The Ship of Theseus and prisons: research agendas for examining the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on South-East Asian prisons and beyond

This article uses the Ship of Theseus metaphor to propose a research agenda for examining how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped prison governance in South-East Asia. Despite growing scholarship on the pandemic’s impact on vulnerable populations, the experiences of those living and working in prisons in this region remain critically underexplored. South-East Asia’s above-average incarceration rates, chronic overcrowding, and punitive penal character – often masked by favourable democracy indices – make this a particularly urgent site of inquiry. To move the metaphor from symbolic to analytical, the article identifies four dimensions of pandemic-driven transformation: governance structures and political valuation; welfare arrangements between states, families, and civil society; technologies of contact and oversight; and external scaffolding by multilateral actors. Engaging with scholarship on penal populism, path dependency, crisis governance, and institutional inertia, the article argues that existing frameworks inadequately account for how states that routinely neglected prison health were capable of decisive intervention during the pandemic yet failed to translate that intervention into sustained reform. The article concludes that future research must distinguish superficial adaptation from structural transformation, examining whether pandemic legacies have redefined the character of South-East Asian prisons or instead rendered high-incarceration regimes more resilient without confronting their underlying drivers. These insights have important implications for prison governance, public health preparedness, and comparative social policy beyond the region.