Marie Morelle – författare

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.

On assiste, depuis quelques années en Afrique, au déploiement concomitant d’ethnographies carcérales et à l’inscription de la question pénitentiaire dans le champ du développement, en tension entre enjeux sécuritaires et droits de l’homme. Tandis que les agences internationales (re)produisent un discours sur la prison africaine, appréhendée comme un objet à réformer, ce dossier, à contre-courant des idées reçues et des lectures stéréotypées, entend ouvrir la discussion à partir d’enquêtes de terrain, issues majoritairement d’un programme collectif et pluridisciplinaire, et dégager les grandes questions qui sous-tendent la pluralité des réalités carcérales.L’expérience carcérale et l’économie des valeurs circulant en détention et produites hors et dans les murs sont ainsi analysées. Une place est également ménagée aux voix des détenus, trop souvent inaudibles. Les dimensions politiques de l’incarcération, des plus évidentes à celles plus implicites, sont abordées. Enfin, les multiples aspects de la réforme et de ses paradoxes sont discutés, au regard notamment de la place historique du travail dans les discours sur la punition et sur la réinsertion. Finalement, ce dossier réaffirme l’importance de la réflexion sur les prisons, et au-delà sur les rapports de domination et sur les inégalités sociales à l’échelle du continent. Ce faisant, il affirme aussi la place de l’Afrique dans le débat mondialisé sur la peine de prison.