Incarcerated women are one of the most marginalised sections of society. The gendered exclusion of women at multiple levels pushes them further into invisibility. We know little about imprisoned women’s everyday lives, including their struggles, suffering and survival in the prison system. Based on fieldwork in various prisons of Punjab and Chandigarh, including the only women’s prison in Ludhiana, this paper attempts to understand the process of women’s prisonisation by which women learn, acquire ways of living and deal with penitentiary culture. Prisons are ‘totalitarian institutions’ where women soon become depersonalised units, bereft of their familial ties and social roles. The imprisoned women not only deal with the intensity of the consequences of their criminal act upon reaching prison but are also confronted with the social reality of confinement and minimalism, where adherence to the operative systems of control is imperative. The chapter argues that in prisons, marginality intersects with the social locations of the imprisoned women in multiple ways to produce disparate narratives of suffering and hardship.