ABSTRACT
Almost all the Asian countries, with the exception of Japan, Thailand, Bhutan and China, are marked by their colonized past. Japan was a colonizer and had colonized Korea and Taiwan. This chapter presents the nature of Asian prisons as institutions that serve to further peripheralize and abandon certain marginalized groups in society. The new prisons in the neo-liberal regimes potentially are spaces of captive labour, implicating these institutions in new logics of management and administration and qualitatively different repressive tactics. The prison thus becomes a site of dissent and seeks to create, albeit implicitly, a larger subversive political field. The entangled interactions within prison, the fusion of functions and the subversive practices within and outside the prison, uncovered through the unravelling of the suppressed voices, represent multiple layers of subversion. In assimilating the specific cultural idiosyncrasies of their contexts, prisons in Asia have gone beyond the rhetoric of being remnants of colonial institutions.
