), but as a mechanism to maintain public trust in the judicial system. Remarkably, the parole law represents the only place in Israeli legislation where an authority is required to consider ‘public confidence in the judiciary’, highlighting the unique institutional role the SPB plays in safeguarding judicial legitimacy.
The decision transcripts demonstrate how the SPB systematically invokes public trust in the judicial system to justify punitive parole denials. In cases involving serious crimes, the board explicitly connects early release to potential harm to judicial credibility. For instance, in a murder case, the SPB reasoned, [This is] a murder that shook the foundations of the State . . . Punishing such offender . . . should reflect the deep denouncement of society from crime . . . we are convinced that this case is so serious that if the prisoner is released this would severely harm the public trust in the legal system, the law enforcement system and public deterrence. (C-41927-03-16)
Another decision transcript reveals the SPB’s perception of its role as guardian of legal authority: Within our community we sit, read, and observe, hearing and experiencing the emotions of public trust in the justice system and law enforcement. We have no doubt that returning the prisoners to their homes before completing their sentence will be perceived by themselves, by those around them, and by the entire public as a weakness and debilitation of law’s authority. It will harm the law’s image, public deterrence, and hereby undermine the law enforcement, and the public interest as a whole. (C-7-03)
The SPB’s toolkit for preserving judicial integrity relies heavily on legal precedents, comparing crime severity across similar cases, analysing sentencing remarks, and even examining defendants’ courtroom behaviour from decades earlier. A decision in a murder case exemplifies this approach: ‘early release may significantly impact the public’s trust in the judicial system and undermine deterrence . . . The prisoner held a proud position before the criminal court in Jerusalem, took pride in his actions, and expressed no remorse or sorrow’ (C-24850-01-22).
The SPB rationalises invoking public trust by distinguishing its approach from ‘populist punitivity’ (Bottoms, 1995). It does so by ‘boundary-work’ (Gieryn, 1983) of (a) carefully demarcating public vengeance from judicial-based proportionality, and (b) reorienting the goal of punitivity as easing public anxieties towards the rule of law rather than as injecting ‘the will of public’ into parole (Pratt, 2007). Interview data supports this judicial-centric approach, with board members emphasising their protective role. As one board member explained, ‘we are in times where the public attention is very much focused on the judiciary, many times unjustly, because the judiciary is in an uneasy time, we can protect or harm the public confidence in the system through parole considerations’ (interviewee Isr 5).
Despite the SPB’s sophisticated boundary-work, significant contradictions emerge in its application of public trust considerations. While the board claims to ground its decisions in normative judicial principles rather than empirical public opinion, the SPB preserves its core populist appeal through the vague term ‘public confidence’ in the criminal justice system that pushes away questions of rehabilitation and risk (Annison and Guiney, 2022). This suggests that the test may serve more as post hoc rationalisation than principled decision-making. This flexibility allows the SPB to maintain its professional legitimacy while accommodating punitive outcomes that align with the ‘public’s generally punitive stance’ (Bottoms, 1995: 40).
India: Political stability
The Indian context presents a markedly different construction of public trust, where parole punitivity serves to disguise and legitimise political rather than judicial stability concerns. The interview data reveals a system where punitive considerations mask electoral and political calculations, representing what can be termed ‘politically motivated punitivity’.
Unlike Israel’s focus on institutional legitimacy, India’s parole system has been persistently marred by political motivations, bureaucratic influences, and corruption allegations across different political administrations (Doddahatti, 2023; Murali, 2004). The historical context provided by the 1998 parliamentary address of the Home Minister illustrates the entrenched nature of this politicisation: Discretionary powers are given to the Governors but Chief Ministers also involve themselves in the matter of political murders. There are some incidents of murders in which criminals do not complete even 10 years of their imprisonment . . . Even after the decision and directions of the Supreme Court, such instances are being witnessed. (Shinde, 1998: 23)
The interviews revealed the persistence of such manoeuvring of parole determination for political purposes, particularly in the cases involving sex offences. One interviewee (Ind 3) candidly explained the political calculus behind rape cases: ‘rape cases are politically sensitive . . . the (home) minister just does not want to touch them, it is obvious that even if probation department recommends release, he is going to reject’. Another (Ind 2) emphasised the media and electoral dimensions: ‘in such high-profile cases, highly covered by the media there’s a lot of pressure from ‘the above’, we cannot afford protests’. The mass protests following the Nirbhaya gangrape case in 2012 serves as a critical juncture demonstrating how political considerations become institutionalised through punitive rhetoric. Interview responses consistently referenced this turning point and its electoral implications: ‘Nirbhaya [gangrape case] was the turning point’ (interviewee Ind 1); ‘no [political] party wants to release such prisoners [sex offenders], there will be public outcry’ (interviewee Ind 2); ‘we need to think about the impact on society, no one wants such prisoners out in the society, that too just after 14 years, the public will come after us’ (interviewee Ind 3). This pattern is symptomatic of ‘state carceral feminism’ post the Nirbhaya case (Dash, 2021; Kotiswaran, 2018) which is marked by amplified criminalisation, carcerality, and hyperpunitivity as an appropriate justice-response to sexual violence (Kotiswaran, 2018).
The findings demonstrate how punitive considerations provide the lexicon to frame lifers as posing not just security risks but also electoral risks, without explicitly acknowledging the political considerations underlying parole decisions. This disguising function allows the SRB to maintain institutional legitimacy by appearing to conform to sentence review guidance, insulating decisions from potential judicial review on grounds of arbitrary discretion, and enabling risk management directed at preventing electoral loss rather than recidivism.
The comparative analysis reveals two fundamentally different constructions of public trust in parole decision-making, each serving distinct institutional purposes while employing punitive considerations as legitimising mechanisms. The Israeli system demonstrates an institutional-protective model where punitivity serves to safeguard judicial legitimacy and maintain public confidence in the rule of law and the work of the criminal justice system. In contrast, the Indian system exhibits a politically instrumentalised model where punitive considerations disguise electoral calculations and serve incumbent government stability rather than institutional integrity. This suggests that the construction of public trust in penal decision-making is not a neutral administrative consideration but rather a malleable concept that can be strategically deployed to serve varying institutional and political objectives, raising critical questions about the true beneficiaries of punitive parole practices in both jurisdictions.
Discussion and conclusion
Our comparative analysis of parole systems in Israel and India reveals two fundamental insights about punitivity in parole. The findings show how the richness and divergent ways of punitive discourses and practices generate multiple configurations of citizen/enemy subjects, individual/collective victim, and institutional judicial/political legitimacy (see Matthews, 2005; Newburn and Jones, 2022). In this way, the findings support analysing parole beyond traditional debates about its utility for reducing recidivism, revealing it as an important institutional and political mechanism that constitutes a key battleground – often hidden from the public eye – over penal legitimacy and power (Annison and Guiney, 2022; Fitzgerald et al., 2022).
First, punitivity demonstrates a fluid and adaptable character that transcends structural and socio-legal boundaries, manifesting effectively across different legal architectures while serving generative purposes beyond traditional penological goals. Second, this generative capacity enables both systems to maintain and legitimise a ‘dual penal state’ (Dubber, 2018) by enabling a bifurcated parole field that differentiates citizen from ‘enemy parole’ (Dagan, 2023).
Despite their fundamentally different structural configurations of parole – Israel’s formal-legalised, judicialised approach versus India’s informal, administrative framework – both systems have become equally effective sites for manifesting punitivity. This reveals punitivity’s capacity for adaptation across diverse socio-legal contexts. Israel’s formalised punitivism creates ‘legalised exclusion’ (Cheliotis, 2016) ostensibly neutral provisions that systematically channel Palestinian lifers towards permanent incarceration. Conversely, India’s informal system achieves similar punitive outcomes through extralegal reasoning that reflects a form of penal power akin to ‘lawful lawlessness’ (Sarat and Hussain, 2004) – where the law itself grants discretionary power that legitimises selective or arbitrary application of the rule of law. In the lawful lawlessness of Indian parole, lifers become liminal legal subjects (Chacón, 2016) – as their meaningful consideration for release is marked by the uncertainty of administrative grace, occupying a precarious space between legal and extralegal review. Such adaptability of punitivity across these contrasting structures demonstrates its fluid and permeable nature. Rather than being constrained by formal legal boundaries, punitivity finds expression through whatever institutional channels are available.
In both systems, punitivity serves generative purposes that extend far beyond traditional penological considerations of risk, and rehabilitation, revealing how parole becomes a site for achieving broader institutional and political objectives. In Israel, punitivity is mobilised to strengthen judicial legitimacy, while in India, it helps disguise and legitimise political stability. This extra-penological generativity of punitivity exposes both the potential and limitations of enabling rules-based parole through structural reform.
Further, punitivity’s generativity in both systems enables the maintenance and legitimisation of a ‘dual penal state’ (Dubber, 2018)–exemplified by a bifurcated parole field that creates differentiated pathways for ‘ordinary’ citizens versus those constructed as ‘enemy others’ or ‘exceptional subjects’. In the two systems, this bifurcation operates through systematic deployment of punitive considerations that create distinct categories of penal subjects with fundamentally different access to meaningful parole consideration. In Israel, this bifurcation manifests through the formal punitivity enabled by Section 40A, which creates a categorical exclusion from parole that disproportionately impacts Palestinians. This construction of Palestinian lifers as inherently dangerous ‘enemy others’ enables their wholesale exclusion from parole consideration while maintaining the formal appearance of equal treatment under the law. In India, the bifurcation operates through the construction of sex and terror offenders as inherently ‘incorrigible’ subjects who warrant exceptional treatment. This is particularly pronounced in the treatment of Muslim terror offenders, who also face prejudicial reasoning that characterises ‘Muslim youth’ as inherently ‘vulnerable to radicalization’ and positions their release as potentially ‘activating sleeper cells’. The intersection of offence type and religious identity creates a compounded vulnerability to punitive treatment that extends beyond individual culpability to encompass ‘collective suspicion’ (Gottlieb, 1996), showing how parole systems become sites for reproducing and legitimising broader patterns of social exclusion. This pattern reiterates that parole reform efforts must grapple not only with explicit punitive policies but also with the implicit categories and constructions that act as proxies of differential treatment (Rhine et al., 2017). This reaffirms recurring findings in discretionary parole research that highlight how parole guidelines remain inadequate in preventing prejudicial constructions of the penal subject (Greene and Dalke, 2021; Hannah-Moffat and Yule, 2011).
In conclusion, the study expands the geographical and analytical gaze of comparative penology to show how discretionary systems become sites for mobilising punitive logic beyond traditional parole determination. Despite structural differences, formal statutory authorisation in Israel versus informal discursive practices in India, both systems achieve similar exclusionary outcomes through fluid, adaptable punitive mechanisms. Our analysis demonstrates that punitivity is neither univocal nor strictly structure-dependent. Rather, it proves remarkably permeable, adapting to different socio-legal configurations while serving generative purposes that extend beyond criminal justice goals. In Israel, formal punitivity reinforces institutional judicial legitimacy, while in India, informal punitivity disguises political considerations through extralegal reasoning. Both systems create dual penal states that bifurcate parole fields into tracks for ordinary citizens and construct ‘enemy others’—Palestinians in Israel, and Muslims in India. This bifurcation legitimises systematic carceral control of minority populations while maintaining procedural facades of equal treatment. The study provides a comparative framework for future research to explore how lifers experience and navigate such fluid nature of punitivity – particularly beyond Anglo-European contexts and about the less explored world of punishment administration.
The study is not without limitations. The SRB’s decision dossiers do not record information on the caste, ethnicity, or religion of the applicant. This prevented the research from including identity-based bias in the analysis. However, it must be stressed that the state’s recording and representation of data are not neutral but influenced by the ‘push and pull of social and political forces’ (Sen, 2021: 56). Therefore, the need for methodological approaches that account for such structural silences in official records cannot be overstated.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.