Prison reform and torture prevention under ‘compromised circumstances’

Abstract

In this article, drawing on two decades studying prisons and prison reform practices in (mostly) southern countries undergoing transition, I examine the challenges facing anti-torture professionals and prison reformers working in the global south and critically interrogate the assumptions of dominant models of reform. Rights and health-based entry points to the prevention of torture and inhumane treatment and prison reform are argued to be necessary but insufficient. I propose the concept ‘compromised circumstances’ to counter the structural biases that diminish and erase ordinary everyday experience. The ‘compromised circumstances’ of countries torn by conflict, inequality, poverty and mundane violence call for innovative interventions based on reflexive social scientific description and analysis. The inevitable sense of dizziness and uncertainty such circumstances induce must be embraced not denied. A dynamic, organic and relational entry point to reform is required.

The Cruel Optimism of International Prison Regulation: Prison Ontologies and Carceral Harms

“…Where the bureaucratic state is less powerful-for example, in Latin America (Biondi and Collins 2016;Darke 2018;Whitfield 2018), Africa (Martin and Jefferson 2019), Israel (Bornstein 2010), and India (Arnold 1994), prisons are more readily seen by scholars as being processually constituted by power relations between different groups-primarily prisoners and prison staff. By failing to attend to these relations, increasing prison bureaucracy consistently empowers the state over those who are imprisoned (Armstrong 2018;Jefferson 2022). Our understanding of power in practice aligns with processual notions of emergence, which presume that everything in the social world is continually being made, remade, and unmade (Abbott 2016;Renault 2016) rather than being determined through replicable applications of legal schema in different contexts.…”