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.

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.

Policing and Human Rights analyses the implementation of human rights standards, tracing them from the nodal points of their production in Geneva, through the board rooms of national police management and training facilities, to the streets of downtown Johannesburg. This book deals with how the unprecedented influence of human rights, combined with the inability by police officers to ‘live up’ to international standards, has created a range of policing and human rights vernaculars – hybrid discourses that have appropriated, transmogrified and undercut human rights. Understood as an attempt by police officers, as much as by the police as a whole, to recover a position from which to act and to judge, these vernaculars reveal the compromised ways in which human rights are – and are not – implemented. Tracing how, in South Africa, human rights have given rise to new forms of popular justice, informal ‘private’ policing and provisional security arrangements, Policing and Human Rights delivers an important analysis of how the dissemination and implementation of human rights intersects with the post-colonial and post-transformation circumstances that characterise many countries in the South.

Policing and Human Rights analyses the implementation of human rights standards, tracing them from the nodal points of their production in Geneva, through the board rooms of national police management and training facilities, to the streets of downtown Johannesburg. This book deals with how the unprecedented influence of human rights, combined with the inability by police officers to ‘live up’ to international standards, has created a range of policing and human rights vernaculars – hybrid discourses that have appropriated, transmogrified and undercut human rights. Understood as an attempt by police officers, as much as by the police as a whole, to recover a position from which to act and to judge, these vernaculars reveal the compromised ways in which human rights are – and are not – implemented. Tracing how, in South Africa, human rights have given rise to new forms of popular justice, informal ‘private’ policing and provisional security arrangements, Policing and Human Rights delivers an important analysis of how the dissemination and implementation of human rights intersects with the post-colonial and post-transformation circumstances that characterise many countries in the South.

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.

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.

Policing and Human Rights analyses the implementation of human rights standards, tracing them from the nodal points of their production in Geneva, through the board rooms of national police management and training facilities, to the streets of downtown Johannesburg. This book deals with how the unprecedented influence of human rights, combined with the inability by police officers to ‘live up’ to international standards, has created a range of policing and human rights vernaculars – hybrid discourses that have appropriated, transmogrified and undercut human rights. Understood as an attempt by police officers, as much as by the police as a whole, to recover a position from which to act and to judge, these vernaculars reveal the compromised ways in which human rights are – and are not – implemented. Tracing how, in South Africa, human rights have given rise to new forms of popular justice, informal ‘private’ policing and provisional security arrangements, Policing and Human Rights delivers an important analysis of how the dissemination and implementation of human rights intersects with the post-colonial and post-transformation circumstances that characterise many countries in the South.

Policing and Human Rights analyses the implementation of human rights standards, tracing them from the nodal points of their production in Geneva, through the board rooms of national police management and training facilities, to the streets of downtown Johannesburg. This book deals with how the unprecedented influence of human rights, combined with the inability by police officers to ‘live up’ to international standards, has created a range of policing and human rights vernaculars – hybrid discourses that have appropriated, transmogrified and undercut human rights. Understood as an attempt by police officers, as much as by the police as a whole, to recover a position from which to act and to judge, these vernaculars reveal the compromised ways in which human rights are – and are not – implemented. Tracing how, in South Africa, human rights have given rise to new forms of popular justice, informal ‘private’ policing and provisional security arrangements, Policing and Human Rights delivers an important analysis of how the dissemination and implementation of human rights intersects with the post-colonial and post-transformation circumstances that characterise many countries in the South.