Gandhi received the judgment gladly because a life in prison was something he liked more in that it gave him ample time for prayer and spinning on the wheel as also for reading and writing. Gandhi prepared a list of books he was going to finish in the six years of imprisonment. 

He was always enthusiastic to read books on various topics and subjects. Religion, literature, sociology, natural science were some of the subjects he was very much interested in and he had finished about 150 such books in prison. 

He read the Mahabharata and the Upanishads, the annotations to Gita and the Manusmriti. He read the Gita as annotated by Bala Gangadhar Tilak and studied the fundamentals of  Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. In addition, he also read through the noted works of Indian and foreign writers like Tagore, Kipling, Goethe and Gibbon. He would not spend any second lazily.

He spent his first months in prison in peace, and the prison became a center of veritable pilgrimage for the countless of Gandhi’s admirers, friends and followers and even for the visitors from abroad.  

But his health was deteriorating   and he fell ill with severe appendicitis. Therefore he was brought to a hospital where he was operated upon and was released by the Government while he was convalescing.

Gandhi was living a life in prison not knowing what was happening outside the prison walls. There were incidents of violence in various parts of the country. 

When the non-cooperation movement weakened, the anarchists found a field day in it. These people had no faith in what all Gandhi preached like non-violence and peaceful non-cooperation. Burglary, theft, and criminal activities like these were noticed from various parts of the country, especially in the Bengal region.