Abstract
Prisons in Africa are usually depicted through their horrific conditions of detention or as institutions in need of reform. In this volume, Marie Morelle, Frédéric Le Marcis and Julia Hornberger bring together contributions to “break with the archetypal stereotypes – both monolithic and incomplete – frequently perpetuated about the prison in Africa, and offer instead a nuanced critique of prison experiences in diverse detention facilities across the continent” (xii).
This collection is a result of the multidisciplinary research programme “Economy of Penalty and Prison in Africa” (2015–2019). More than 20 years after Bernault's pioneering edited volume Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique (1999) to historicise the emergence of prison in Africa, this collaboration revives prison studies on the continent by adopting a strong ethnographic approach. The contributors, mostly French and South African, share Jefferson, Martin and Bandyopadhavy's (2014) concern to describe how prisons function and Wacquant's (2002) willingness to conduct in-depth observations. In 10 countries and at different times, they aim to “analyse different architectural logics, as well as the gendered, racial, political, and economic valence of prisons and their symbolic ubiquity in nearly all imaginations of the state” (xiii).
Due to certain barriers in accessing the prisons, some contributors have led their investigations outside of the prison walls. The editors offer a very interesting reflexive discussion on the epistemological and ethical consequences of the different methodological approaches. They demonstrate how the diversity of approaches allows us to grasp the prison in its full complexity.
This volume is structured in four parts. Part I, “The carceral imprint,” mainly adopts a historical approach to show the mutual relation between prison and society and how they structure each other. Christine Deslaurier historicises the prison phenomenon in Burundi by showing how the colonial logics have shaped the language and design of the carceral system. Romain Tiquet focuses on the written complaints of Senegalese prisoners in mobile penal camps that bypass censorship to question the notion of reform. Sabine Planel explores the practice of confinement in a contemporary developmental regime, Ethiopia, where it is used to control the peasant reluctant to use fertiliser. In newly independent Ghana, Nana Osei Quarshie shows that prisons were used as waiting areas to control West African migrants before their expulsion.
Part II seeks to reveal the logics that structure the prison and to catch the prison experience by focusing on “The economies of value.” Using the concept of mortification, Sasha Gear exposes the power relations between newcomers and some gangsters’ prisoners by analysing the journeys towards prison of two young men in South Africa after their arrest. By following street youth in Ouagadougou, Muriel Champy highlights the blurred lines between incarceration and street life, which are self-perpetuating. Julia Hornberger shows the extent of the carceral grip in South Africa where ex-prisoners are forced to revive their prison experience whether during testimonies for NGOs, motivational speeches or to build their “street cred.”
More rooted in ethnography, part III “Tension within the dispensation of justice” focuses on the popular meanings and representations regarding the articulations between justice and punishment. By studying women incarcerated for genital mutilation, Frédéric Le Marcis critically inspects the relations between the production of gender and prison in Burkina Faso. Musa Risimati sheds light on legal and popular lectures of bail to explain how magic, bribery and social relations are used in situations of uncertainty in Giyani community (South Africa). Sirius Epron then stresses the hybridisation between formal and popular justice in a neighbourhood of Abidjan.
Part IV, “Transforming the prison,” explores prison reforms in Africa and their reception on a plurality of prison systems. Yasmine Bouagga studies the languages of prison reformers in Tunisia during the transition and reveals the complex articulations between the values of “punishing well” and prison transformation. Marie Morelle tackles the way prisoners use law and human rights in Yaoundé Central Prison to show they can be full actors in prison reforms. By focusing on a reform to reduce the high rates of pre-trial detention in Guinea, Maud Angliviel highlights the contingency of legal norms that reproduce relations domination. Kathy Rawlings offers a critical analysis of the redemptive script of prisoners in South Africa: embodying moral reform allows them to gain a sense of agency but hides the structural and historical discriminations of the prison system. The last chapter is an interview with Alice Nkomo, a Cameroonian lawyer fighting for the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships.
Despite the quantity of contributors (14), the book is characterised by a strong theoretical coherence that makes it stimulating. Firstly, the heuristic notions of “porosity” of prisons and “economy of values” permeate most of the reflections. There is no communal definition of these concepts in the introduction which leaves the authors free to explore different aspects. Breaking with the Goffmanian reading of prisons as total institutions (1961), the concept of “porosity” brings together the external and internal approaches of prison studies by emphasising phenomena relative to the permeability of prison walls (persons, goods, information, etc. circulate through their walls) or to the prison-society continuum. It also encompasses multiple scales of analysis from the continuity in life stories between incarceration and life outside to the exchanges between national or global reforms and the carceral design. Given this broad acceptance, the choice of the words “confinement” and “punishment” in the title could have been explained because they are not explored in other spheres than that of criminal justice. Secondly, chapters resonate with each other on themes such as frames of reference for prison-reform: human rights for just punishment, pre-trial detention for efficiency and gender-based programmes for women in custody.
Overall, this volume is thus an unmissable contribution to prison studies as it stimulates intra-African dialogue and opens up global debates by raising universal issues. The studies are empirically rich and provide a renewed understanding of how prison works in African settings. Using cartographies, the editors also provide promising leads for decentring the African prison by comparing similar trends of hyper-incarceration in Algeria and South Africa with Russia and the United States.
