Post-prison survival in Sierra Leone
In February 2006 a group of over 50 former fighters were released from Freetown’s central prison after over six years’ incarceration. In a new scientific article, the RCT author traces the ways the fighters handled the move from one form of confinement to another.
The author shows how everyday life for former combatant,
ex-prisoners is fashioned according to contingent, unpredictable
features of the post-war, post-prison landscape. These are mediated
through worldviews that developed prior to confinement as well as
in response to their particular personal and collective histories
of violent conflict, imprisonment and ongoing feelings of
dislocation and ontological insecurity.
The article contributes to the broadening out of studies of
imprisonment effects, focusing on experiences of re-entry while
highlighting the importance of pre-prison experience. Based on data
from a quite different context (post-conflict Sierra Leone, West
Africa) and of a different form (ethnographic rather than
interview/survey) the article lends support to the perspective
advocated by Jamieson and Grounds that a new paradigm is necessary
for thinking about the effects of imprisonment.
Traversing sites of confinement, Post-prison survival in Sierra
Leone
by Andrew M. Jefferson, Rehabilitation and Research Centre for
Torture Victims, Denmark
Theoretical Criminology, November 23, 2010 vol. 14 no. 4
387-406
doi: 10.1177/1362480610370832
Theoretical Criminology November 23,
2010 vol. 14 no. 4 387-406
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