Prison officer training and practice in Nigeria : contention, contradiction and re-imagining reform strategies
Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer training and the penal philosophy and practice of the Nigerian Prisons Service.
Source: Punishment and society ; vol. 9, no.
3
Download here
Documentation of the contradictions of prison
training practice reveals how pretensions to
discipline, order and hierarchy are challenged both from below and
above at the level of everyday practice. What look like hegemonic
practices are, not surprisingly, contested and contradictory. Via a
partial ethnography of prison
training school practice the article presents a
challenge to reform agencies seeking to transform penal
institutions via methods that assume the homogeneity of the
targeted institutions. A suggestion is made that perhaps the
contested nature of penal practices in the South may encourage
reform agencies to reconfigure their own identities by tapping in
to internal contradictions rather than trying to impose change from
without. A space for re-imagining reform strategies is framed that
takes the potential but inevitable contradictions and ambiguities
of prison practice as its reference
point.