Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. It introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. These prisons were designed to respond to the demand for a more rigorous mode of convict discipline by implementing a strict penal system based on remunerative labor. At the same time, these controlled spaces provided the British an opportunity to study and explore the bodies of Indian convicts from medical, labor, and anthropological perspectives. Visual representations of prisons and prisoners helped to codify British colonial opinions about the particular characteristics of the Indian convict, as well as the need for the prison institution in India. My dissertation studies these processes of representation through an examination of prison architecture and the spatial formations of prisons in colonial Bengal, between, 1858 and 1911, a period that witnessed critical transformations of the penal landscape. Changes included the construction of numerous central and district jails, medical management that aimed to reduce prisoner mortality, and the implementation of a streamlined program of prison labor. By analyzing the visual and architectural archive of these prisons, I propose a new spatial model for understanding how the prison both exemplifies and challenges the claims of British colonial rule. This will be first project to provide a detailed analysis of the visual corpus of colonial penology in India, particularly the architecture of colonial prisons, while at the same time demonstrating the contested character of the colonial prison.