Prison officer training and practice in Nigeria

Abstract

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. 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.