Conceptualizing confinement: Prisons and poverty in Sierra Leone

Introduction

Confining institutions can be understood as sites where social power is a central dynamic and where practices of power and knowledge, discipline and resistance, control and care are key features (Butler, 2006; Casella, 2007; Dikötter and Brown, 2007; Foucault, 1979; Strange and Bashford, 2003). The idea that the dynamics and effects of confinement observed in prisons might also feature in other social contexts is gaining ground. Loïc Wacquant (2000, 2001) has written about the ‘deadly symbiosis’ created when prison and ghetto (in the USA) ‘meet and mesh’. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) hints that the ‘paradigm of exclusion’ and logics of confinement and marginalization seen most clearly in carceral contexts are not limited to such contexts. And more recent work by Da Cunha (2008) in Portugal supports the idea that carcerality extends beyond the walls of state institutions and pierces the heart of specific local neighbourhoods. This article shows how material gathered in Sierra Leone, West Africa points in a similar direction. The article explores two sites, namely, a prison and a ‘camp’ within a poor urban neighbourhood. The point is not to compare them systematically but rather to juxtapose the dynamics and characteristics of confinement. The article is divided into two parts, the first theoretical where confinement is discussed as an analytic category and the second empirical where examples are given of the topography of confinement in a prison and a poor urban neighbourhood in Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown.

Sierra Leone is a small country of around six million inhabitants sandwiched between Guinea and Liberia within the volatile Mano river region. Ranked consistently at or near the bottom of the UN’s development index Sierra Leone is most famous for its diamonds and its civil war, a protracted affair which caused widespread anguish and disruption between 1991 and 2002. Since the end of the so-called ‘rebel war’ and subsequent elections, Sierra Leone has endured a gradual transition towards multi-party democracy, including an election where an incumbent regime was defeated at the polls and handed over power. The international community, through a variety of security and development initiatives, led by the British, has played a central (though not unproblematic) role in pushing an agenda of rule of law, human rights, poverty reduction and institutional reform, especially of the justice sector. This article is set against this backdrop but does not directly or indirectly address these initiatives. Rather, it focuses on the lives, situations and experiences of the implied beneficiaries of such programmes, namely the poor who occupy the urban slums and the prisoners who occupy the prisons.

The article reflects an expansive transdisciplinary approach. Such an orientation, where disciplinary boundaries are not the criteria used to evaluate the merits of the argument, the observations or the style, has been demonstrated elsewhere (Motzkau and Jefferson, 2009). Fieldwork, especially in prisons, especially under conditions of exorbitant poverty is an intimate affair. The reader is encouraged to show tolerance if the data presented occasionally have an intimate, personal feel. This is a product of a slight over consciousness of the researcher’s position in the field rather than the opposite.

As already stated, the article features a theoretical discussion of the concept of confinement illustrated with examples from a specific West African context. However, it ought to be of interest to criminologists more generally, particularly those conscious of the extreme degree of western dominance in the field (Martin, Jefferson and Bandyopadhyay, under review). The article makes a specific contribution to the literature on prisons, particularly to the very sparse literature on African prisons by attending to the dynamics and logics of confining practices in Sierra Leone. For too long penal systems in Africa have been seen as too difficult to study or too underdeveloped to compare meaningfully. For too long the scholarly work on Africa has assumed Africa to be a ‘bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap and primordial chaos’ (Mbembe, 2001: 3). By presenting empirical data it is hoped that some of these dubious assumptions might be laid to rest. ¹

The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive notion of confinement might help us make sense of the lived experience of people whose possibilities are limited materially, spatially and discursively. Exploring the lived experience of people occupying poor neighbourhoods and prisons will allow us to reflect on the constitutive relations between subjectivity and confinement. At stake are notions of social power and freedom as well as what it means to be human. To what extent are we confined? To what extent are we free? What exactly confines? And what liberates?

The aim is ‘to expand our understandings of confinement beyond the icons of penal incarceration, by exploring … processes of confinement that cross institutional boundaries’ (Casella and Fredericksen, 2004: 118). This is part of a search for a less prison/state-centric orientation, a ‘looser more multi-textured analytic frame’ (Armstrong and McAra, 2006: 7). Attention will be turned not only to institutional sites but also to practices and states of being. Two fundamental relationships are under scrutiny, that between institutions and non-institutions and that between confinement and subjectivity.

Confinement as Concept

Confinement is a term utilized in the criminological literature but it remains under-theorized. It is often used as a simple noun, its meaning assumed, or as a straightforward synonym for incarceration or imprisonment. We can read of quality of confinement (Lukemeyer and McCorkle, 2006; Perrone and Pratt, 2003), impact of confinement (Thomas et al., 1981), consequences of penal confinement (Comfort, 2003), conditions of confinement (Welch, 2010), forcible confinement (Mailloux and Serin, 2003), forced confinement (Wacquant, 2000, 2001), coercive confinement (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007), solitary confinement (Scharff Smith, 2008 ), supermax confinement (Naday et al., 2008), use of confinement (Welch and Schuster, 2005 ), custodial confinement (Macallair, 1994; Williams and Soutar, 1984), sovereign confinement (Howell, 2010), community-oriented confinement (Burdman, 1969), prior confinement (Kassebaum et al., 1964), institutional confinement (Wright, 1998), history of American confinement (Kunzel, 2008). While the term is recurrent there is relatively little evidence of systematic reflection on its conceptual possibilities or its analytic power. The ambition of this article is to allude to its theoretical potential in order to think more clearly about the lived realities of marginalized citizen-subjects in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities.

Harvard Professor Stanley Cavell (2007: xii) notes that ‘the philosophical image or myth of pervasive but hidden chains’ is represented throughout the history of philosophy in the works of Plato, Rousseau, Thoreau and Marx. The use of prison as a metaphor has been widespread. Societies, homes, factories, barracks are variously portrayed as prison-like. Navaro-Yashin (2003: 110) offers a graphic example: ‘Expressing a feeling of entrapment in a slice of territory, a man described his brief visit out of Northern Cyprus as “the permitted stroll of the prisoner in the courtyard to take some air”.’ Some even go so far as to suggest that life itself is a confined practice. It has ‘boundaries, audience and architecture’ (terms borrowed from Armstrong and McAra, 2006). It is lived within contours of control. Human subjects are always only more or less free. In the words of anthropologist Jean Lave (forthcoming: 13, emphasis added),

I believe that we make our own history … but not exactly as we might wish or intend. I take social existence to be in part historically/spatially determined and in part made by people in their interrelations and their interrelated struggles in the world.

What Nils Christie (1978) calls the ‘imperialist’ tendency to call anything and everything prison causes him to warn against hollowing out the concept of prison and forgetting the specificities of prison, its shame and its pain. The intention here is not to propose that poor urban neighbourhoods are prisons as much as it is to point towards a broader overarching concept of confinement which might capture some of the similarities and differences across institutions and practices. Christie’s desire to specify details and decipher difference is a backdrop to the analysis. The desire to develop a broader theoretical orientation to confinement draws upon exactly Christie’s concern with the way those who underuse and overuse the category ‘prison’ seem to lack interest in the specific characteristics of sites of confinement.

The analytic journey, represented here, towards recognizing the power of confinement as a concept has, in this author’s experience been a gradual and essentially empirical one. A field-based study of Nigerian prisons and prison staff resulted in a quite specific orientation towards the everyday micro-climates that characterized the prisons. In a subsequent project in Sierra Leone the focus broadened to detention practices because of a desire to study state prisons and the ways in which rebels exerted control and punished their members during the civil war. The experiences of a group of newly released former rebels were examined and we learned how their experience of life beyond prison was not so different from their experience of life within prison. Their lives could be characterized as journeys through which they ‘traversed sites of confinement’ (Jefferson, 2010: 387). Their movement from prison to beyond prison was one strand of a journey back and forth between prison, police detention and poor urban neighbourhood experienced rather regularly by a certain segment of Freetown society.

This represents the expansion of an empirical field which might have been enough if we only want to define the parameters of new empirical studies but it seems necessary to do more. For example, to pose questions about what confinement really means and how confining practices differ or are similar, especially for those subject to them. This orientation to confinement resembles in a way an intriguing question posed by Mary Bosworth (2010, 2012) at the Conference of the British Society of Criminology in 2010. She asked what is it about prison that makes it prison? What are the defining characteristics of prison? Is it the walls and the wires and the security infrastructure? Is the prison best defined according to purpose or to effect? Should we give primacy to intention or experience?

Below work by Eleanor Casella (2007), Casella and Fredericksen (2004) and Mark Halsey (2007) is presented as illustrative of scholarship which consciously and deliberately works with the concept of confinement. Halsey (2007: 338) is specifically interested in the products and meanings of confinement, in ‘the kind of subject which confinement unwittingly produces’. Casella and Fredericksen’s interest is in histories, archaeologies and theories of confinement. ²

It is clearly important to attend to ‘the dynamics of specific institutional contexts’ (Armstrong and McAra, 2006: 21). While different sites of confinement and control are not identical or interchangeable ‘common frames of analysis can reveal important cross-institutional patterns’ (Armstrong and McAra, 2006: 21). Pursuing a similar line while writing about Australia’s diverse heritage sites Casella and Fredericksen (2004: 119, emphasis added) note that despite differences ‘the theme of confinement can be used to thread them all together into a unique strand of shared national experience’. Here, reference to a ‘theme of confinement’ indicates the analytic work that the notion of confinement does or can do.

Casella and Fredericksen subtly unpack the landscapes – institutional and non-institutional – of confinement which they claim are central to understanding Australian national identity. They trace how, in actual fact, despite popular misconceptions institutional confinement during the period of convict settlement was not that widespread in Australia except as applied to the indigenous people: ‘Institutional confinement represented an atypical colonial experience’ (Casella and Fredericksen, 2004: 105). In fact the convicts shipped off to Australia were subject to forced labour more than to confinement. Through their historical analysis Casella and Fredericksen are led to think about confinement in broader terms than the institution. The practice of labour rather than the site of imprisonment was the confining mechanism. Archaeological studies of the sites of convict labour enable Casella and Fredericksen (2004: 112) to argue that ‘these have become landscapes of confinement as much as they are representations of early colonial governance’. The prison has historically been a classic feature of colonial governance. What is emphasized here is the way non-institutional forms of confinement can equally be tools of control and regulation.

Similarly, but with reference to rural Sierra Leone, Mokuwa et al. (2011), in a recent article on judicial serfdom, show that it is not the farm or the field which is a confining site for the Sierra Leonean villager. It is rather labour and relations between elders and youths which have significance. Basically, they argue, ‘elders control the labour and reproduction opportunities of cadets’ (2011: 360). In the Sierra Leonean village relations of obligation, mediated via customary judicial processes or alternative dispute resolution, are examples of confining practices. These circumstances were seen as so oppressive by some young men that joining the rebel movement became a viable escape route. It ‘allowed them to break free from a restrictive and customary institution’ namely the ‘agrarian marriage arrangement’ (2011: 343). Of interest here is the way the authors use the concept judicial serfdom as related to practices and relationships resulting in limited freedom and mobility (and creating a breeding ground for violent dissent). Echoing the idea of judicial serfdom, Casella (2007: 87) makes an additional claim comparing non-institutional and institutional confinement: ‘the everyday experience of non-institutional agrarian enslavement may not have been materially dissimilar from that of penal incarceration’.

These studies suggest that to understand the experience of confinement we must look not only at institutions or sites but also at practices and meanings, or more crucially at the relations between sites, practices, social relations and subjectivity.

Having laid out a theoretical backdrop we can now turn to some empirical material from Sierra Leone which casts further light on these relations. First, a note on methodology.

The empirical examples presented below are drawn mainly from seven months’ fieldwork in Sierra Leone during 2006. The fieldwork formed part of a larger project on state and non-state detention during and after war. Fieldwork included extensive time spent in the company of, discussing with and interviewing former political prisoners and former fighters in the rebel war (1991–2002), repeat visits to the Central Prison in Freetown for observation and conversation, visits to seven of the 12 provincial prisons (including interviews with senior members of prison staff) as well as participant observation in a localized area of the Kroo Bay informal settlement throughout the seven months of fieldwork. In addition, court hearings were attended where the slow grind of the wheels of (in)justice was witnessed. Elsewhere, meetings were held with key actors in the justice sector reform business.

The data are drawn then from systematic observation and field notes recorded in Sierra Leone in 2006. Subsequent annual visits to key sites offered an opportunity to meet with key informants as well as central actors in the prison reform business (for example Prisons Watch, the Community Association for Psycho-Social Services (CAPS), the Justice Sector Development Programme (JSDP)) and with the Prison Authorities. These visits confirm the contemporary validity and ongoing relevance of the observations made and recorded in 2006. While there have been changes (e.g. a new prison Director, some infrastructural improvements, a new magistrates’ court in Freetown, the destruction by fire of the camp studied), the dynamics and logics of confinement described here remain accurate.

Prisons and Poverty in Sierra Leone

The second part of this article gives, as promised, some glimpses of confining practices across two sites: a prison and a poor urban neighbourhood. Giving a taste of the lived experience of others inevitably poses epistemological as well as representational challenges. Field notes recorded at the time present the dilemmas of being in the field, the ambiguity of the researcher’s position as well as the radical contingency of the researcher’s embodied presence. In an intriguing article about the experience of stateless persons in Northern Cyprus, Navaro-Yashin (2003) writes of the need for an alternative language for expressing the lived experience of exclusion (or confinement), a counter to the ‘(F)ully conscious, always rational, never lost.’ ‘I wonder’, he writes,

whether another sort of sensibility may keep us within the domain of the subjective experience that the political generates so that we may sense it, catch hold of it as it fleets by or before it is normalized, and write about it without flattening it into the rationalizing discourse of the social sciences. (Navaro-Yashin, 2003: 109)

What follows draws heavily on extensive field notes both to give a sense of immediacy but also to allow the reader to sense the material ‘as it fleets by’.

Prison

There are 13 active prisons in Sierra Leone incarcerating around 2500 people. Of these less than one-third are convicted and the vast majority are male. The largest prison is in the capital Freetown. When built its capacity was 324. Today it typically houses around 1000 prisoners. The prisons are centrally administered by the Sierra Leone Prisons Service through a national headquarters (HQ) which falls under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There are also four regional command HQs. The main functions of the prison are, in the official terminology, the safe custody of prison inmates, the welfare of inmates and their reformation and rehabilitation. There are currently 1166 members of prison staff, 896 male and 270 female (Prisons Watch, personal communication). Prisoners are accused of crimes ranging from treason through homicide to larceny and loitering. The prisons in Sierra Leone are, of course, examples of institutional or spatial confinement. Inmates are confined in and confined within by walls and wires, gates and guards. We might also say they are relationally confined in the sense that they are subject to share cramped quarters, sleep, eat and spend time with people not of their own choosing. Possibilities for interaction with family members and friends are limited though on a day to day basis most prisoners spend long periods unlocked in the company of fellow prisoners, inside or outside cell blocks. Extensive periods of association and exercise serve to distinguish the Sierra Leonean prison from the generic image of a western prison. Another distinction is the custom of dormitory accommodation. Living a life in conditions of intimate proximity with others is a key characteristic of confinement in prisons. But what does it mean to have a life in a Sierra Leonean prison? Commenting on a football match in Central Prison, Freetown field notes record:

The opportunity for competitive exercise and the associated tiredness and aches and pains likely remind prisoners that they are alive, that they have a life, that they are alive despite the curtailments on that life. … The playing of football seems to introduce a hint of normality into everyday prison life. It evokes groans and cheers from spectators, a sense of identification with something outside of themselves, a break with what I imagine is a sense of aloneness. (Field note, 30 May 2006)

Looking back it is doubtful whether aloneness is the key characteristic of the prison experience. As mentioned above the institutional set up of the prison means it is actually a strikingly social institution filled with exchanges, pressures and obligations to manoeuvre and negotiate in order to procure the goods, services and alliances necessary to survive. A more accurate reflection of the Sierra Leonean prison experience would be to characterize it in terms of uncertainty, limbo and ontological insecurity (Jefferson, 2010, 2011). There is an inbuilt paradox to confinement in the Sierra Leonean prison. It is undoubtedly a confining experience but the boundaries are unclear and undefined. In temporal terms confinement is elastic, that is, in experiential terms, often perpetual and indefinite. The former fighters who were released in January 2006 after six years in prison (‘no case to answer’ declared the judge finally) were held in temporal conditions with no outer limit. For many prisoners there is no fixed end point to the experience.

The early period of incarceration is particularly stressful. Many speak of their anxieties about being held incommunicado, about family members not knowing where they are or even that that they have been arrested. One prisoner approached me with a note to deliver to a family member. He wrote:

___ ____ please I Abdul is asking you to come to court on 020506. I have seen my lawyer but you are to be there for him to speed up. Please try to help me. Greet ____ ____ for me.

____ _____

From prison

This is not out of concern for worrying parents but in the interests of release. Without outside help there is no guarantee that release or even a court case will ensue. If nobody knows their plight no-one will act to expedite the case. The experience of prolonged uncertainty or judicial limbo is a real and strong one even for new arrivals. This is demonstrated most clearly in the anxieties associated with court attendance and the regular shows of disorder associated with the failure of the prison authorities to deliver prisoners to court on schedule.

One such drama unfolded in the gate lodge one morning. Three high profile prisoners had already been protesting in their cells in order to get taken to court. Later one of them described how they had been ready to ‘string the man (a prison officer) up by his proverbials’ and to smash in the gate. In the gate lodge the senior prisoner shouted in frustration: ‘This is the third time we have not been to court, the third bloody time … so called treason trial …’ Later, after court and the refusal of bail, we sat together in the special quarters (‘old female’) where the three were held in segregation. Field notes record how ‘he laughs about the tragedy of the whole situation, noting that one day maybe he will be able to laugh about the whole business, suggesting his current laugh is no laugh at all’ (field note, 17 July 2006). On the same rather tense occasion the older man shared how he still could not get used to the lock being turned in the evening hours. As noted, ‘even after six months the most confining aspect of his daily routine still gets to him’ (field note, 17 July 2006).

Other examples of prisoners having to fight the authorities in order to attend court were witnessed. One of these disputes pointed to the deeply inter-personal nature of confinement in the form of being under another’s control, of relinquishing autonomy through being under the jurisdiction and command of a state official. A dispute overheard in the gate house resulted in the inmate refusing to eat food served by the officer he was quarrelling with out of fear he might subsequently be poisoned. More or less trivial disputes can result in mortal fears.

This idea of being confined by somebody, of having one’s routines regulated by a specific other, is closely related to experiences of inner confinement, that is, to emotional states, and fears about what one might be subject to. Material experience is linked to subjective experience. Cohen and Taylor’s (1981 [1972]) question remains pertinent: Is adaptation to conditions and circumstances a sign of deterioration or of adaptive coping? The biggest fear expressed by former fighters who lost comrades during their six years in prison was giving in to despair. In their narratives, deaths in custody were unequivocally a result of comrades giving up. The relation between the material and the subjective is also illustrated by this author’s experiences of confinement within the prison. The following example shows the strong relation between actual physical confinement and an existential state of confinement:

I went to leave after staying longer than planned with the three treason trialists … But I could not get out. The orderly had gone for food and was no doubt standing in a queue in the kitchen, so I retreated to the veranda a slight feeling of claustrophobia and containment bugging at me, pressing at my chest, a surge of confinement. Here I was slightly off limits together with the treason trialists, those threatened with plotting the assassination of the Vice President and the overthrow of the state. And here I was stuck inside the walls. Coincidence or conspiracy? (Field note, 11 July 2006)

Here, seeping paranoia was partly informed by a slightly covert approach to this small group of sensitive prisoners. In the interest of not being refused, permission had not been sought. But it was clear that there was a risk that the authorities might not have looked too kindly on the British researcher hanging out with their most high profile and politically controversial prisoners. ³

One way in which to think about the limits of confinement is to consider issues of mobility. As already mentioned prisoners are relatively mobile within the prison. Some are also engaged in supervised labour outside the prison. Still others are reportedly ‘released’ on a daily basis to carry out their own business in the town on the condition that they return in the evening. In an evocative article about relationality, mobility, space and movement Philip Vannini (2011: 250) explores the ‘constellations of (im)mobility’ characteristic of the lives of people living on islands. He identifies isolation and insulation as ‘hallmarks of islandness’ and proposes a concept of ‘remove’ to refer to ‘the degree or stage of separation influencing motion between locations’ (2011: 252). Mobility is certainly an issue in relation to confinement and to prison, both in terms of its restriction by walls and gates but also at the level of daily interactions between inmates and staff. Attention to the micro-dynamics of embodied interactions suggests there are subtle ways of resisting restrictions on movement and that ‘motion between locations’ is not totally fixed, as illustrated below.

Much as I avoided the gaze of the old officer yesterday to facilitate my own change in location when prisoners want to move through spaces potentially off limits they occupy the micro-territory around the officer in particular ways. A man I watch moves through from remand section diagonally across gate lodge towards the reception exit. He is challenged by the gatekeeper but simultaneous with the challenge about where he thinks he is going the prisoner steps sideways and turns his body (almost spinning) such that he has come past the officer situating himself closer to his hoped for destination than to his place of origin. The officer is forced to extend his arm very wide and stretch it very long to indicate the way in which he wants the prisoner to limit his movement. The language is clear ‘Go Back’ but the space has already been occupied. The officer is at a disadvantage and is put on the defensive. Notably face to face confrontation is avoided by the spinning movement of the prisoner. The gatekeeper remains seated at least at first. In the end the prisoner is permitted to move through to reception ostensibly to check the date of his court appearance. But after 5 minutes he is ordered back into his own section by the gatekeeper who goes looking for him. ‘They just come to loiter’ he says. (Field note, 12 July 2006)

Vannini (2011: 258) portrays islands as places of geographic marginality where distance, separation and connection are ‘performed’ spatially and temporally and where the negative aspect of islandness, namely isolation ‘is an affective experience marked by vulnerability, marginality, and inescapability’. The prison is, of course, at one level qualitatively different to the island in the sense that prisoners are objects of the performance of spatial and temporal distance to a greater degree than they are agents of that performance. They are distanced and removed from society (though as we saw above they are also mobile performing agents). The point is prisoners are separated and connected through their own actions but chiefly through the actions, policies and discourses of others. Quoting Weale, Vannini (2011: 255) writes:

when you live here for long, you take the island inside, deep inside. You become an Islander, which is to say a creature of the Island. Islandness becomes a part of your being, a part as deep as marrow, and as natural and unselfconscious as breathing.

Clearly spatial arrangements, performances of distance and remove are particularly significant for subjectivity within sites of confinement.

These reflections on mobility, separation and connection serve as a useful link to the experience of the occupants of the urban slum. To what degree does it make sense to speak of their lives as similarly or differently confined? What follows is a topography of confinement in a poor urban neighbourhood.

Poor Urban Neighbourhoods

Within the urban neighbourhood which became one of the key sites for this research the residents experienced confinement in a number of ways. The stakes were high as suggested by the following field note written after attending the burial of a very young child:

Tears gather in the outer corners of my eyes but evaporate before they fall. Tears of humidity. Tears of futility. Tears in the landscape of grief … I felt trapped between competing discourses on health, illness and well being. Not called to arbitrate or judge. Just called to care, and to donate … Did they know she would die? They have watched her suffer and deteriorate, kept her condition secret. They saw her pain. Now they grieve. I only saw the father, heading the procession of men (walking) at marching speed through the neighbourhood, across the bridge … the brother of his wife following, Isatu, wrapped in a prayer mat, held in his arms.

On the way home from the burial one of the young men complained ‘I too want to die; I am so tired.’ (Field note, 2 June 2006)

These fragments and those that follow can hardly do justice to the lived experiences of coping with ‘exorbitant poverty’ and the uncertain daily struggles of life and death in the ‘camp’. The aim was to try to understand the everyday lives of residents in the slum neighbourhood. How are lives organized, configured and lived? How is the community governed? How are rule-breakers punished? How is authority instantiated and social control practised? Who controls which spaces when? An explanation about the broader focus of the study invited the following response from an early gatekeeper: life in the neighbourhood was ‘made up of young men hanging out, hustling, smoking weed, not having much chop (food)’. While not inaccurate this was clearly a minimalist account.

Material, Spatial and Discursive Confinement

The following examples show how confinement was expressed and experienced in the camp: (1) materially, in terms of lack of opportunity and insecurity; (2) spatially; and (3) discursively and symbolically. In the conclusion these dimensions are supplemented by consideration of the temporal confinement of both camp and prison.

Camp dwellers are confined materially through poverty and lack of opportunity though these particular camp residents do not fit the caricature of jobless, idle young men. Indeed most of them are working in some way or other, and a proportion of residents were neither men nor that young. But they do all share livelihoods which are far from certain and certainly insecure:

An elderly man shunts a barrow filled with refuse, shoulders hunched, hat down over ears. He comes from the roadside all the way to the shoreline where it is dumped. I ask whether work is hard. He says it’s not work. He has no work. The refuse collection is just something he does ‘for small thing’ and gestures with his hand in a manner implying rattling coins. The refuse is dumped where the pigs roam and the kids mess about, tossed and turned by the waves. (Field note, 2 February 2006)

Everyday life features a variety of forms of subsistence employment, which typically feature movement from and to the camp as goods are acquired, sold and exchanged. Only three out of 39 respondents to a brief household survey I conducted characterized themselves as unemployed or in their terms ‘doing nuttin’. Irregular work and informal trading are the commonest livelihood strategies. Pre-made food for instant consumption, second-hand clothes and household items/toiletries are among typically traded commodities. The women especially wake early to prepare olele or rice which they spend the best part of 12 hours trying to sell on the city streets. Others claim to be electricians, carpenters, barbers or the like, though work in this field is often sporadic and hard to come by. Pig-rearing and slaughtering is one highly visible form of local industry, the pigs roaming and feeding off the dumped garbage on the seashore. Others work in the police or the army or as drivers while others facilitate the drug-trade or arrange local football tournaments. Rumours that the young women in the camp engage in sex work to supplement the meagre incomes acquired through trading commodities are rife. Similarly the trade in cannabis is a dominant feature of the everyday landscape ostensibly smoked to ward off hunger or to keep heads calm.

Insecurity is a feature of their material confinement in at least two senses. In the first instance the residences are part of illegal settlements and rumours circulate regularly that the land will be confiscated and they will be made homeless. But powers stronger than the local city council also threaten their homes, namely the powers of the rainy season. Flooding is a perennial threat. The rain exacerbates the day to day sufferings of the residents. Rooms leak, alleys flood, temperatures drop, confusions and palavers increase:

XXX complained of the fact that he had not had food. … (T)he mother of one of his children came sidling up to the room during a pause in the storm, left slightly ashamed (according to XXX) because she could not fight him due to my presence. … She has been bothering him for money all morning, he says. He has nothing. He showed me a wound on his head that she gave him with a stone. The rainy weather creates confusion between men and their girlfriends, explained YYY. (Field note, 19 June 2006)

Business opportunities are reduced. The possibilities for movement on which hustling is dependent are limited by the rain. At the same time frustrations are enhanced as people are forced inside rooms which leak, revealing their impotence to alter their own situation, even to provide a roof over their own heads.

In the second instance, life also features personal insecurity. Life is risky if not outright dangerous. The camp was founded by former streetboys known for their rough criminal lifestyles and a significant number of the residents have first-hand experience of the civil war or are traumatized by it in some way. While they distance themselves from streetboy culture the camp is known as a rough place where ‘bad boys’ hang out, especially after dark.

The camp is predominantly self-policed. Rules of conduct (no bad language, no fighting) and punishments (mostly fines) are posted on the walls of the socializing shelters. Conduct is governed but somewhat arbitrarily. There was certainly plenty of bad language and fighting which was going unpunished. In the case of theft a quite explicit violent authority is enacted involving a public hearing and, if the person is determined guilty, a public flogging.

In contrast to the prison there are no physical barriers keeping people in or out, though there are practices which police – and thereby reveal – spatial markers. The camp, like the prison, features practices of surveillance. For example, informal security networks (youths patrolling) were adept at monitoring who was in the camp, also across the wider neighbourhood of which the camp is just a small part. One slightly troubling incident (for me) illustrates the reach of the eyes of the camp. During a return visit to Sierra Leone after the first period of fieldwork my former research assistants (one a camp dweller himself, the other a founding member of the camp and former soldier) and I headed to the camp. Rather foolishly, rather than paying a courtesy call on the Chairman and heading straight for the camp I chose to visit a young woman (former resident) in another part of the neighbourhood. As I sat with her, just readying to leave, a ‘posse’ of the camp’s biggest, toughest-looking members appeared demanding why I had not yet made it to their camp. It was a vivid reminder both of the high visibility of the researcher and the reach of their vision.

While the vision of the camp is wide-ranging the camp’s ‘catchment area’ is very limited. The vast majority of camp dwellers are born within just a few kilometres of the camp. During the period of fieldwork only a few new residents arrived. The population is relatively static. Listening to their talk of the long-hoped for windfall which would mean they could pursue their dream of escape it was hard not to hear a sense that they really felt destined never to move beyond the actual. There were no realistic horizons of possibility.

The discursive expression of confinement was revealed rather vividly during a conversation with the Chairman of the camp (sometimes known as the ‘campmaster’). He showed how the occupants of the camp were confined by a self-stigmatizing discourse. The researcher’s presence often invoked discussion of western Europe or America, places to which enormous significance was granted, places imbued with fantasy based often on rumour and hearsay or glorified accounts channelled back second or third hand via relatives who had ‘escaped’ to the West. In the context of one such discussion the Chairman suddenly revealed his particular take on a hierarchization of humanity: first God, then the white man, then the black man. ‘I regret my colour,’ he said, ‘I regret being born black.’ Ill at ease with this characterization I sought to deny the attribution of race-based superiority uncomfortably aware that in my interlocutor’s eyes I was evidence for his thesis: internationally mobile, relatively affluent and successful, choosing voluntarily to spend time in the ghetto in contrast to his relative poverty, confinement and daily struggle to create a livelihood. Putting this fact aside we can still see his comments as part of a discourse of self-stigmatization, a process of self-attribution involving shame, a sense of unworthiness and a sense of ‘heaviness’ (Mathiassen, 2009: 235). This sense of heaviness was represented by ghetto dwellers as a burden or a struggle: ‘we are sufferers’, they regularly claimed, once again situating themselves near the bottom of a hierarchy of victimhood. The camp master’s remarks and the appropriation of negative stereotypes by inhabitants of the ghetto suggest an internalization of racial and societal exclusionary stereotypes (see also Bauman, 2000).

Some months later a rather different performance was enacted and I use the theatrical metaphor advisedly – it was drama. The Chairman was often quite loud, even melodramatic. Sometimes he was just high from smoking the djamba which was the dominant form of trade in the camp or from consuming the small sachets of gin or whisky that were drunk for breakfast by at least some of the young men. (One of them was nicknamed after the brand of the liquor because of his heavy consumption.) Other times his loudness was just an expression of his personality and the authority he had in the camp:

It is surprisingly the campmaster in his characteristic uncompromising verbal style who pays me my biggest compliment so far. His speech kind of comes flying out, a hasty monotone, a verbal barrage. Its form is so aggressive I fear I may have misinterpreted kind words on previous occasions. … He asks me rhetorically: ‘do you know why we like you here in the camp?’ and goes on to reveal, ‘it’s because you come and join us, treat us like brothers, not like others who think we live in the dirt who would prefer to avoid us, you come and are with us, you join in our burials’. This at least was the drift. (Field note, 3 July 2006)

There is a certain complementarity between the latter discursive performance and the former. While the former implies a harsh reality of projected and real difference the latter represents acknowledgement of the importance of commonality. Joining their burials became a sign that the researcher does not see them as living in the dirt at the same time as it is a transgression of the perceived boundaries that separate.

Residents are confined not only by their own self-stigmatizing discourse but also by the opinions others have of them and the rumours and myths that exist about them. As already mentioned the camp was known as a hang out for ‘bad boys’. The overwhelmingly ‘dangerous’ image the camp seemed to have, remained unclear compared with other much more dubious (to my mind) neighbourhoods. But it was certainly a powerful discourse.

Conclusion: Unsettled Restlessness and the Confines of Time

Encounters with occupants of prisons and poor urban neighbourhoods in Sierra Leone lend support to Wacquant’s analysis and Bauman’s hunch that there are important resemblances between different types of confining sites and practices, not least at the level of personal experience and subjectivity. While Wacquant’s account focuses mostly on societal and structural dynamics Bauman is more concerned with the effects of carceral and pseudo-carceral spaces on people. Both orientations are significant, though Bauman’s orientation towards people resonates (not surprisingly) most strongly with the experience of the informants in this study and with the experience of the researcher. As already mentioned, confinement was also a feature of the researcher’s encounter with the field. Paradoxically, this is perhaps best revealed by a desire to keep moving. Field notes record the following:

It is still a learning curve for me to be outside the confines of the four walls of state institutions. My interest in travelling/accompanying/moving with informants may also be seen as a concern with inbetweenness, a desire to be on the move, tracking, strolling, always in a process of arrival and departure, never settling long enough to become unsettled – a kind of non-intentional restlessness. To what degree does this restlessness reflect the participation in practice of these young men with whom my research is concerned? (Field note, 8 March 2006)

This reflection on movement and unsettled restlessness is perhaps a strange place to end given the orientation to confinement and limits. But ‘constellations of (im)mobility’ (Vannini, 2011) do seem to infuse the spaces and practices portrayed. Most significantly, the lives of inhabitants of poor neighbourhoods and prisons are animated by a radical desire to escape. The tragedy is perhaps that to draw on Halsey (2007: 360) confinement ‘is about incapacitation – a rendering still or physical capturing of otherwise volatile and “problematic bodies”’. Or, appropriating the words of Casella (2007: 34) what we observe in the poor neighbourhoods and prisons of Sierra Leone are practices and sites for ‘the storage of ambiguously defined non-citizens’ (emphasis added).

Confinement, inescapability, rendering still, storage and incapacitation: these are all terms representing limits to freedom. This is no accident. Notwithstanding contemporary trends to reify mobility, agency, manoeuvring and so on, the reality is that lives in prison and lives in urban poverty are constrained. Even coping mechanisms might be seen as deterioration rather than overcoming or transcending conditions of existence. The conditions for the ‘exercise of existence’ (Mbembe, 2001) are limited. Eleanor Casella (2007: 2) argues that social power is a central element of institutional confinement, ‘(W)hether defined as an oppositional relationship of domination and resistance, as an embodied engagement with institutional regulations and rituals, or as a subversive means for minimizing the everyday pains of confinement.’ The question of whether the ‘camp’ is an institution and how exactly it is similar to or different from the prison remains open but it is certainly true that social power is, like in the prison, a central element of camp life be it defined in terms of domination and resistance, engagement with rituals and regulations or in relation to strategies of survival. It does seem true that seen through the analytic lens of ‘confinement’ the prison and the poor neighbourhood have much in common. Perhaps one of the most striking realms in which there is a similarity relates to the temporal perspective. Spatially we can identify qualitative differences between camp and prison but in terms of temporal experience occupants of both seem to be subject to a similar unlimited horizon. Time itself confines not through a limit or a fixed sentence but paradoxically through the lack of a limit. Especially for those undergoing trial or awaiting trial in prison (the majority) there is only prolonged uncertainty. Similarly, for those occupying the camp there is no final horizon of opportunity. Time (for the realization of dreams and aspirations) is out of reach.