Synopsis Through her close study of how criminals were handled and treated in the British prisons in Colonial Bengal in the period under review, Dr. Madhurima Sen shows an administration wavering between the new ideas in the air perceiving the prison as a site of moral reform of the convict and the punitive thrust that came more naturally to the colonial rulers. She ferrets through a large body of archival material, documents, reports, and reminiscences, to reconstruct prison life in Bengal and the Cellular Prison at Port Blair in the Andamans, in all its details.