Confinement, Punishment and Prisons in Africa: (Transnational Criminal Justice)

This interdisciplinary volume presents a nuanced critique of the prison experience in diverse detention facilities across Africa. The book stresses the contingent, porous nature of African prisons, across both time and space. It draws on original long-term ethnographic research undertaken in both Francophone and Anglophone settings, which are grouped in four parts. The first part examines how the prison has imprinted itself on wider political and social imaginaries and, in turn, how structures of imprisonment carry the imprint of political action of various times. The second part stresses how particular forms of ordering emerge in African prisons. It is held that while these often involve coercion and neglect, they are better understood as the product of on-going negotiations and the search for meaning and value on the part of a multitude of actors. The third part is concerned with how prison life percolates beyond its physical perimeters into its urban and rural surroundings, and vice versa. It deals with the popular and contested nature of what prisons are about and what they do, especially in regard to bringing about moral subjects. The fourth and final part of the book examines how efforts of reforming and resisting the prison take shape at the intersection of globally circulating models of good governance and levels of self-organisation by prisoners. The book will be an essential reference for students, academics and policy-makers in Law, Criminology, Sociology and Politics.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: thinking with prisons in Africa The carceral imprint Words, walls, and hierarchies: on some colonial legacies in the Burundian prison Improving daily life? Senegalese prisoners’ use of letters as an attempt to reform colonial prison (1930s) Confinement and development in Ethiopia: the uses of prison in public policies Mass expulsion as internal exclusion: police raids and the imprisonment of West African immigrants in Ghana, 1969–1972 Economies of value ‘As if they can squeeze you to death’: recollections of post-arrest journeys towards and into prison in South Africa The carceral impasse seen from the perspective of street youth in Burkina Faso The value of prison in South Africa: performing the prison experience beyond the prison Tension within the dispensation of justice ‘I don’t steal, I don’t lie, I cut!’ The paradoxes of the imprisonment of women for female genital mutilation in Burkina Faso In search of justice in an uncertain world (South Africa) A justice that dare not speak its name? Amicable settlements in the commune of Abobo (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) Transforming the prison The languages of prison reform: how to speak about punishment in a period of political transition (Tunisia, 2011–2019) Claiming rights in Yaoundé Central Prison The uses of pre-trial detention: a case study at the Maison Centrale in Conakry Prison and the politics of the ‘redemption script’: a view from Johannesburg, South Africa ‘Mother, you can’t leave us here’: thinking about incarcerated homosexuality. Interview with Ms Alice Nkom, Esq., lawyer at the Cameroon Bar

About the Author :
Marie Morelle is Professor at Lyon 2 University, France. Frédéric Le Marcis is a professor of social anthropology at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. Julia Hornberger is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.