Subsistence Citizenship: Welfare Informalisation and the Politics of Survival in Southeast Asian Prisons

ABSTRACT

Welfare state theory is rarely applied to the carceral domain, yet prisons are among the most resource‐intensive coercive institutions of the modern state. This article examines how survival is organised within Southeast Asian prisons, drawing on 154 policy documents and 37 elite interviews across Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Synthesising welfare pluralism, feminist political economy and theories of informal governance, we show that prisons operate through a carceral welfare mix. Specifically, the state provides custodial infrastructure, while everyday subsistence (i.e., food, medicine, hygiene and care) is displaced onto families—primarily through women's unpaid labour—and civil society organisations. The COVID‐19 pandemic exposed this dependence. When visitation bans severed family supply chains, prisons experienced immediate crises of hunger and health with no compensatory state provision, revealing a governance arrangement that had long been obscured by routinisation. We conceptualise this condition as subsistence citizenship : in particular, a regime in which prisoners remain fully subject to state authority, while welfare protection is privatised, conditional and stratified. By repositioning prisons as sites of welfare analysis, the article disrupts established assumptions about informal provision, citizenship under punishment and boundaries of state responsibility. Its implications hence apply to any context where incarceration expands while welfare retreats.