Reformative Justice in South Asia: A Comparative Study of India and Bangladesh, with Lessons from the Nordic Model

ABSTRACT:

Most criminal justice systems in South Asia were built on a punitive logic inherited from the colonial period. They punish, but they rarely reform. This article asks whether that logic still makes sense and argues that it does not. Reformative justice, the idea that the central aim of punishment should be to change the offender and return them to society as a law-abiding person, is not a soft or marginal theory but a serious and workable basis for criminal policy, and one that both India and Bangladesh have already accepted in part. The article compares the two countries. It shows that India has gone further, mostly through a bold line of Supreme Court decisions that read the Constitution as requiring reformation, while Bangladesh has stayed closer to a purely punitive model despite having similar laws on its books. It then sets both against the Nordic example, especially Norway and Sweden, where reformative justice is the organising principle of the prison system and where reoffending rates are among the lowest in the world. The central argument is that the gap in South Asia is not primarily a gap in law or even in theory, but in political will and institutional capacity and that India's judicial experience offers Bangladesh a realistic, region-specific route to reform that does not depend on copying wealthy Western states wholesale. The article concludes with concrete proposals for both countries.

Keywords: reformative justice; rehabilitation; restorative justice; India; Bangladesh; Nordic model; prison reform; criminology