Prison and Punishment Economies in Africa – ECOPPAF

The prison is the archetypal figure of confinement. It is only at the end of 18th century that prison sentence was recorded in the criminal codes of Western Europe and United States. Gradually, this punitive model was spread out from one continent to another, thanks in particular to colonial empires. This endeavour was underlain by logic of conquest, enforcement and racial segregation in the name of the civilization of societies seen as primitive. In Western countries, this institution is an answer to a moral imperative, which forbids corporal punishment, tortures and execution in public places. In the colonies, the introduction of the prison is based on a translation - negotiation according to the colonial project and local socio-cultural contexts. According to the literature prison oscillates between several functions: to punish and exclude, to reintegrate (by getting detainees to work) and to produce wealth while dominating large swathes of the population. Since its inception, it has never ceased to be the subject of debate, mainly in democratic states where its failure to reintegrate is continuously denounced. Penal institution opens the way for an analysis of a wide reflection field on the relationships of power and domination relationships. It appears as the position of the poor and is involved in the reproduction of inequalities. As such and via detainees and warden biographies, it is connected to certain urban areas (favela, the American ghetto, the slum or "the suburbs").
Loïc Wacquant emphasized the weakness of ethnographies on prisons (2002). It may be added that these ethnographies mainly concern the Western industrial and post-industrial societies, South Africa being an exception (due to the democratization of the country and the end of apartheid). The prison in Africa remains at best the domain of historians (with a relative difference in English Speaking Africa). This absence in social science meets the silence of public debate on this topic within the African continent. Prison remains a minor subject for Social Sciences in Africa, even though it could foster the discussion on the dynamics of contemporary African societies, between coercion and control of the poorest populations (including urban youth which are numerous and facing underemployment) and pacification of social relations. Studying prisons in Africa allows interrogating “State at work.”
In a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective, the main challenge of this project lies in the desire to turn the carceral question in Africa as a legitimate subject for social sciences. It is necessary to understand the various prison experiences and the complexity of punishment forms. The prison has no universal shape, nor it is completely predetermined by its cultural context. It is the result of a negotiation between models and contexts that are both social, political, spatial, historical and cultural. This project aims to de-exoticize prison in Africa, to see how "prison" endorsed the given models, how it singles them out on several scales of time and space. In this process, we aim at interrogating through the African prison the global logic of confinement while also making heard the African voice. Therefore, our project is set in a double context, that of Prison Studies and the study of societies and African states. Starting from ethnography of the prison and bypassing it, it should help bring the debate on the rule of law, on the reform of the African States and the intertwined challenges of democratization and fight against inequalities.