Abstract
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress – animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic ways. Resisting the urge to view imperial forms through a peripheralising northern lens, or solely in terms of continuity and discontinuity, we pursue an understanding of penal duress as a ubiquitous, yet distinctly situated and relational phenomenon that has taken form through local colonial experiences and their afterlives. In sum, we attend to ‘processes of partial inscriptions, modified displacements and amplified recuperations’ to discuss how relations of penal duress are endured and enduring in Myanmar today.
To the death mill
During the hot, dry season of 1900, the Danish journalist, Henrik Cavling – considered the grandfather of modern Danish journalism – visited Myanmar (then known as Burma) and recorded in glorious detail his impressions of Rangoon jail, at the time one of the most populated in the region with 1400 prisoners (Cavling, 1901: 101). Cavling was curious to see the prison's infamous ‘death mill’ and his brief account is a breath-taking portrait of colonial prison labour and bodily subjugation.
Upon entering the gate, he is met by a young British prison superintendent, who is busy shaving and only has time for a cursory left-handed wave. As he enters the prison compound, hundreds of prisoners throw themselves down on their knees, prostrating themselves and kissing the ground. He feels awkward at their ‘unnecessary inconvenience’ and suggests that the accompanying prison guard teach them more self-respect. The guard tells him that this behaviour is, in fact, obligatory and expresses a 1000-year-old tradition of how the Burmese greet their king. ‘I got the feeling that I was royalty then’ Cavling records, 1 ‘but the effect was of course weakened by the fact that each and every subject was a prisoner’ (Cavling, 1901: 102).
The first stop on Cavling's tour is the cells, inside of which prisoners are tasked to turn a handle that propelled an oilseed press. ‘I took over from one of the prisoners for a moment’, Cavling writes, ‘and got an impression of the terrible work. The unhappy [prisoners] had to turn [the handle] for four hours … On the floor, where they stood, was the damp stain of their sweat’ (1901: 102). Cavling then crosses the courtyard, passing a three-person scaffold (leaving no doubt about the capacity to kill), passing prisoners binding and lining the colonial administration's ledgers, before reaching the main prison workshop. Here, prisoners make furniture and Cavling describes the sweat ‘hailing’ from their half-naked bodies as they worked ‘in silent subjugation, bearing witness to an iron-hard discipline’ (1901: 103). He finally reaches the ‘death mill’, which turns out to be a giant treadmill – over 30 metres long – powering the machines in the workshop as over 60 prisoners tread the wheel for four uninterrupted hours. Cavling watches as the prisoners twist their bodies to shift their feet and closes his account like this: Then one sees […] a row of broken, pleading, flaming, raging and evil glances, and for a moment one feels the entire sum of all the human physical and spiritual passion and pain contained inside the walls of this terrible torture chamber. It is such a nerve-wracking feeling that one shudders with emotion and dashes out (Cavling, 1901:105).
Cavling observes prison labour and bodily subjugation as a conscientious-cum-complicit outsider, appalled by the suffering he witnesses. He is ambivalent about the majestic position he is afforded by the prostrating prisoners, but his account remains enmeshed in the racial and civilising rationalities of his time. We open our article with his observations because they vividly and viscerally display the relations of duress that can still be discerned in penal practice in Myanmar today. Not, we argue, that history is repeating itself; it simply never went away.
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial penal practice in Myanmar. We unpack the way in which two practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress (2016) – with deep roots in ‘imperial formations’ animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic ways in Myanmar today. Prior to the military coup of 1 February 2021 and the ensuing political repression, violent conflict and weaponisation of the criminal justice system, discourses about prisons in Myanmar typically focused on human rights violations, access to justice, penal reform, accountability, access to the outside world, and possibilities for rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders. At the time of writing, Myanmar is experiencing what some scholars term a ‘revolutionary moment’ (Cheesman, 2021) and external discourses about prisons, at least, are harsher and more hostile, calling out the military regime for atrocities and blatant abuses. Common to both pre- and post-coup discourses is a tendency to neglect history, occluding important though sometimes ‘strange continuities’ (Stoler, 2016: 28). 2 This occlusion is enhanced by the fact that prisons in Myanmar over the last 20 to 30 years have primarily been conceived of via the autobiographical accounts of political prisoners (see, for instance, Thida, 2016). Penal practice has been understood as a product of a nationalist, authoritarian and dictatorial regime divorced from any thorough consideration of colonial or imperial power and its (after)effects. We seek to reinsert imperial histories into the conversation about contemporary prison life in Myanmar. Yet, we resist temptations to peripheralise the past, by seeing it not as long gone but ever present; and we strive not to peripheralise the southern prison, by viewing it not through the lens of northern penal scholarship but from the perspective of those subject to its power. Drawing on historical and contemporary first-hand accounts we construct a raw but analytical account of punitive, sedimented, tenacious and enduring penal practices. 3
The article is structured as follows. We begin by presenting the imperial figure of the Myanmar military in relation to prison. We then flag the potential of the concept of duress to help us unpack penal relations. Subsequently we analyse two empirical examples: (a) prisoner labour; and (b) the demeaning coercive practice of pone-san, demonstrating the ongoing presence and never absent power of imperial formations. We begin with a brief justification of our focus on prison with reference to recent scholarship on southern penalities.
Penality in the Global South has been gaining increasing attention of late with some scholars arguing for a decentring of the prison for a fuller understanding of southern penality. M Brown et al. (2021), for example, argue for the idea of ‘southern penal spaces’ to best capture the expansive nature of penality in colonial and postcolonial India (see also M Brown, 2014), deliberately deflecting attention from sites of institutional carcerality. Sherman, already in 2009, proposed scholars turn attention to ‘imperial coercive networks’ rather than only focus on ‘colonial coercive techniques’ (2009). We are sympathetic to these moves, as evidenced by our own work to portray confinement as a practice, not just a site (Jefferson, 2014); our account of prison climates as reflecting their situatedness in society and history (Martin et al., 2014), our interest to pursue carceral themes beyond the prison (Jefferson and Martin, 2020; Weegels et al., 2020) and our turn to unorthodox entry points to the study of prisons such as the politics of air (Martin, 2021). And yet, it is important to recognise that demonstrating there is more to penality than the prison does not make the prison unworthy of study. The prison remains a key site where state–subject relations are instantiated, where penal excess is expressed, and where the peculiar presence of walls and fences and the contradictory impulses of care and control exacerbate pre-existing conditions of inequality and amplify vulnerabilities. Notwithstanding the need to frame penality broadly and comprehensively if we are to understand its scope, reach and exclusionary power, southern, (post)colonial or non-western prisons remain and deserve to remain a compelling site for social scientific attention. Thus, we make no apologies for focusing explicitly, in this article, on penal duress in prisons.
Imperial formations and (post)colonial prisons
The rich literature on colonial penality convincingly shows the significance of imprisonment in colonial subjugation and extraction, and writes the penal experience into the history of colonial and (post)colonial governance (Bernault, 2003; Dikötter and Brown, 2007), also in the case of Myanmar (I Brown, 2010). We take inspiration from this literature but also identify how, although the explicit manifestations of colonialism have been dismantled or diffused, a distinctly imperial form of imprisonment endures in Myanmar prisons. Following Said (1994), we emphasise the subtle difference between the imperial and the colonial and draw attention to the ways in which the Myanmar military has adopted, retained, developed and currently performs imperial sovereign practices as a form of rule.
Said posits that although the specific practical and operational instantiation of empire referred to as colonialism seemed to end, imperialism ‘lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices’ (Said, 1994: 9). He emphasises that imperialism is fuelled, not only by a hunt for profit and conquest, but also by quests for cultural formation, desires for modernity, and the production of superiority and inferiority. We see later how such elements do more than just echo in contemporary Myanmar.
We illustrate how in Myanmar, imprisonment is folded into martial projects of rule, exploitation and control in distinct and historically resonant ways. When conquest – rather than order, punishment or even care – becomes the leitmotif of imprisonment, penal practices, in turn, become overinvested in extraction, and paradoxically characterised by both inbuilt lenience and indifference to death. The prisoner is not considered a wayward subject to be corrected, but an enemy 4 to be conquered and subjected to imperial control. Penal practice involves not the production of delinquency, but the symbolic and literal reproduction of imperial might. Our concern is not the relationship between militarism and imprisonment per se, but rather the dynamic interpolation of martiality with penality and their inseparability in the Myanmar context. 5
The imperial figure of the Myanmar military
Myanmar was colonised during the height of European imperialism in the 19th century, and was a central part of the British Raj, gaining independence shortly after World War II in 1948. Since that time, the Myanmar military has considered itself the protector of the Buddhist Bamar nation, which it seeks to consolidate through the conquest of the country's frontiers populated by many and often large groups of ethnic minorities (Egreteau, 2016). This is domestic imperialism, imperialism in the minor key, so to speak – entrenched, defensive, cannibalistic – always struggling to stabilise itself (and not necessarily expand) in the shadow of (imperial) China and on the verge of collapse in the face of civil war, public dissent, international sanctions and internal strife (cf. Bünte, 2014). This imperial rationality also underpins the military's grip on prisons.
Myanmar prisons have been run by the military since the coup in 1962. Resembling colonial practice during British rule, military officers have managed Myanmar prisons for the past 60 years. Significantly, this has also been the case during the recent ‘democratic’ period (approximately 2011—2021), where the Myanmar Prison Department was under the military-controlled Ministry of Interior, headed by a general and beyond civilian control. As an integral part of the military, the prison – like the police and to a great extent also the judiciary (Cheesman, 2015) – has been used to eliminate enemies, assert control and facilitate the perpetual conquest of the country (and its resources). This protracted martial occupation of the prison offers important insights into how penality unfolds in Myanmar.
It was first drawn to our attention by a former prisoner who described how the military officers who came to manage the prisons in which he was held in the 1990s and 2000s, approached their tasks as if they had just conquered a village. Whereas junior prison warders, who had been trained for prison work, generally sought to manage and coerce prisoners like draconian bureaucrats with reference to (colonial) prison rules and regulations, the military-trained senior managers entered the prison with ‘bravado’, as he put it. They were oriented towards extinction of the enemy and the pacification of newly conquered subjects. Prison superintendents from the military could be harsh, but they were also flexible and somehow straight forward, he argued. Echoing this theme, a former military officer, who had held a senior management position in the prisons department, was interviewed by our research collaborators. During the interview, he spoke of how he relied on his military experience to deal with the constant challenges of overpopulation and understaffing. He characterised prisoners as potentially seditious, and himself as unsure of who was a real enemy and who to be afraid of – just like in the villages he had occupied as a military general. Therefore, he adopted deliberately ‘restrictive’ tactics to maintain order and control and more easily root out ‘the enemy’, as he put it. The translation of military logics into prison practice is evident. These logics of war and conquest play out in the day-to-day management of prisons with their perennial problems of order, overpopulation, underfunding and understaffing. We argue that imperial, martial penal practices and rationalities are empirically manifested and can be conceptually approached as relations of duress.
Penal duress
Scholars preoccupied with historical continuity commonly – and somewhat lazily we contend 6 – often invoke the concept of legacy. The more productive notion of afterlives is also becoming popular (Bruce-Lockhart, 2022; Draper, 2012). We find that Ann Laura Stoler's conceptualisation of duress offers a compelling alternative (2016). Stoler's notion of duress captures the tenaciousness, protractedness and durability of colonial effects. These are what she identifies as ‘three principal features of colonial histories of the present’ (2016: 7). She warns against the habit of (post)colonial scholars to go looking for ways in which history is repeating itself. To engage in a quest for examples of repetition rests on the idea of a clean temporal break, the idea that there is something that once was, that then ceased to be, and since returned (Stoler, 2016: 14). ‘Colonial entailments’ she writes ‘do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems …’ (Stoler, 2016: 3) The past is not present as a left-over or a trace, a vague copy; it is ‘not a matter of mere recurrence’ (Stoler, 2016: 30). For Stoler the past is not over (and history does not repeat itself) because it never went away. Histories endure but become reactivated and transfigured, sometimes subtly, sometimes more obviously. Duress is ‘a relationship of actualized and anticipated violence’ (Stoler, 2016: 8) that is both delivered as a ‘pressure exerted’ and exercised and received as a ‘condition borne’ and related to (Stoler, 2016: 7). In that sense, duress captures the interdependent relations of confining and being confined endemic to prison life and, as we show in what follows, is a central feature of martial, imperial incarceration. 7 In the light of the foregoing considerations, we turn now to the relations of penal duress that are hidden in plain sight in Myanmar prisons in the form of practices of labour and pone-san.
Labour camp life
Formally, penal labour is organised around three overall and somewhat conflicting objectives: to discipline, to exploit and to rehabilitate prisoners. First, labour is part of the prison's ideological disciplinary edifice in terms of exposing prisoners to punitive toil and producing tasks and routines that underpin total institutional control. Second, penal labour has very direct exploitative dimensions in the sense that prisoners can be compelled and coerced to work to facilitate their own upkeep, to earn money for the prison or to labour for the state or private enterprise. Third, penal labour has a rehabilitative dimension related to normalising everyday prison life and developing skills that may facilitate employment and reintegration after release (Shah and Scherrer, 2017; van Zyl Smit and Dünkel, 1999).
Penal labour in Myanmar prisons takes two main forms. One is the organised labour that involves a range of types of work: brickmaking, forestry, agriculture, tending animals, maintenance and so on as well as the hiring out of prisoners to outsiders. This type of labour is part of the prison's formal economy in the sense that it is either saving the prison money by having prisoners do work to keep the place running or earning the prison money by selling their labour power. The second main form of prisoner labour relates to prisoner self-governance and entails a vast and complex market of services where poor prisoners cook, clean, wash and work for the more affluent prisoners and are paid in cash, kind, or protection. This type of labour is part of the prison's informal economy in the sense that ‘jobs’ are purchased and sold as particular positions offer profit-making opportunities or ways to avoid afflictive work (Myanmar Research Team, 2022). An additional sphere of penal labour involves the devolving of power to prisoners (known as Tan-zis or using non-vernacular colonial terminology ‘convict officers’) who are tasked to maintain order and inculcate discipline at ward level and facilitate the smooth running of the prison. Essentially, they fulfil the role often assumed to belong to uniformed staff.
Such arrangements of labour are common to many jurisdictions, not least in countries featuring poverty and (post)colonial governance. As evidenced by Cavling, penal labour in Myanmar has deep and distinct imperial roots, producing relations of duress. This is particularly pronounced in Myanmar's prison labour camps. In 2021 the relatively vast system of labour camps constitutes about 50 agriculture and stone quarry camps primarily for people convicted of minor offences. As we show, these camps have a grim history of tenacious, protracted and durable affliction with distinct imperial underpinnings.
Irksomeness and killing fields
Colonial prison administrators did not experience the political pressure to mould the urban poor into a productive workforce, as was the case for their prison manager colleagues in the European metropoles (Bernault, 2007). Prison managers at the imperial frontline rather had their eyes fixed on the suppression of dissent and the extraction of penal labour to facilitate the colonial conquest, implemented according to the pervasive racist and civilisational rationalities of European imperialism. As Pieris notes regarding the penal landscapes of colonial Singapore: ‘the imperatives of labour supplanted the prerogatives of punishment and reform’ (Pieris, 2009).
The importance of extracting penal labour to expand and firm up the British empire in Burma both economically and territorially is evident in the colonial archives. In 1867, for instance, the Inspector General of Prisons in colonial Burma, Dr C. Planck, had recommended that extramural penal labour should be halted owing to security concerns. His boss, the Chief Commissioner of Burma, Colonel Albert Fytche, disagreed. In his annual report to London in 1867, Fytche remarked that ‘it must be borne in mind that the prosperity of the Provinces must not be lost sight of’ (1868: 20). Fytche goes on to state that ‘the stations in Arakan [contemporary Rakhine and home of the Rohingya] have been made inhabitable for Europeans solely by means of Convict labour’ (Fytche, 1868: 21). Demands for labour trumped security concerns, but it was important to keep penal labour harsh and ‘irksome’. In the 1867 report, Fytche offered the following appraisal of Burmese prisoners’ work in the colonial stone quarries: There can, I think, be no doubt about the hard labour required of a man in breaking 6 cubic feet of stone a day into small pieces, and the sum of Rupees 4008 realized from this source a year (…). I have no hesitation in saying, that a visit to the stone breaking sheds in the Rangoon Prison would prove, to the greatest disbeliever in the irksomeness of our Gaol labour, that for Prisoners of a coarse, violent, degraded nature, a proper form of employment is provided there (Fytche, 1868: 21).
As Fychte's enthusiasm shows, penal labour is integral to empire. Labouring prisoners – from galley slaves and onwards – have been central to processes of conquering, controlling, populating and extracting resources from newly acquired territories (Anderson, 2018). The British empire pushed convicts from the metropole to populate colonial frontiers and forced indigenous penal subjects to first form and then serve the extractive infrastructures of the colony (Sherman, 2009; Vito and Lichtenstein, 2016). In the case of Myanmar, the British colonisers imported what they considered able-bodied Indians to extract resources from the supposedly feeble Burmese. Such racist engineered displacement generated divisions between, on the one hand, the displaced lumpen immigrants and, on the other hand, the subsumed indigenous communities that sowed the seeds for the recent Rohingya catastrophe (cf. Cheesman, 2017). The importance of mobility, conquest and expansion entails that the transient frontier camp is more important than the intransigent prison fortress. Empires rely more on barbed wire than on bricks.
After the coup in 1962, the Myanmar military appropriated the colonial carceral infrastructure – not only in terms of the prison buildings and the penal technologies, but also the carceral techniques, the rules and procedures, and, ultimately, the complex necro-political relations between the incarcerating state and its incarcerated subjects. A vivid example of this appropriation was the idea of British penal reformer Alexander Paterson to develop Cocos Island off the shores of Southern Burma as a site for rehabilitative labour in the 1920s (I Brown, 2007). The plan was considered too ambitious and expensive, but the socialist military dictatorship took up the idea in the 1960s and established a camp on Cocos Island, which was the site of two seminal hunger strikes by the early generations of political prisoners in independent Burma (Cheesman, 2022).
Later, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, which seized power after the 1988 uprising and instigated a particular dark period of military rule in the 1990s and early 2000s, took control of the penal labour camp system. The network of camps facilitated the afflictive and lethal extraction of labour from the slaves of the military state, who built roads, cleared fields, crushed stones and perished in the process. 8
In an interview with one of the authors, a former political prisoner, who served time in a large prison that was a hub for the labour camps in Northern Myanmar, said that the prisoners transiting through en route to the camps were known as ‘fertilizers’. When the destitute and desperate prisoners arrived, the sedentary prisoners and staff would say: ‘Ah, here come the “fertilizers”’, a morbid acknowledgement of how they simply died and were left in the fields to rot. Along similar lines, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, refers to the labour camps as Burma's ‘killing fields’ (AAPP, 2009a).
Lenience and duress
The labour camps in Myanmar persist. One of the first and strongest exposé news reports about Myanmar prisons shortly after the democratic government took office in 2015 was investigative journalist Swe Win's undercover reportage about the camps (Win, 2016). The news series documented the prisoners’ harsh and hazardous working conditions and the significant financial interest from the military and allied private contractors in the substantial production of gravel – echoing Commissioner Fychte's emphasis on the synergy between profit and hardship. In an informal conversation in 2017, a person close to the higher echelons of the Myanmar Prison Department told one of the authors that the most coveted positions in the upper prison management was the head of the prison quarries because the profits were so high. Yet, there is a tension between the enduring desire for the profits of penal labour and the security imperatives of involuntary custody (as Fychte also registered in 1867).
Penal labour camps constituted sites of lethality in Myanmar's recent past, but they also entail more lenient regimes that allow prisoners more mobility, perks and autonomy than standard prison regimes. This pragmatic leniency has a distinct colonial history (Branch, 2005) that lingers in contemporary labour camps. Labour camp prisoners are, for instance, allowed conjugal visits and they are remunerated for their work. Our ethnographic material illustrates that some prisoners actively seek to be transferred to labour camps to access these possibilities. A woman, interviewed by our research collaborator, compared the labour camp favourably with the prison, where she felt ‘suffocated’, as she put it. ‘The environment of the quarry camp was so comfortable for prisoners, enjoying various outside views, and breathing fresh air. Yet, I just hated [the] unrelenting work.’
‘I paid money to move to the labour camp’, another former prisoner told our research collaborators, referencing the 1990s. ‘At that time, I paid 5000 kyats (…). In the labour camp, we were workers’, he said. ‘We could move easily without restriction’. But the food was bad, he stressed. ‘Nobody could eat well due to the tiny allocation. We seemed to be like cows (…) At that time, I looked for green plants. Any green leaves I wanted to eat, even grass. I encountered starvation there’.
In more contemporary tales of labour camp imprisonment, such balance between hardship and leniency is also pronounced. A former woman prisoner told one of the authors how she ended up in prison without any money to bribe the prison officers, knowing all too well that she was bound to go to the labour camp. ‘Since I was very young, I heard about labour camps as tough and laborious places’ she said. ‘I was worrying about these fearful reputations of labour camps. If they send me there, will I die there?’ As expected, she was summoned and transported to a camp up country, but she was quite surprised when she arrived. ‘It was spacious and seemed like at the early stages of building a new village. I had to remove the wild plants from the ground. I felt a little lighter inside my chest.’
This resemblance to a village also struck our researcher colleague, who visited a camp during fieldwork. In his fieldnotes he wrote, The labour camp is like a village under the military regime, when people were forced to work on infrastructures such as roads, railways and constructions of buildings (…) Even though I was in such an environment, it still gives me goose bumps when I look at the prisoners climbing up the mountain without any protection. The prisoners told me that many people have been injured while working in the camp. [The] labour camp was a wrong place for me. (…) I had to work all the time. I could not rest there. I fetched stones back and forth. I felt so tired working in the quarry camp. I got a lot of damage hitting stones. I could not brush my teeth and face due to injuries.
Prisoners can bribe their way into or out of the camps, and once there, they can buy attractive posts or protection from afflictive work from the Tan-zis. A former woman prisoner explained, It was like they allowed the Tan-zi to govern us. (…) Sometimes the Tan-zi came near me and hit me like that. ‘You are too slow, work quickly. We have to send up to this amount [of crushed stones]! Don’t you know that?’ They did like that. Once they hit me severely and the hitting marks did not disappear for 3 or 4 days.
During the democratic thaw from 2011 to 2021, conditions in Myanmar prisons did seem to improve somewhat as piecemeal reform initiatives were launched, technological advances made, and the most atrocious persecution of political opponents decreased (Martin, 2021). As noted above, this ambiguous amelioration of carceral violence, which was suspended by the February 2021 coup, also affected labour camp life. The labour camps might not have been exactly ‘killing fields’ in Myanmar's more recent prison history. Indeed, the Myanmar Prisons Department has, in meetings with us, extolled the virtues of the camps as a form of vocational training. In the camps prisoners are taught to work, they are remunerated and have access to conjugal visits, the Commissioner General of Prisons emphasized, roping the dubious practices of penal labour into the fantasy of correction and rehabilitation. Yet, our fieldwork suggests that extraction remains the primary purpose of penal labour (see also Myanmar Research Team, 2022). Penal labour in present-day Myanmar is afflictive and exploitative and oriented towards profit. Labouring prisoners continue to tear up their hands and suffer beatings, humiliation and hazardous working conditions, but the camps also offer lenient spaces of informalised relations based on violence and inequality. The camps have not simply stayed the same and the imperial history of penal labour is not just repeating itself. But labour camps continue to thrive on irksomeness, pain and lenience in pursuit of the extraction of profit from prisoners’ bodies under the pretence of correcting them, connoting deep imperial roots. Prisoners populate this morphing-cum-enduring space of simultaneous relief and terror with apprehension and ambivalence. Prisoners are suspended within relations of penal duress characterised by conditions and pressures of anticipated and actualised violence.
Our second case focuses more directly on the embodied, embedded dynamics of domination inherent to everyday prison life. We draw attention to pone-san, a form of penal duress that is as potent and pervasive as afflictive labour, operating not for profit but to reproduce order.
Pone-san
Tucked away in Appendix XXX on pages 803–804 (253–254 of vol 2 ‘Appendices’) in the two-volume Burma Jail Manual 9 are a series of sketches. The sketches illustrate the ‘Rules providing Marks of Respect to be shown by “C.” class prisoners to Government Officials and Visitors’. They show figures standing, squatting and squatting in a group before a ‘convict overseer’ who stands baton at the ready as described in the accompanying text: ‘The Convict Overseer (Tan-zi) shall stand erect with his baton held in both hands and placed over the right shoulder’. The text also details how exactly the prisoner should stand or sit: ‘Stand erect with legs close together placing both hands at the full extent of the arms with the fingers of one hand clasping the fingers of the other.’ And further ‘The prisoner shall sit down (squat) with folded arms. The elbows resting on the knees, the left palm should be placed on the right upper arm and the right palm on the left upper arm’ (‘Appendix XXX’ p. 801; e-version). The amended version of the Burma Jail Manual, old copies of which can still be purchased in the book markets in central Yangon, was drafted by the British in 1937. The ostensibly respectful bodily positions sketched in the manual are the prototypes of a practice which, according to interviews conducted with former prisoners, 10 is a core element of prison practice today. It is known as pone-san and is one of the defining features of contemporary prison governance. Rather than a posture of respect, contemporary pone-san, and most likely its colonial predecessor too, is a practice of domination and subjection that produces order and maintains discipline, often punitively, a relation of duress where violence is very clearly ‘actualized and anticipated’ (Stoler, 2016: 8). 11
The Burma Jail Manual covers how prisoners must stand and sit in the presence of officials or visitors, during inspections or when part of a work gang. Interviews about contemporary pone-san reveal how it is a routine form of calling forth respect and inculcating obedience involving a range of positions to be adopted in specific circumstances. Pone-san involves a range of forms of squatting deferentially with different postures to be adopted for different situations. A 35-year-old male prisoner described how the first form of pone-san was used ‘when the prison is opened and closed’, the second form ‘when taking porridge, rice, bath, parade, going in and out of the gate’, the third ‘when the director, deputy director, superintendent, deputy superintendent, jailor, deputy jailor, staff and any authority come into prison’. ‘I also memorised it’ he continued while laughing, ‘If I don’t memorise it, I would get a beating’.
While Tan-zis oversee the details of day-to-day prison life including people's vital functions, their mobility, allocation of labour power, access to resources, and use of recreative/leisure time, pone-san is the grease that lubricates this system; that is, the inculcation of subordinate status through a combination of cognitive and bodily impositions. This begins from the moment the prisoner arrives in the prison. It is arguably the key means through which bodies in Myanmar prisons are rendered docile and thereby amenable to the authority and control of the Tan-zis, and ultimately the (mostly absent) superintendent.
A dedicated teacher known as Pone-san Hmu (a prisoner) instructs new prisoners in the positions they must adopt across the contexts listed above. The initial introduction is combined with the forced memorisation of the prisoner's identifying number and a briefing about the rules and regulations governing behaviour in prison. Three features are thus combined: the bodily, the cognitive and the compulsion to obey. Pone-san must be learned and naturalised. Prisoners are expected to become habituated to pone-san, to incorporate, or integrate, it into their modes of behaviour in the prison. The effectiveness of this habituation was illustrated by a quite remarkable story that circulated in the Myanmar print and social media about a mass prison escape (42 people) and the recapture of one of the escapees. The story was brought to our attention by one of our research collaborators and warrants a retelling.
It took place in mid-September 2018. The escapee – serving a 14-year sentence for a drug-related offence – had cut his hair and changed his clothes, but the bus in which he was travelling was stopped at a check point and all the passengers obliged to step out. A Karen State police officer described the incident afterwards, praising the intellect and quick-wittedness of one of the police officers at the scene whom, as the escapee stepped down from the bus and came forward, shouted ‘pone-san!’ Out of shock and apparently involuntarily the escapee sat down and adopted the position – crossed legs, head down, submissive – making him an easy target for arrest. The news article describes the commonality of the use of this position in police lock-ups and prisons, and makes much of the ingenuity of the police officer in facilitating the arrest ‘without use of force or torture’. The escapee was basically incapacitated on exit from the bus because of the extent to which he had become conditioned (in a Pavlovian sense) to respond to the cry ‘pone-san!’ Perhaps he felt foolish, but it is worth noting that he thus avoided the fate of two of his fellow escapees who were shot dead resisting arrest. The story clearly illustrates the embodied and protracted scope of pone-san and the way it reaches beyond the prison. It lives with people, becoming part of who they are. 12
Pone-san is not the only relation of duress at play in contemporary Myanmar prisons. It is part of a broader apparatus of control and regulation. For example, there are correct things to say, correct ways to avert your gaze (for example, in the presence of the superintendent), and correct ways to walk. During an interview, one former prisoner demonstrated physically how prisoners were instructed to walk in a specific fashion when going to the toilet, saying ‘We cannot straighten up our shoulders and walk towards the toilet. We should bend when we walk’. Thus, prisoners’ bodies are turned into tools of their own subjugation in relation to an unavoidable and vital bodily function. Through the involuntary performance of pone-san prisoners display their deference and offer up their own bodies as sites of unfreedom. Through pone-san they are captured within a relation of duress.
The teaching of pone-san is often accompanied by violence which laces these rituals of bodily subjugation – whether linked to learning your prison number, getting to know the prison rules or going to the toilet – with menace and serves to instil fear, one of the predominant emotions expressed in our data set. A 56-year-old woman explained during an interview how intimidation was used ‘when newcomers learnt pone-san body position’. She elaborated: ‘They (prisoner leaders) wanted newcomers to fear prisoners. Some prisoners already had fear before they arrived at the prison; they were worried about who would bully them as they came to the prison’. Anticipated violence is regularly actualised. Violence is used to instil fear and as a punitive, pedagogical tool for slow learners, not an exceptional practice but simply part of the production of a disciplined and orderly prisoner population. A 21-year-old man reported thoughtfully how ‘some people who are slow to learn pone-san are often flogged by the Pone-san Hmu’. A 37-year-old man spoke, in graphic fashion, of a similar practice: Even though a newcomer prisoner did pone-san wrong just once they hit these prisoners several times. Some newcomer prisoners were seriously injured and sometimes I saw blood on their head and body … Tan-zi prisoners kicked and forcibly trampled newcomer prisoners’ bodies. Nobody dared to say anything while they were beating them …
Documenting the experience of political prisoners during the period when Myanmar was ruled by authoritarian military regimes (specifically the period 1988–1990, as well as 2007 and up to 2012) the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) explicitly describes and illustrates pone-san as torture, 13 that is as a kind of ‘stress position’. In their report, they include photos of former prisoners performing three common pone-san forms that bear an uncanny resemblance to the sketches in the Burma Jail Manual of 1937. What we might think of as mutations of these positions with a deliberately more stressful and damaging intention are positions such as the motorcycle position – where the prisoner half crouches as if sitting on a motorbike with arms outstretched as if holding the handlebars – and the airplane position where the prisoner is forced to stand on one leg, leaning forward, torso horizontal with arms outstretched. Such practices have been reported more recently in connection with arrests made as part of the crackdown on dissent following the military coup of 1 February 2021.
In sum, pone-san is an integral part of initiation into prison life, with a colonial and precolonial history, a fundamentally corporeal, pedagogical, punitive practice, and an integral part of the management and control of captive prison populations. Recall also that this is a method of inculcating submission that is enacted and enforced by prisoners on each other. It is a form of self-rule in which authority to mete out violence and maintain order through corporeal power is delegated, a practice well known to scholars of empire (Lawrance et al., 2006; Sherman, 2009).
Conclusion
In this article, we have presented two examples of penal duress with imperial underpinnings. We have drawn attention to the way historical forms are sedimented in the contemporary experience of imprisonment through relations of penal duress. This has involved foregrounding historical accounts and contemporary voices in a relatively subtle fusion, refusing to peripheralise (or occlude) the past and paying attention to the Myanmar context as a central and constitutive site of knowledge not a site of objectification or exotica. Recognition of the imperial character of contemporary penal practice is important if we are to develop comprehensive accounts of penality in places and times often rendered peripheral by the northern criminological gaze.
‘Duress rarely calls out its name. Often it is a mute condition of constraint’, writes Stoler (2016: 7). We have sought not only to unmute the contemporary experience of the extractive labour practices of Myanmar's prison labour camps, and the humiliating and defamatory practice of pone-san. Our deeper point has been to hint at and thus unmute the imperial qualities of these practices. Our readings of Myanmar's penal history and current patterns of prison life indicate no distinct rupture with the imperial past. As we demonstrated early in the article, the Myanmar military are distinctly imperial in character. But we resist reading current dynamics of penality as implying straightforward continuity. Labour practices and pone-san are similar although not identical to their colonial instantiations. We have articulated the way situated and populated penal practices endure without positing a past that was and a present that is. Rather, the past and the present (for want of a better conceptual vocabulary) co-exist in overlapping and connected fashion. What Cavling observed, what Fychte discussed, what the Burma Jail Manual codified has endured tenaciously, in protracted and highly durable mutations.
Stoler's work on duress is oriented towards contemporary imperial formations whose imperial underpinnings and overlays are somehow hidden. We have registered that labour and pone-san remain key sites and forms for the outworking of penal duress. The ‘strange continuities’ and signs of ‘imperial debris’ we are picking up and unpacking are not that disguised. They are relatively blatant; they are hidden in plain sight. And yet, as we considered in our introduction, dominant accounts of Myanmar prisons rooted in the experience of only political prisoners and in deficit-oriented diagnoses of lack of justice and of prisons-in-need-of-reform do, in fact, occlude how ‘imperial’ contemporary relations of duress are integral to the pains of everyday prison life. We offer a necessary corrective to this diagnosis.
One final reiteration. The history of relations of duress – blatant or subtle – is not sequential or chronological but layered, dispersed and foggy. However, this fogginess should not be misinterpreted as meaning lacking in power and impact. For us, as for Stoler, the simultaneity of past and present, what she calls the ‘colonial presence’ is profoundly generative. The ‘impress’ of duress is not a ‘dim trace’ but retains ‘commanding force’ (Stoler, 2016: 19–20). The commanding force of penal duress and the martial imperiality of Myanmar's penal project was clearly revealed to Cavling during his visit to the death mill. As we write, today, still in the aftermath of the military coup of 1 February 2021, we observe the martial imperial form graphically and tragically reanimated making itself felt and leaving its pernicious marks. The need for nuanced analysis of the unfolding situation – including the effects on prisons and their populations – is clear if we are to find any meaningful way to challenge penal excess and undercut imperial presumptions to rule through duress.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thoughts developed here owe much to ideas germinated in collaboration. We acknowledge the role played by Liv Gaborit in the conceptualisation of our research project and thank Susanne Kempel for pointing us towards Cavling's travel writings. We are also grateful for the insights of Hannah Russell and Ergun Cakal and to our research collaborators in Myanmar whose data we lean heavily upon. Owing to the danger of doing critical research in Myanmar currently, names of our colleagues and details of our collaboration are omitted. We also sincerely thank the three reviewers for encouraging and detailed comments on earlier versions of this article. This research has been supported by the Consultative Research Committee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supported administratively by Danida Fellowship Centre.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been funded by the Consultative Research Committee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supported administratively by Danida Fellowship Centre.
Notes
Author biographies
Andrew M. Jefferson is senior researcher at DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture, specialising in the critical, ethnographic study of prisons and prison reform in the global south.
Tomas Max Martin is senior researcher at DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture, specialising in the ethnography of prison life, human rights and the anthropology of the state.